Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ula Lukszo Klein

Reviewed by Hannah Chaskin

Ula Lukszo Klein’s Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2021) explores the eighteenth century’s simultaneous fascination with and anxiety about the figure of the cross-dresser. Citing previous genre- or class-specific accounts of the phenomenon, Klein argues that the cross-dressed woman needs to be reconsidered as a figure that “comes to take on a central role in the defining and negotiating of gendered and sexual categories in the long eighteenth century” (1) across a diverse set of texts written for diverse audiences. While each chapter of Sapphic Crossings is narrowly focused on a part of the body—as I will discuss below—each is also productively promiscuous in the number and types of texts discussed. Sapphic Crossings accounts for sensationalized biographies of working-class women like The Female Husband (1746) and The Female Soldier (1750) alongside novelistic representations of upper-class cross-dressers in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), as well as the “breeches role” popular on the stage. While the narrative function of the cross-dressed woman, and the moral framework of the text she’s in, differs widely, the prevalence of the representation in itself may have given eighteenth-century readers a framework by which they could access or even emulate lesbian desire and lesbian relationships. Klein eschews a chronological account of cross-dressing in Britain, and the recursion of texts, themes, and figures, often through several chapters, imbues Sapphic Crossings with a satisfying interconnectedness, even while each chapter can stand on its own.
By doing a cross-genre study, Klein argues that we can excavate “a lesbian-themed canon of literature that propagated lesbian representations that constructed lesbian desire as between women, for the pleasure of women” (14). In this way, Sapphic Crossings establishes itself as part of a genealogy of lesbian scholarship, joining the work of Terry Castle, Emma Donoghue, Sue Lanser, and Valerie Traub, among others. Klein is rigorous in providing historical specificity that lends context to the cultural norms by which the cross-dressed woman, and her body, would be judged. At the same time, and in common with many of her interlocutors, Klein uses the presentist word “lesbian” to give modern legibility to same-sex relationships and desires in the past. In modern parlance, the word may connote primarily internal or personal identification; however, Sapphic Crossings avoids a conception of “lesbian desire as rigid and identitarian” (18), and does not aim to “locate meaning through one-to-one connections between modern-day lesbians and cross-dressing women” (20). Rather, Klein offers an account of lesbian relationality that is more structural than affective, arguing that the hyper-visibility of the cross-dresser and her exploits “challenges our understanding of gender and its relationships to desire and the body” (3). Focusing on the materiality and ambivalent social gendering of the body, Sapphic Crossings suggests that writers construct, and make legible for their readers, a vision of same-sex desire with or without explicit access to a character’s internal processes.

The argumentative arc of Sapphic Structures speaks to Klein’s investment in the body as a social text. The book is divided into four chapters, each offering a historical, socio-cultural, and literary reading of a single body part: the beard, the breast, the penis, and the legs. With the suggestion that these four body parts are most central to the complex gendering of the cross-dressed woman, each chapter provides a historicist account of the body part’s gendered connotations in the eighteenth century, as well as a more granular account of how the body part is textually represented as an aid or an obstacle to the cross-dressed woman. Thus, Chapter 1 establishes the way that popular conceptions of maleness rested on a person’s ability to grow a beard—although the fashion at the time was to be clean-shaven—and thus highlights the lack of a beard as potentially the biggest obstacle to the cross-dressed woman. Klein argues that when the cross-dressed woman can attract a feminine woman, the femme becomes a metaphorical beard, distracting from and replacing the literal beard. A compelling implication here, borne out by—though not specifically highlighted in—the subsequent chapters, is that the beard is more socially gendered than the breast or the penis (the leg, as Klein notes in Chapter Four, is both enticing and frustrating in its androgyny). The beard (or lack thereof) is immediately legible from the outside, while the other features are only potentially interpretable in specific, often untoward, circumstances. Moreover, as Klein shows in Chapters 2 and 3, neither the breast nor the penis is as easily gendered as we tend to assume. Establishing a pattern of cross-dressed women whose exposed bodies do not fully expose them, Klein shows the body to be as ambiguous as the texts representing it.

This notion of “passing,” in which the body cannot be read as essentially gendered even when seemingly sexed characteristics are visible, highlights the possibility of a transmasculine reading of the figure Klein calls “the cross-dressed woman.” Indeed, Sapphic Crossings offers the tantalizing potential for such a reading in its introduction, where Klein argues that when we “[place] trans and lesbian in binary opposition, we fall into the same trap that trans studies and queer studies themselves have long sought to evade” (11) and suggests that the representations discussed in the subsequent chapters “contain moments for reading gender fluidity and transness in the past” (15). The idea of the trans reading continues throughout the chapters of Sapphic Crossings, but one does notice that it almost always appears at the end of a paragraph focused primarily on a lesbian reading, and that the trans reading is alluded to but infrequently performed. Klein notes in the introduction that the lesbian focus of Sapphic Crossings “does not intend to, nor should it be read to, negate the possibility of reading a trans man loving ciswomen and ciswomen attracted to a trans man” (15). While Sapphic Crossings as a whole surely leaves room for a transmasculine reading of these figures, transness, and, for that matter, butch cisgender expressions, are under-theorized.

For example, one compelling contention throughout Sapphic Crossings is the idea that the cross-dressed woman is desired not for her masculinity but for her femininity (33). The femme, in this reading, is attracted to the cross-dresser precisely because she lacks a beard, has smoother skin, more shapely legs, is better in bed with a dildo than a cisgender man is with a penis, etc. This point is well-established and convincing throughout Sapphic Crossings: the texts at hand emphasize the possibility that a woman might be more attracted to traditionally feminine qualities in both men and women. As a lesbian reading of the cross-dressed woman, then, we see on the writer’s part a refusal or failure to “straighten” the relationship by emphasizing the gender difference between butch and femme, cross-dressed and not. However, as a potential trans reading, we fall short: without sufficient theorization of transness, and transmasculinity in particular, the implication is that transmasculine people are fundamentally more feminine than their cis male counterparts. This seems to contradict the excellent and well-established point throughout Sapphic Crossings regarding the fundamental failure to consistently gender the body. It is not necessarily a problem that Sapphic Crossings does not provide robust trans interpretations of the figures it covers: Sapphic Crossings is an important work of lesbian scholarship and offers important insights into same-sex dynamics and attraction in the eighteenth century. Nor am I, I hope, putting a trans reading “in binary opposition” to Klein’s lesbian reading, as she cautions against. However, the specter of trans potential in a book that primarily focuses on femininity, “female bodies,” and “women cross-dressers” begs the question of how transmasculinity might factor in. Ultimately, the way that trans scholarship manifests in Sapphic Crossings sometimes confuses otherwise convincing arguments without offering substantive payoff for trans studies as a whole.

Part of what’s missing here is a clearer sense of separation between the highly motivated writers and the figures they represent. The understanding of the cross-dresser’s gender in Sapphic Crossings sometimes aligns too neatly with the authors it focuses on, arguing that authors’ persistent feminization of the cross-dresser “betray[s] the men’s discomfort, not necessarily with women dressing as men, but with women’s seducing other women” (123). The assumption here is that authors make most visible what they are least comfortable with: they feminize the cross-dresser because they want to warn against lesbianism more than they want to warn against gender-nonconformity. What would happen if we considered the opposite: that compulsive feminizing moves suggest a persistent anxiety about the cross-dresser’s masculinity; that same-sex attraction is represented precisely because it is less frightening than a figure who fully “passes,” not just within the text, but also, potentially, to the reader? In this reading, a writer highlights same-sex desire in order to downplay the gender-nonconformity of the cross-dressed figure. Writers’ obsession with bringing the reader under a person’s clothes, to constantly evoke what might lie beneath them, strikes me as a disciplinary, rather than a gender-affirming or -confirming, move.

Sapphic Crossings is a complex and wide-ranging study of a figure that has intrigued readers, play-goers, and academics, for a long time. In organizing her chapters around the body, rather than chronology or genre, Klein is able, as she notes, to highlight the consistencies in cross-dressing narratives and to offer a persuasive case for the importance of the figure to the development of gender and sexuality norms. Sapphic Crossings approaches the cross-dresser from diverse angles, frequently surprising the reader with where, and how, the body is gendered (or, even more interestingly, not). Chapter Three, “Penetrating Discourse and Sapphic Dildos,” is especially compelling and varied: I was especially taken by the formal reading of certain narratives wherein Klein compares editor or author notes in later editions to formal dildos, attempting to satisfy previously skeptical readers with a “strapped-on textual appendage” (110). In her discussion of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), meanwhile, Klein identifies what she calls the “dildoization of the…penis” (127), suggesting some gender trouble in Cleland’s characters’ suspiciously indefatigable stamina. Overall, Klein’s scholarship joins important conversations in lesbian scholarship, offers a cross-genre approach to the figure of the cross-dresser, and opens the door to further study on transgender history and literature, racialized gender norms, and the materiality of the body.

Hannah Chaskin, Northwestern University

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Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years, edited by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2021;

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Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski

Reviewed by Emmanuelle Peraldo

Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years, edited by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2021. Pp 234. $47. ISBN: 9781684482863 (Paperback);
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Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press. $34. Pp 220. ISBN: 9781684482313 (Paperback).


Reviewed by Emmanuelle Peraldo

In the same way as, in 1719-1720, Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in three parts,1 scholars all over the world organized conferences and published collections of essays to celebrate the 300th anniversary of this eighteenth-century-novel-turned-global-myth.2 In 2020 and 2021, Bucknell University Press published two collections of essays that are quite complementary: Andreas Mueller and Glynis Ridley gathered outstanding essays on Robinsonades and on re-interpretations of Robinson Crusoe, thus showing the huge impact of what Ian Watt called one of “the great myths of our civilization”3 on literary, artistic, and cinematographic creation as well as on academic and philosophical reflection. Jakub Lipski also brought together an excellent range of essays that offers transnational and transmedial perspectives on the Robinsonade. The two volumes pay attention to the afterlives of Defoe’s original text, both in terms of criticism and of adaptation / imitation of the Crusoe story in the three centuries that have unfolded since the publication of Robinson Crusoe, which proves that it is a work that has never stopped engaging readers from all around the world, as a chameleon that adapts to any time and any place.

Robinson Crusoe is indeed so pervasive in global culture that you can be inspired by it while not being aware of it, as Glynis Ridley shows in her essay on The Martian in Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years. Ridley quotes interviews of Andy Weir who claims he has not been inspired by Defoe’s text, and yet he says he does “love a good survival story” (12). The first part of the collection focuses on “Generic Revisions,” and this first essay by Ridley draws attention to the fact that The Martian is a Robinsonade malgré elle, so to speak, whose tremendous success may be explained in part by its plurimediality, as it is a 2015 movie directed by Ridley Scott that started as chapters of a novel published on a personal blog in 2009 before being put together in the book format by Andy Weir in 2014. Ridley adds that the novel was re-written again with no bad language for a children edition. This polymorphic and protean Robinsonade may be seen as a synecdoche for the process of mise en abyme that is at the core of the definition of a Robinsonade, i.e., an intermedial venture with several prerequisites – such as a castaway on a desert island that develops agriculture to survive – in a direct or indirect intertextual connection with Robinson Crusoe.

In an attempt to define and conceptualise this hypertextual relationship between a text and its afterlives, the volume explores the variety of genres of the Robinsonade. Geoffrey Sill’s essay examines the figures of Robinson and Friday in pantomimes, burlesques and melodramas in the nineteenth century, and more particularly the female Robinsonade in theatre, which connects the transgeneric process in the theatrical adaptation of Defoe’s novel to a “transgender voyage,” to quote Sill’s title. Sill inserts several illustrations showing actresses who played the role of Robinson Crusoe (Alice Brookes, Ada Blanche, Alice Atherton, Lydia Thompson, and Georgina Delmar), thereby contradicting the traditional association of the Robinsonade genre with masculinity. The representation of a Blackface Friday subjugated by a female Crusoe (55) is thought-provoking, as it suggests that Friday was associated to a Black African slave in the nineteenth century. The combination of gender and race studies proves efficient to revisit the relationship between Crusoe and Friday.

This gender/feminist discourse on the female Robinsonades and the decentering it entails are taken one step further in the third essay, which which draws its methodology from the growing field of animal studies. Amy Hicks and Scott Pryz focus on a corpus of children’s Robinsonades in which Crusoe is a non-human animal. When the role of Robinson is taken up by an animal, there is inevitably a form of decentering at stake: in the reappropriations of Defoe’s character and novel, Crusoe is no longer a male Christian but can be a woman or an animal, among other forms this chameleon can take. The authors of this chapter argue that if, traditionally, children identify with animal characters, here it is not the case, due to the fear of being eaten.

After the first section on Robinsonades, the second and third parts of the volume come back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, alternating between fresh interpretations inspired from material studies, new materialism, ecocriticism and posthumanism on the one hand, and more mainstream eighteenth-century criticism on the other hand, and all essays make you want to read Robinson Crusoe and its sequels again, as they completely revisit some commonly-held beliefs. Part 2, entitled “Mind and Matter,” articulates discourses around the body-soul relationship. Laura Brown compares Newton’s conception of matter in the “Queries” to his Optics (1704) to Crusoe’s gathering of things, in a reflection on the nature of things, the vitality of matter, and the manifestations of materialism. She concludes that both works tackle “the modern engagement with matter” (96).

Daniel Yu and Pat Rogers reconsider the traditional depiction of Crusoe as a prototypical capitalist and as a Protestant that never stops being active and working. First, Yu focuses on tobacco consumption in Robinson Crusoe and observes that, actually, Crusoe can be quite passive and contemplative. He studies Crusoe’s treatment of tobacco as a sacred substance that triggers reflections, conversations, but also a form of idolatry and spirituality. Pat Rogers goes even one step further in showing Crusoe’s true colours by focusing on something unexpected in an adventure novel, that is boredom: He argues that Crusoe cannot not have been bored in the 28 years he spent on this island.

Jeremy Chow’s chapter revisits the violence analysed by some critics in connection with imperialism and colonisation (Christopher Loar, Robert Markley) by adopting an ecocritical perspective, and more particularly by inscribing itself in the emerging field of the blue humanities (focusing on the role of the ocean) and “oceanic new materialism.”4 Chow starts from the motif of the storm to interpret the violent relationality between Robinson and the environment, presented as an actor, and talks about “aqueous violence” (115). This time, agency is not granted to women or animals as in Part 1, but to the sea that is said to have the “capacity to segregate Crusoe” (117), and to be at the origin of Crusoe’s violence against the cannibals, which is a rejection of the religious interpretation according to which the storm is a divine punishment for human sins.

Part 3, entitled “Character and Form,”, opens with two essays by Benjamin Pauley and Maximillian Novak. Both focus their essays on the neglected Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, thus contributing to correct the distortion of the Defoe canon perpetrated by the grand narrative of literary history. If The Farther Adventures are considered as part and parcel of Robinson Crusoe, then it is a “stranger and messier book”, says Pauley (152). The process of making the two sequels of Robinson Crusoe invisible in the Defoe canon is nevertheless a distortion that needed reconsideration and these two essays are important to reconsider the reception of Defoe’s work and to understand better the link between Defoe’s fiction and his economic thoughts. Pauley contradicts the belief that Robinson Crusoe, published in the century in which the individual rose, is a celebration of individualism: on the contrary, the inclusion of the Farther Adventures in our reading of Robinson Crusoe makes it clear that Crusoe’s greed and individualism are problematic and not valued. Maximillian Novak similarly corrects another hermeneutic mistake that consists in making the confusion between Defoe (author) and Crusoe (character), articulating his development around the concern with justice.

Finally, one of the volume’s editors, Andreas Mueller, concludes by coming back to Robinson Crusoe’s resonance due to its mythical nature and iconicity, through an analysis of what he calls “the Crusoe phenomenon” (183): he examines how Robinson Crusoe was transformed into products in popular culture, how the reference to the name is used with “commercial purposes” (198) in tourism but also in the video game industry or even in the conception of a note-taking software.

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From its title onwards, the second collection of essays, edited by Jakub Lipski, makes it clear that it will exclusively focus on Robinsonades, which is the main difference from the volume edited by Mueller and Ridley. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media (2020) is anchored in a transnational and transmedial perspective from the introduction onwards, in which Lipski describes the genre of the Robinsonade, which is presented as a “global phenomenon” (1), a “genre in a constant state of becoming” (ibid.), “a project for permanent rewriting” (as Robert Mayer says in the Foreword x), as there are dozens of new literary works, plays, television programs, virtual reality games, and movies derived from the Crusoe story every year.

Lipski’s will to try to define the undefinable is first tackled by Rivka Swenson and Patrick Gill in Part 1, entitled “Exploring and Transcending the Genre.” Swenson’s essay goes back to an early example of the genre; Gill’s essay, on twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictions, articulates the “Robinsonade microgenre’s poetics” (9) and the “postmodern Robinsonade’s poetics” (24). It is refreshing not to start a volume on Robinsonades with a contemporary reappropriation of the myth, but with a Robinsonade of the eighteenth century, published in the immediate aftermath of Robinson Crusoe, The Hermit by Peter Longueville (1707), that is a very interesting read in itself and also one of the first Robinsonades.5 In her essay, Swenson analyses the sensory descriptive poetics of The Hermit’s version of Crusoe’s island in combination with reflections stemming from the burgeoning field of literature and food studies, and she shows how metafictional the genre is. In the second essay, Patrick Gill summons three postmodern Robinsonades by Muriel Spark (Robinson, 1958), J. M. Coetzee (Foe, 1986), and Yann Martel (Life of Pi, 2001), analysing the nature of the transformation through “counterfactuals” or “imagined realities” (23). Part 1 is very efficient in coming back to the origins of the Robinsonade genre in order to explore the extent of its formal transformations throughout centuries.

After the diachronic exploration of Part 1, the second part of the volume, entitled “National Contexts,” adopts a transnational approach that “transcends languages and geographical boundaries” (1) and that underlines the plasticity of the genre of the Robinsonade as it adapts to different contexts. In Chapter 3, Przemysław Uściński engages with the ambivalence of The Female American (published anonymously in 1767), which features a half “Indian,” half English woman marooned on an American island, and which has imperial and colonial undertones despite a potential for progressive ideology through the figure of a biracial female Crusoe. In Chapter 4, Jakub Lipski tackles the early reception of Robinson Crusoe in Poland as well as the important roles played by translators and publishers, and considers against this background the emergence of the Polish Robinsonade, including a discussion of Ignacy Krasicki’s The Adventures of Mr. Nicolas Wisdom (1776) that Lipski calls a “quasi-Robinsonade” (53) because it is a utopian narrative.

Chapter 5 echoes Geoffrey Sill’s essay in the 2021 collection, as Frederick Burwick explores the theatrical Robinsonade in London and the staging of Robinson Crusoe in an abolitionist harlequinade also analysed by Sill: Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday (1781) by R. Sheridan. Burwick insists on the satirical engagement with political issues at stake in the Crusoe plays he studies and on the anti-racist and anti-colonial dimension of Sheridan’s and Pocock’s theatrical Robinsonades. The subversive power of the genre is also perceptible in the reactions to the imperial Robinsonade in postcolonial readings that convey an anticolonial resistance, in what Márta Pellérdi calls “Counter-Robinsonades” in the title of her essay on the subversive potential of R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) that deconstructs “the Defoevian representation of the Others as ‘savages’” (4).

As with the collection edited by Mueller and Ridley, Lipski manages to gather contributions on very timely perspectives in order to account for the timeless impact of Robinson Crusoe.  Part 3 offers two “Ecocritical Readings,” one of which is reminiscent of Chow’s chapter in the other collection. Indeed, it is difficult to talk about contemporary Robinsonades without mentioning their engagement with ecocriticism and post-humanism, and the role of the Robinsonade and literature in awakening people’s consciences. In Chapter 7, Lora E. Gueriguis comes back to the motif of the storm, and more generally climate, in Robinson Crusoe and many Robinsonades, thus forming a “three-hundred-year record of human apprehension and scientific perception of the environment” (95); she analyses a diachronic and transmedial corpus of three Robinsonades (a novel, The Female American 1767, and two movies, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1997 and Cast Away 2000). In Chapter 8, Krysztof Skonieczny studies how, in Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou Les Limbes du Pacifique (1967), Robinson no longer sees the island as an object to be colonized but as a person, an empowered subject, and how his “Becoming-Earth” (117) underlines a form of continuity between man and Earth. Ecocritical and posthuman perspectives “create a chance to rethink our relationship to Earth” (130-131), and this brings back to the genre of the Robinsonade that adjusts itself to different social, environmental and political contexts, thus connecting itself to “the Present Condition,” which is the object of the fourth part of the volume.

Part 4 ends with two essays that insist on the enduring relevance of Robinsonades. Jennifer Preston Wilson discusses the alienation of the contemporary worker in the “extreme and life-dominating work environments” (137) in three movies (Cast Away, Moon, and The Martian). Ian Kinane revisits a television Robinsonade that was very successful in the 1960s (Gilligan’s Island CBS, 1964-1967) by comparing it with another Robinsonade that was based on it, Tom Carson’s postmodernist novel Gilligan’s Wake (2003), and he examines the transmedial relationships between these two Robinsonades and Defoe’s 1719 novel in what looks like a mise en abyme of rewriting, focusing on the ways in which literary and popular culture combine to create a “complex web of shared cultural memories” (163). That mise en abyme is repeated in the title of Daniel Cook’s coda, “Rewriting Robinsonades,” that summons the idea of a never-ending process of transformation and of texts feeding on themselves, sometimes loosely connected with Defoe’s original novel.

These two tercentenary publications offer an incredible diversity of theoretical and critical standpoints on Robinson Crusoe and its afterlives, and while they sometimes intersect, they are never redundant. The richness and excellence of the contributions, along with the fresh interpretations of a three-hundred-year novel, prove – if proof was needed – the enduring and always renewed interest in this universal myth of Robinson Crusoe.

Emmanuelle Peraldo, Université Côte D’Azur

Notes

1 The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (25 April 1719), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720).

2 Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade (ed. Ian Kinane), 300 years of Robinsonades (ed. Emmanuelle Peraldo, Robinson Crusoe: a Gazeteer, (2019) (a special issue of Etudes anglaises), as well as the two collections of essays under scrutiny in this review.

3 See Ian Watt (1951), “Robinson Crusoe as Myth,” 95.

4 He borrows this expression from Stacy Alaimo’s “States of Suspension: Transcorporeality at Sea” (476).

5 Some critics argue that there were Robinsonades before Robinson Crusoe, meaning that even if they predate Defoe’s novel, they contain elements belonging to that genre. Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, for instance, sees Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668) as a matrix for Robinsonades and island narratives; Emanuele Arioli argues that a thirteenth-century Arthurian romance – Segurant, or the Knight of the Dragon – is a proto-Robinsonade; and Beatrice Durand discusses Hayy bin Yaqzan, an allegorical novel by Ibn Tufayl (1105-1185 AD), as one of the probable sources of Robinson Crusoe. These essays are all in Part 1 of 300 Years of Robinsonades.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. “States of Suspension: Transcorporeality at Sea.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 19.3 (2010): 476-93.

Kinane, Ian (Ed). Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade. Liverpool UP, 2010.

Peraldo, Emmanuelle (Ed). 300 years of Robinsonades. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

Robinson Crusoe: a Gazeteer. Special Issue, Etudes anglaises 72.2: 2019.

Watt, Ian. “Robinson Crusoe as Myth.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (1951): 95-119.

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Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800, by Isabel Rivers

Reviewed by Nicholas Seager

Isabel Rivers’s Vanity Fair and the Celestial City addresses the production, dissemination, and reception of religious literature among Protestant Dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England Evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. In this era, theological writings constituted by far the largest category of published books. Rivers establishes which were the most popular and influential works among these religious groups, also drawing reliable and significant conclusions about who read the books, why, and how. The Bunyan allusion in Rivers’s title invokes the paradox that books which promote the eschewal of worldliness were made possible by the commercialization of the book trade: the journey to the Celestial City was enabled, not jeopardized, by passing through Vanity Fair. Dissenters, Methodists, and Evangelicals saw the writing, editing, publishing, and distribution of books as a crucial means of promulgating Christian belief and practice; but there was money to be made, too. Vanity Fair and the Celestial City is a thorough and authoritative study which does full justice to “the remarkable wealth and complexity of the literary culture it defines and celebrates” (6).

The first of three sections, “Books and their Readers,” surveys the principal publishers among Dissenters, Methodists, and Evangelicals: this includes those who published for particular denominations, sometimes in provincial towns and probably with “godly” motivations in the main; and it extends to larger, metropolitan enterprises with apparently more commercial objectives (10). There are startling data points in this account, such as the fact that, along with his brother Charles, John Wesley was “responsible during his writing and publishing career of almost sixty years for about 450 works by himself and others that appeared in about 2,000 different editions” (14). Several denominational groups besides the Methodists were prolific publishers and distributors of books. Rivers attends to the number and sizes of editions (often the best proxy for readership), formats, and prices. She describes six institutions which disseminated religious writings as widely as possible, including the S.P.C.K. and Religious Tract Society, and details what we know about readers’ access to books through libraries and private collections.

From the voluminous literature Rivers describes, she extracts the theory and practice of “godly reading,” picking up where Andrew Cambers leaves off in his 2011 study of this topic in the early modern period. Rivers explains what people were advised to read, how, when, and where, as well as guidance tailored to lay, ministerial, male, and female readers. This section makes important contributions to the history of reading, such as Rivers’s exploration of Watts’s The Improvement of the Mind (1741), in which he urged readers of religious works to progress from a cursory to a studious reading before forming reading groups for the purpose of critiquing and debating the text under discussion. In Watts’s advice, annotation, abridgement, excerption, indexing, and memorization should follow, as he counsels readers to attend to “a limited number of books with care and meditation” (77). Wesley also promoted a balance between “reading too little and too much,” to steer between the dangers of “superficial knowledge and a dangerous thirst for books” (82–83). Wesley’s “Directions How to Read This and Other Religious Books with Benefit and Improvement,” an appendix to his abridgement of Norris’s Treatise on Christian Improvement (1734), impressed the need for “purity of intention,” a receptiveness to instruction and understanding, encouraging slow reading as the best method. Turning from the advice given by authors to accounts left by readers, Rivers’s evidence is necessarily anecdotal and partial, as must be all accounts of historical reading practices, but she rightly stresses that the imperatives of profit and pleasure guided lay and ministerial readers (117).

The second section, “Sources,” establishes which writers were the “most frequently recommended, edited, published, read and cited” in Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical circles (121). The most striking aspect of this investigation is how interdenominational the canon was, including non-Evangelical Anglican and Roman Catholic works, as well as nonconformist mainstays such as Owen, Bunyan, and Baxter. In an important section that treats Edwards’s and Brainerd’s publication and reception in England, Rivers outlines the two-way flow of ideas between Britain and America during the Evangelical Revival. This part of the book is rich in detail about how older theological texts were abridged, edited, adapted, or re-packaged for new audiences, whether to improve their reach through simplification or to “improve” their doctrinal propriety or practical efficacy. Medieval Catholic texts such as Kempis’s Imitatione were predictably pruned, but Watt’s works were altered by Unitarians to downplay the hymnist’s Trinitarianism, and Wesley’s abridgement of The Pilgrim’s Progress made that Calvinist work more palatable to Arminian Protestants.

The third section, “Literary Kinds,” is the largest, constituting about half of the book. In it, Rivers details the major genres produced and consumed, headed by scriptural guides which aided biblical interpretation, prominently Doddridge’s Family Expositor (1739–56), Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), and Thomas Scott’s annotated edition of the Bible (1788–92). She indicates the wide variety of approaches in annotators and editors, which amounted to “adaptation and exploitation” (219) as well as straightforward exposition, and facilitated in readers not just active interpretation but literary appreciation of scripture. The other major practical genres were sermons and devotional handbooks such as Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), which were hortatory and often communal in the sense that they encouraged collective reading.

Rivers’s excellent chapter on published lives, letters, and diaries emphasizes the exemplary functions of these genres, what John Kendall, the Quaker editor of a collection of biographies, Piety Promoted (1789), described as “the promotion of piety and virtue [to] excite others to follow their example” (278). Eighteenth-century Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical life-writing continued Restoration nonconformist traditions in this genre, though there were significant developments. These include the greater prevalence of biographies by and of women, dissemination of lives through religious magazines, and increased publication of “raw” (though in truth selected and edited) private documents like letters, diaries, and journals. The publication of these modes came with qualms among some, like Josiah Pratt, who feared the propagation of self-deception, hypocrisy, and “formality,” however much he valued diurnal writing to the self as a way to promote humility and vigilance (310). Regardless, the private writings of religious leaders like Whitefield and Wesley, of ministers, and of laypeople were enormously popular.

The final chapter contends that “religious verse in a wide variety of forms was arguably the most valued component, after the Bible, of the literary culture of dissenters, Methodists, and evangelicals” (338). This was down to poetry’s reach and ability to move readers, an imperative explored so expertly in Rivers’s earlier study in two volumes, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (1991, 2000). Rivers accounts for the publication and editing of major poets such as Milton, Pope, Young, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, as well as describing prominent collections of hymns, which she powerfully argues should not be regarded separately from other verse. Her striking claim is that religious literature “transcended” divisions between parties within the Church of England, and divisions between dissenting denominations and the Church (389). That is to say that readers found profit and delight in works they knew to be by Christians of a different persuasion to themselves.

Rivers’s book will transform how literary scholars, religious historians, and book historians approach eighteenth-century culture. It invites comparison in terms of methods and materials with N. H. Keeble’s The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987), a study with a greater sense of the purely literary quality of the writings produced by Dissenters in the wake of the Great Ejection. Enabled by digital resources such as the ESTC and ECCO, Rivers is far less focused than Keeble on aesthetics or even the finer points of religious belief or responses to particular historical events; she is more concerned with the business of books and what they meant to their original producers and readers.

Nicholas Seager, Keele University

Works Cited

 Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720. Cambridge UP, 2011.

Keeble, N. H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester UP, 1987.

Rivers, Isabel. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. 1: Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge UP, 1991.

– – – . Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. 2: Shaftesbury to Hume. Cambridge UP, 2000.

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Parroting Solitude: The Alienated Voice in Julio Cortázar’s “Adíos Robinson”

Peter DeGabriele

 

Abstract: This article argues that Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s Adios, Robinson, a radio play written in the late 1970s, takes up the theme of solitude from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by focusing on mechanical repetitions of the human voice. On Defoe’s island, the human voice was ‘recorded’ and repeated by Robinson’s parrot, and the parrot’s voice produced in Robinson a sense of alienation. Cortázar’s play narrates Robinson’s and Friday’s return to his now modernized island in the 20th century. Both the form of the radio play itself, and various modern apparatuses, such as loudspeakers, radios, and telephones detach the human voice from its point of origin and produce for Cortázar’s Robinson a sense of profound alienation, even in the middle of a modern city. This alienation, the article argues, is related in Cortázar’s play to the capitalist colonialism which Robinson represents. The play demonstrates that this world produces solitude and argues that Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe is the herald of this capitalist modernity. Robinson’s loneliness on his return to the island is contrasted with Friday’s profoundly social experience. Friday immediately makes a connection with the indigenous population on the island and enjoys the city without Robinson. Friday, however, does not return to nature, but instead is able to make the most of the culture of modernity without being absorbed by its alienating effects. When Friday quotes Defoe’s parrot at the end of the play, saying “Poor Robinson Crusoe,” he emphasizes that what Robinson hears from the other is always only his own voice repeated back to him. He is thus unable to exist in a future world in which the colonialist masters of “dirt and smoke” will find themselves lonely and powerless. Cortázar thus produces a Robinsonade that looks to a future without Robinsons.

Keywords: Defoe, Daniel; Robinson Crusoe; Cortázar, Julio; Adíos, Robinson; parrots in literature; solitude

 

Julio Cortázar’s radio play “Adíos, Robinson” ends with Friday twice quoting the parrot from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Friday, speaking to a Robinson who is disillusioned and depressed after returning to his island in the late twentieth century, calls him “poor Robinson Crusoe,” repeating the message that Robinson first heard from his parrot after he woke up in his ‘country seat’ (Cortázar, 190).1 In this famous scene from the novel an exhausted Robinson is woken from sleep by a voice calling out “Poor Robin Crusoe” (Defoe, 104).2 The parrot startles Robinson and disorients him as he cannot account for the presence of what seems to be human speech on his deserted island, and it is only when he recognizes his parrot Poll that he begins to calm down. Even beyond speech itself, however, what Crusoe finds startling is that the parrot speaks his own name and uses his own words. Robinson finds it arresting to hear back his own message but from an external voice. The parrot is like a recording device, preserving Robinson’s words and having the capacity to repeat them in a different context. It is a strange feature of Defoe’s text that his island would include this kind of device capable of recording human speech and repeating it in an alienated form, and it is precisely this aspect of the novel that “Adíos, Robinson” develops. The play’s use of various forms of disembodied voices ultimately shows the voice to be an index of solitude, and it demonstrates that solitude is not the opposite of the social, but a modality of modern society, perhaps even its secret center.

Julio Cortázar, as well as being one of the major Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, is also the translator of Robinson Crusoe into Spanish. His translation forms the basis of the widely available Penguin edition of the novel in Spanish, and he is thus an author with a close connection to Defoe. “Adíos, Robinson” is his most explicit creative engagement with Defoe’s work. Saúl Yurkievich estimates it was written between 1975 and 1980 and it was first published posthumously in 1984, along with another theatrical piece “Nada a Pehuajó” (226-227).3 To my knowledge there is no published English translation of this work, although it was performed in 2020 by La Lengua Theater in San Francisco, a production which included English subtitles.4 Even within studies of Cortázar it counts as a relatively minor piece. It has not received, then, a great deal of critical attention, either by scholars of Cortázar, or by those interested in Robinsonades, though there are of course exceptions.5

All this is to say that “Adíos, Robinson” is not a canonical text either within Latin American literary studies, nor in the broader world of Defoe studies. However, its interest for scholars of Defoe should not be underestimated, especially because the form of the work, the fact that it is a play to be performed on the radio, makes it an unusual kind of Robinsonade.6 This formal innovation allows us to see in a new light some of the ways Defoe’s own prose, for all its commitment to writing and the written word, relies on specific effects of voice.7 Cortázar, for his part, picks up on the importance of the voice in Defoe’s novel by using the form of the radio play, which necessarily consists of recorded, disembodied voices which are detachable from their immediate point of production. If this is a given of the form of the radio play, Cortázar also uses disembodied voices within the play itself, with significant parts of the ‘dialogue’ consisting of one-sided phone conversations, announcements over P.A systems, and radio advertisements. Furthermore, while Ricardo Benavides, in an early review of the first publication of “Adiós, Robinson,” dismissed it as not being of the same quality as the prose fiction for which Cortázar is more well-known, Cortázar’s exploitation of the form of the radio play is careful and effective for his rereading of and reevaluation of Defoe’s text. Indeed, although Peter Standish says the play is more interesting than Cortázar’s other theatrical pieces because as a radio play, it “functions more like a text than like theatre,” it is, on the contrary, precisely his exploitation of the form of the radio play which makes the piece worthwhile (443).

“Adíos, Robinson” begins with Robinson and Friday returning to the island in the twentieth century. The island in this text is not only Defoe’s fictional island, but also the Juan Fernandez of Alexander Selkirk. As Daniel Graziadei notes, the island seems to be located not near the mouth of the Orinoco River, as in Defoe’s novel, but in the Juan Fernandez archipelago (which includes an island called the Isla Robinson Crusoe) off the coast of Chile (89). The setting of the play is thus an overdetermined island which combines the actual island of Selkirk’s shipwreck with the fictional island that it inspired. The island is also clearly overdetermined by the colonial and postcolonial history of Europe and Latin America between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juan Fernandez of Cortázar is a settler colony living under what Rosa Falcón calls “a police state, in a type of colonial dictatorship” (135). There is a clear distinction in the play between those of European descent, like the functionary Nora with whom Robinson becomes infatuated, and the indigenous population such as the chauffeur Platano who Friday discovers is from his own tribe. This is obviously a postcolonial settler nation, however, as we find out early in the play that the government of the island no longer has good relations with Great Britain (indeed diplomatic relations seem icy if not entirely frozen), and it is only Robinson’s status as the author of Robinson Crusoe that makes him even slightly welcome on the island. In this sense, the play is simultaneously about the legacy of European colonialism and the legacy of Defoe’s novel. 

Disembodied Voices and Parrots

The disembodied voice is central to Cortázar’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe and to his examinations of the legacy of colonialism and the alienation fundamental to modern society. To understand Cortázar’s intervention, then, it is worth looking at how critics have interpreted Crusoe’s parrot Poll, the most significant disembodied voice in Robinson Crusoe. Critics of Robinson Crusoe have identified the parrot as radically questioning Robinson’s sense of self. In calling out his name, it asks him to think about his own solitude, and raises questions about the status of animal speech and animal society. For both Eric Jaeger and David Marshall, the parrot is disturbing to Crusoe’s sense of self because its external voice challenges his own self-composition and establishes a dialectic between self and other even when Crusoe is supposedly alone on the island. While for both Jaeger and Marshall, Crusoe is eventually able to overcome the otherness of the parrot’s voice either through the composition of self in language or in recognizing the other as an image of himself, Cortázar’s play maintains the sense of alienation Crusoe initially feels. In “Adíos, Robinson,” the message that Crusoe hears repeated back to him is one that he cannot recognize and cannot identify with. Otherness, in Cortázar’s text, is not reducible back into an image of self.

Importantly, in Cortazár’s play it is not only the speech of the parrot that seems to be empty of subjectivity, but also human speech itself, especially as it is relayed through the technologies of the radio, the loudspeaker, and the telephone. In this sense, the play forces us to look intently at the relation between speech and human society. While for Jaeger and Marshall the speech of the parrot is a limit case that stands between Robinson’s sense of self and his integration into human society, Heather Keenleyside argues that the parrot is an example of the creaturely society that Robinson lives in while he is on the island. She sees the parrot’s speech, (as well as the various other animals with whom Robinson lives on the island including cats, dogs, goats, and other parrots) as offering Robinson a form of society in its own right, not merely a reduced version of human society. She argues that Defoe’s novel “ultimately develops a vision of society that is not grounded wholly in human speech” (82).8 The personification of Poll (and other animals), she shows, becomes a model for human society in general, in which humans too need to be personified in order to become, as Keenleyside puts it in a quote from Robinson Crusoe, “’Some-Body to speak to’” (Keenleyside, 58).  Keenleyside thus undoes the distinction between creaturely conversation and human society. Personification, she shows, is necessary to produce a social relation but, just as animals such as parrots can be personified, humans also need to be personified before they can count as members of a society. Keenleyside positions Robinson Crusoe as producing a form of society that is not based on the kind of communicative reason explicitly theorized in Locke, in which a shared language and consensual contracts form the basis of society. In this sense, then, Keenleyside expands the potential of the social and allows us to see society as something other than conversation between those who speak fully developed human languages. Cortázar’s radio play allows us to approach Defoe’s parrot from a point of view which is compatible with, and yet distinct from, Keenleyside’s argument about creaturely society. Instead of validating creaturely society and expanding our concept of the social, “Adíos, Robinson” underscores the radical deficiencies in the sociality supposedly provided through human speech and language. If creatures can be personified, the human voice can also be automated, othered, and alienated.

In “Adíos Robinson,” this othering and alienation of the voice is achieved through the way it uses modern recording and telephonic technologies. Some of this sense of the alienation of the human voice, however, already comes across in the way critics of Defoe’s novel have noted the similarities between Friday as a speaking being and the parrot. Friday is consistently compared to the parrot both in the sense that, like the parrot, he is made subservient to Crusoe, but also in the sense that his speech seems conditioned in the way animal speech is supposed to be.9 As Bruce Boerher puts it most bluntly, “Poll is a man Friday with feathers” who “foreshadows [Crusoe’s] eventual acquisition of another human underling” (71). Marshall shows that the moments in which Poll and Friday first speak “serve not only as baptisms of the other but also as acts of self-naming…in which Crusoe’s words…are repeated back to himself” (915). The conditioned and replicative form of speech these readings see as characteristic of both Friday and Poll thus undermines speech as an index of selfhood and agency. In “Adíos Robinson” the echoes of the human voice proliferate with the presence of modern recording technologies (reinforced by the form of the radio play itself) and further destabilize the voice as an anchor of agency and selfhood.

This drama of the voice is played out in “Adíos, Robinson,” therefore, through the media of modern technology. Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the parrot scene in Robinson Crusoe gives us some idea of why this is so appropriate. Derrida argues that the parrot’s call to Crusoe is an auto-appellation and auto-interpellation that, despite coming from the outside, from the other, is circular because “it comes from a sort of living mechanism that [Crusoe] has produced, that he assembled himself, like a quasi-technical or prosthetic apparatus, by training the parrot to speak mechanically so as to send his words and his name back to him, repeating them blindly” (86). Robinson thus hears his own voice but in a fundamentally alienated form, alienated enough that he is at first terrified at hearing the parrot and, even when he realizes that it is Poll, remains disturbed for some time. If the parrot is thus formally Robinson’s voice returned in an alienated form, the specific message the parrot gives is one which confirms and reinforces Robinson’s solitude. The parrot asks “poor Robin Crusoe” “Where are you? Where have you been? How come you here?” (104). These questions are disorienting for Robinson both because they refer to his immediate situation in having just found his way to his country seat after having been lost in his explorations of the island, and to his moral and existential situation as a castaway who blames his fate on his own moral turpitude. Importantly, then, solitude is not entirely an effect of silence, of having no one to speak to or hearing no voices. Solitude is an effect of having one’s own voice echoed back to you in an alien form, of receiving from the other the message that one is all alone. As Nora in “Adíos, Robinson” puts it, it is the experience of meeting “in the hotel lobby for a useless and recurrent drink and to see our own sadness in the eyes of the other” (184). What Cortázar takes from Defoe, then, is not the potential of producing a society without the necessity of a fully communicative human language, but of the radical solitude of modern human society itself. The index of this solitude is not silence, but the disembodied or automated voice who repeats one’s own message in a form one no longer understands. 

The Voice in “Adíos Robinson”

While in the example above Nora uses a visual metaphor to explore solitude, the play is more specifically concerned with the effect of the voice as an index of solitude. “Adíos, Robinson” opens with Robinson and Friday in an airplane about to touch down on Juan Fernandez. Robinson is giddy with excitement to return to the island in the twentieth century, noting with astonished glee the “skyscraper of 24…no wait, 32 floors” where his bower used to be (166). He is also proud and fascinated by the cities and oil wells that cover “the forests and plains that I wandered over in my solitude” (167). Friday, on the other hand, is more skeptical about this return. He questions why Crusoe wanted to come back at all, and counters Robinson’s enthusiasm by saying that he knows exactly what he will find on Juan Fernandez because, after all, he has TV, cinema, and National Geographic magazine to tell him all he needs to know about the island. At the beginning of the text Robinson still positions himself as the subject of knowledge, saying to Friday that the joy of seeing the “dreams of progress and civilization” are simply not available to “Indians like you” (167). Robinson, here, is the confident colonialist who is sure he understands progress better than Friday.

Even at this early stage of the play, however, Robinson’s mastery is called into question. Importantly, this questioning comes by way of an involuntary vocal tic which Friday has developed. This tic, in which Friday involuntarily laughs every time he calls Crusoe “master,” detaches Friday’s consciousness from his voice, alienating the voice from its condition of enunciation in a way similar to that of Defoe’s parrot. Like the parrot, Friday seems not to mean anything by this laugh. However, in this case, rather than being an index of servitude, Friday’s similarity to the parrot works to challenge Crusoe’s mastery. Robinson, for his part, is irked by this habit, saying to Friday, “Tell me, why do you laugh every time you address me? You didn’t used to do it, not to mention that I wouldn’t have allowed it, but since a little while ago… Could you let me know what’s so funny about me being your master, the man who saved you from an atrocious destiny, and taught you to live like a civilized being?” (166). Friday himself is disturbed by this recent change, saying to Robinson that indeed “there is nothing funny about it” (166). Friday thus signals that there is no intention of critique and his voice is detached from his own enunciating consciousness.

Friday, we discover, has been examined by “two psychoanalysts, a Freudian and a Jungian” as well as by “an eminent ‘ant-psychiatrist,’ who, by the by, was the only one who accepted without doubts that I was Friday, from your book” (166). In consulting psychoanalysts Friday goes to the latest Western experts on the relation between voice and consciousness. Psychoanalysis is both a therapy that relies on the presence of the human voice, and a method of interpreting the voice that insists that the subject can speak things of which he or she is not conscious. While certainly an ironic stab at psychoanalysis by Cortázar, Friday seems to have some faith in this new science, as he informs Robinson that although he is awaiting confirmation from a lab in Dallas which is processing the results, Jacques Lacan has informed him that it is probably a nervous tic. Friday’s critique of colonialist modernity at this stage of the play does not go much further than this involuntary laugh, and it is still to Europe and the United States that he looks for expert clarification of his situation. If the colonialist West and its civilizing mission is called into question with this laughter at the word master, its intellectuals, its psychoanalytic masters of the voice, seem also to be those with the knowledge to solve, or at least explain, the problem.

The disruption of Friday’s voice thus hints at undermining the authority of colonialist modernity, even if it is then reabsorbed into a system of Western expertise. Upon landing in Juan Fernandez, the unfailing confidence which Robinson has in Western progress is represented again by a disembodied voice. Robinson is highly impressed by the airport P.A, which organizes passengers into corridors marked with different colored arrows based upon their points of departure and final destinations. He admires the efficiency of this machine-like system for organizing people which he says has “eliminated the possibility of error,” and feels honored when he is excepted from this categorization and ushered alone (without Friday) through a door marked “official” (169). Robinson enjoys both the progress of Western civilization, represented by the way a disembodied voice organizes bodies, and his seeming exception from this system of organization.

It is only when he meets Nora, a white government functionary (who is also the wife of the sub-prefect of police) who has been charged to take care of Robinson during his visit, that Robinson begins to become slightly disillusioned with the island. In conversation with Nora, Robinson begins to understand that, because of political tensions between Juan Fernandez and Great Britain, he is not entirely welcome on the island. He is told that the government prefers that he is “distanced” as much as possible from the populace and, far from being able to explore the island, he will have his time regimented (even automated) by an official itinerary (171). He is to be prevented from having “useless” contacts with people in the streets and will be housed in an “isolated” hotel room with its own private elevator (171). Nora tells him that the government always “has some rooms prepared for distinguished guests in order to minimize unnecessary contacts” (171). Robinson’s experience of separation and solitude on the island is thus first announced and performed by the disembodied voice of the airport P.A, and then confirmed in the ‘socially distanced’ itinerary he will have to follow. What Robinson saw as the progress of civilization leads in fact to radical social isolation.

At the same time as this separation is announced, however, Robinson also develops a strong connection with the functionary Nora. In particular, he conceives a desire to speak with her, and she confirms that if it were up to her, she would “very much like to speak to [Robinson] again” (173). The promise of speech, of a face-to-face conversation in a situation not mediated by her position both as functionary and as the wife of the sub-prefect of police, excites Robinson. He feels that Nora understands him, in part because she has both read and reflected on his book. She tells him that “Of course, I know your book. It’s a book everyone here has read. Sometimes I ask why, as it is already about a very different Juan Fernandez. Unless…” (173). Robinson jumps on this conversational bait, replying “unless it is perhaps not so different?”  (173). While this conversation goes no further, as Nora retreats into her official persona, what Robinson recognizes in Nora is the possibility that there is still solitude on Juan Fernandez despite the skyscrapers, “the highways, the yachts in the jetty” (173). Between Robinson and Nora, the first and latest representatives of colonialist modernity there is the promise of a conversation based upon the shared experience of solitude.

If Robinson’s introduction to the island is one of distance and alienation with only the promise of a future conversation, Friday fares differently. While he is waiting for Robinson and collecting their luggage, he meets their assigned driver Platano. Friday discovers that he and Platano belong to the same tribe (distinguished by the length of their thumbs), and they form an immediate bond. Indeed, Friday has been able to make friends so quickly in part because (unlike Robinson) “no one pays much attention to” him and he is able to do more or less as he pleases (174). He has, in fact, organized with Platano to go out drinking and chasing girls in the evening.

Robinson’s experience on the island continues to be punctuated by disembodied voices. On the car ride to the hotel, the stage directions ask that stupid music and equally stupid advertisements are played, and when Robinson arrives at the hotel there are the sounds of a hotel lobby, including muzak and the P.A system calling a guest (174). These disembodied voices of capitalist modernity thus form Robinson’s experience of the island. Furthermore, the play figures Robinson’s relation to other people as based on disembodied or alienated voices. Initially, Friday tells Robinson to speak freely in front of their driver Platano because Friday thinks Platano does not understand English. He and Platano have been conversing in their native language, which Robinson of course never bothered to learn. It soon becomes apparent, though, that, while he may not speak English, he at least understands it. When Robinson asks Friday about what kind of schedule he will have on the island, Platano is able to enter their conversation and confirm for Friday (in the native language they share) that Robinson will have an itinerary waiting for him at the hotel which will regiment his visit. Robinson thus gets an answer to his question that confirms the automatization of Robinson’s own time, taking away his freedom of movement and choice. This answer comes not in English, but in a language that Robinson cannot understand and is only relayed to him via Friday’s translation. Friday, for his part, laughs, saying of Platano, “that sneaky bastard hasn’t lost a word, and there was me thinking he didn’t know English…You English have done things well master, this language of yours is spoken by everyone everywhere, even by the seals in Antarctica” (175). What is significant here is both the sense that Robinson has his question relayed back to him in the voice and language of an other, and also that the speaking of English is figured, by Friday, as extended not only to the ends of the Earth, but even to animals.

Robinson’s success, as an Englishman, in the colonial spreading of the English language is here returned to him in the itinerary of soulless solitude that constitutes an official visit to a modern city. Robinson is sentenced to the experience of a late modern capitalist solitude, the kind of experience his own early modern capitalist colonialism initiated. He receives back his own call in the voice of the other. While this sentence is voiced by Platano, Friday’s joke that even the seals could have understood Robinson’s question and relayed him an answer recalls the parrot in Robinson Crusoe. In Keenleyside’s reading of Defoe’s novel, the concept of society is extended to include animals who form a creaturely society in which Crusoe participates. In Cortázar’s play, by contrast, even the animal is drawn into the colonialism, solitude, and automatization of human modernity.

Late Modern Solitude

The play’s treatment of the alienating nature of capitalist modernity comes out most clearly through Robinson’s continuing relation with Nora. Once he is ensconced in his hotel, and has complained that the official program of tours he is expected to go through is “interminable and boring,” he receives a phone call from Nora (176). We hear only Crusoe’s side of the conversation, giving the sense of an alienated connection. This is heightened when Robinson’s eager exclamation that he will wait for Nora below for her to pick him up is followed by his disappointment that it will not be her who takes him on the tour but “another functionary” (177). Nora, here, seems replaceable as any one functionary would be for another, and Robinson must be content with the mediated and distant telephone conversation in place of the personal connection he hoped for. The meeting with Nora remains a disappointed hope that disillusions Robinson, and causes him to lapse into melancholy.

After his arduous first day of tours (during which Friday was living the life with Platano) Robinson is unable to sleep. Friday reminds him that before, in his bower on a deserted island he always slept well, even if the solitude (before Friday’s arrival) must have weighed on him. Robinson replies that “Yes, it was hard to live alone on the island…but I’m beginning to think there are worse solitudes than simply being alone” (179). Indeed, Robinson muses to Friday that despite its 2.5 million inhabitants, the “island is still deserted, much more deserted than when the sea vomited me on to the coast…” (180). Friday’s response that the island is so well populated that the government is working on controlling the birthrate (a specifically modern phenomenon of governmentality) does not convince Robinson, who replies that in Juan Fernandez, just as in London, there are millions of people who do not know each other, “families that are so many other islands” (180). Robinson thus describes his experience of a solitude at the heart of a modern city, and combines it with his own disillusionment, as he tells Friday that “Stupidly I thought…that this could be the place where my solitude from long ago would be replaced by its contrary, by the immense marvel of smiling and talking and being close and doing things together…I thought the book had been worth something, to show people the terror of solitude and the beauty of meeting, of contact” (180-181). While Cortázar’s Robinson saw his book as a warning against solitude and a plea for friendly society, then, the book seems to have been taken in the opposite way, as a description of the centrality of solitude to modernity, even a recommendation of solitude as the modern way of life. Like the English language (understood by not only Platano but even the seals in the Arctic) the book speaks back to Robinson in an alienated form. He hears again his voice as the voice and the message of the other.

The question of the value of the book, of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, guides the drama of the final part of the play. Robinson himself is proud of the book, saying it “has been read almost as much as the Quixote or The Three Musketeers” (181).  The book is the subject of his long awaited but still rushed conversation with Nora. In this meeting, Robinson finds that Nora has come to see him not only because, he says, “you have noticed my disillusionment and sadness, but because you are also disillusioned and sad” (182). As they discuss Robinson’s book Nora tells Robinson that her favorite part is “where you save Friday’s life, and then little by little raise him up from his ignoble condition of cannibal to that of a human being” (183). For her, the value of the book remains the way it describes the colonialist and civilizing mission. It is a message for white people like her and Robinson, and not for those others like Platano and Friday who she describes as people who “think and feel in another manner,” and who “cannot understand us” (182). In her disillusionment, she still places her hope in the progress of a Western, colonialist civilization.

Robinson, however, no longer feels that his saving of Friday can be his favorite part. He tells Nora that what he appreciates now about Friday are what remains of the cannibal in him, the “mental cannibal” or the “interior savage” he qualifies (183). He goes on to explain that it is precisely Friday’s ability to resist the alienation of modernity that he now admires in him, his ability to “only [accept] from our technology the things that entertain or interest [him], the juke boxes, canned beer, and TV shows” (184). He thus begins to see in Friday the possibility of a technological modernity without alienation, a form of life which is neither that of Friday before contact with European civilization, nor that of European civilization itself. He tells Nora that “Friday has shown me in his way that much of him was still able to escape the system that Juan Fernandez imposed on me” (184). While he and Nora are “meeting, all too briefly, on a common ground of frustration and sadness, Friday and his friend are moving happily through the streets, chatting up girls” (183-184).  Robinson sees obscurely a form of modernity to which he has no access.

Responding to Robinson’s rereading of his own book, Nora speculates that perhaps the book has a different ending than the one Robinson gave it, an ending in which it is Friday who would have had to have saved Robinson and Nora from their own solitude. Nora, like Robinson, acknowledges the alienation and depression caused by the homogeneous spaces of modernity, the hotel lobbies, skyscrapers, museums, and airports that give no joy or contact with life. Importantly, though, she sees the book as potentially saving her and Robinson, and the rest of Western modernity, by having an ending different to the one which Robinson wrote. The idea that the book Robinson Crusoe could have a different ending than that given it by Robinson/ Defoe emphasizes that the book is itself, as Derrida notes, a “prosthetic apparatus” that speaks “of Robinson Crusoe without him” (87). In this sense, Robinson’s book too speaks to him as an alienated voice, returning to him a message not quite his own and one which repeats and confirms his solitude. Far from confirming his self-composition, as in Jager’s reading, the book decomposes Robinson, with Cortázar’s metafictional Robinson no longer recognizing himself in the book.

Nora’s own reading of the book, however, still takes the kind of colonial form which Robinson could recognize. In her reading, the savage Friday saves the colonialist, leaving the trope of salvation intact, as well as the dichotomy between savage and civilized. Robinson, however, intuits that the ending of the book is different, and significantly more alienated from his own perspective. He himself can only express it in his own colonialist language, saying to Nora that he is “too civilized to accept that people like Friday…can do something for me other than serve me” (184).  Robinson, in this sense, refuses the idea that he could be saved by Friday, that Friday could have an agency that could change Robinson or teach him. While this language is clearly colonialist, what it speaks unconsciously and unwittingly is Robinson’s own unteachability, of the impossibility of salvation because of the inability of the colonizer to hear or understand what an indigenous subject may have to say. In this instance, Robinson’s own voice is alienated from him even at the moment of enunciation. He cannot hear or understand the very message that he speaks.

At the end of the radio play, however, Friday speaks more clearly and relays Robinson’s message in a more radical and direct way. As they leave Juan Fernandez, in a scene again punctuated by the voice of the airport’s P.A system, Friday and Robinson reflect on their experience on the island. Robinson tells Friday that up until now he had seen his civilizing mission as good, that he “imagined [Friday] identifying with our way of life, until we arrived here again, and you began to have this nervous tic…at least that’s what you call it” (186-187). Robinson returns to Friday’s involuntary vocal tic, and Friday, in his response again laughs when he calls Robinson master. Moving beyond this involuntary insubordination, however, Friday addresses Robinson by his first name, telling him that “it is true Robinson,” that many things changed upon their arrival on Juan Fernandez, but that “it is nothing next to what is going to change” (187). Friday here begins to speak in something like his own voice, demonstrating his release from Robinson’s mastery more directly and challenging Robinson’s control over the future, over the change that is coming. Echoing Defoe’s parrot, Friday addresses Robinson as “poor Robinson Crusoe” and tells him that “You had to return here with me to discover that among millions of men and women you are just as alone as you were when you shipwrecked on the island” (188). Robinson now hears the message of his own solitude doubly echoed, in the voice of a Friday who is no longer his man, and in the voice of the parrot. These voices that always seemed to be Robinson’s own voices are released from his control, and in the process they speak back to him the message of his own book, but in a form that he could never understand or articulate for himself.

Friday forces Robinson to acknowledge that beyond the restrictions placed upon him by the government, his alienation on Juan Fernandez was due to his own alienation from humanity. Friday assures him that even if the government had not isolated Robinson from the people of Juan Fernandez, the people would have done it themselves, “would have smiled at you in a friendly way and nothing more” (189). Friday tells Robinson, again quoting the parrot, that “It is too late for you, I’m afraid. On Juan Fernandez there is no place for you and yours, poor Robinson Crusoe, poor Alexander Selkirk, poor Daniel Defoe, there is no place for the shipwrecked of history, for the masters of dirt and smoke, for the inheritors of nothing” (190). Friday thus quotes the parrot’s “poor Robinson Crusoe,” adding all the other colonialist writers and explorers to the list, as the truth of the book. The parrot has the last word, echoed through Friday, and, in between boarding calls for his return to London, Robinson thus has the message of his book returned to him as one in which he is not the mythical hero of a progressive and civilized future, but the relic of a past isolated from the present, from presence, and from others.

The play ends with Friday finally disparaging Robinson and castigating him for never having learned his true name. Instead of reclaiming his name, however, Friday claims the name of Juan Fernandez, which he explains to Robinson is like the name John Smith in English, or Jean Dupont in French. It is thus the name of an everyman with whom Friday can connect, but with whom Robinson cannot. Peter Standish suggests Cortázar’s own ambivalence here, arguing that he identifies as much with Robinson as Friday, unable, as a highly cultivated intellectual to communicate with “the man on the street” (443). Francisco Emilio de la Guerra also sees Cortázar as part Robinson, part Friday here. Both these readings suggest a further alienation of voice, as Cortázar himself routes his own voice through two opposed fictional characters from another author’s work. This may help explain why Friday does not reconnect with an authentic voice and name of his own, but instead finds his subversive power and his future in the voice of the parrot.

It is not, however, through making the animal into a speaking agent that this radio play functions, but in making the parrot represent a kind of collective power which solitary individualists such as Robinson cannot understand. Friday says that he and Platano, and all the others that recognize each other in a way Robinson never will, are continuing forward into a future that is unknown. The only thing certain, Friday says, is that “we are going to firm ground, we say we want to leave behind forever these islands of Robinsons, the solitary pieces of your world” (190). De la Guerra sees the optimism of this ending as a reflection of Cortázar’s optimism about the “recent triumph of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua” (201), and this enthusiasm for the socialist and collectivist revolutionary movement would certainly contrast with the solitude Cortázar associates with Western capitalist modernity.  As Robinson listens to the disembodied voice of the airport P.A telling all passengers heading to London to board quickly with their vaccination cards in hand, Friday tells him to hurry up because “Planes don’t wait, Robinson, planes don’t wait!” (190). Robinson is thus left behind by the technological modernity he helped to herald, alienated from the world that is of his own making, and unable to keep up with the new world of Friday, Platano, and all those like them.

 An Adíos without a God

“Adíos, Robinson” thus ends with the projection of an exciting and uncertain future and refuses the narrative of salvation that is part of Defoe’s novel. In doing so, the play participates in a tradition of postcolonial Robinsonades which challenge the ideological thrust of Defoe’s novel, as well as that of many of the Robinsonades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ian Kinane notes that the island in early Robinsonades is often a place where Europeans imagined they could find redemption (13), and Andrew O’Malley argues that the Robinsonade has long been “implicated in…the imperialist project” (xiii). By contrast, Anne Marie Fallon demonstrates that “the Crusoe that appears in twentieth century literature is a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression” (2). Furthermore, in her discussion of twentieth-century Robinsonades, Rosa Falcón argues that one of the most significant changes to the story is that Friday appears as “parallel hero” and sometimes “the true protagonist who is full of the wisdom and virtues of archaic cultures unknown to the West” (128). Clearly it is into this latter tradition that Cortázar’s work fits. However, the text’s representation of Friday is complex. His indigeneity is important in the text, but so is his modernity, his ability to take from modernity what suits him and to discard what he does not need. Indeed, much of what he discards involves the question of salvation with which both Nora and Robinson remain occupied. This is why the last scene of the play, which sees Friday associated with the aerial speed of the plane and the future, and not with the terrestrial and the past, is so important. It represents Friday as the future, but as a future which implies uncertainty rather than salvation.

To do as Robinson says Friday does, and to take what one can of civilization and leave the rest, looks more like what Robinson does at the beginning of his stay on the island in Defoe’s novel. He salvages things from the ship to help him survive. What “Adíos, Robinson” points to is the possibility, inherent even in Defoe’s own text, of detaching this question of survival, of taking things one by one and leaving others, from the theme of salvation. If Defoe’s novel tries insistently to order all of Robinson’s daily routines into a grand narrative of salvation, in which all is directed by the voice of Providence, “Adíos, Robinson” notes both the colonialism of this narrative, which ultimately looks to the colonized Other and to the imperialist project for salvation, but also its fundamental failure. The voice of Providence cannot order a world which is full of other voices that arrive from the outside and alienate the subject from him or herself. Importantly, Cortázar draws attention to the way voices in Defoe’s novel are already fundamentally othered, something made most clear by the presence of the parrot as a kind of proleptic recording device. Far from being linked to a particular subjectivity or body, voices can be alienated from the beginning, the result of repetition and exteriority. These othered voices represent both the alienation of colonialist and capitalist modernity, as in Robinson’s experience of them as voices he cannot identify with and cannot recognize as his own, and as signals of a future without colonialists like Robinson, as when Friday quotes the parrot in order to give to Robinson his final “adíos.” This is an “adíos,” however, that will send him to no God and no salvation.

Mississippi State University

Notes

1 All translations from “Adíos Robinson” are my own, as are all translations from other Spanish language sources unless otherwise noted.

2 Friday in “Adíos, Robinson” thus does not quote exactly. Both in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and in Cortázar’s translation of the novel the parrot says “Poor Robin Crusoe.”

3 In 1995 it was republished by Alfaguara as part of its Biblioteca Cortázar series as the title piece of a compilation of Cortázar’s short theatrical works. It is the only piece for radio included.

4 My thanks go to La Lengua Theater for providing me with a recording of this excellent performance. There is also a production from 2012 by Radio Nacional Argentina available on YouTube.

5 There are at least four recent books in English on Robinsonades: one by Anne Marie Fallon, two by Ian Kinane (one as editor and one as author), and one by Jakub Lipski (as editor). All have a global focus, but none reference “Adíos, Robinson.”

6 It is notable that Derek Walcott’s theatrical Robinsonade Pantomime also focuses on the voice, both through its transformation into song of many scenes from Robinson Crusoe, and through the inclusion of a parrot who voices racist obscenities.

7 For more on Defoe and voice see DeGabriele and Stephanson.

8 For another reading of the importance of animal speech in reading the parrot scenes in Robinson Crusoe see Borgards.

9 Both Marshall and Jaeger argue that even though Friday does have an independence of mind, Crusoe’s conversations with him remain modes of self-composition and self-naming, in a way not entirely different from his interactions with Poll. Keenleyside pushes the similarity between Crusoe’s relation with Friday and his relations with other creatures even further, arguing that Crusoe’s domestication of a goat “becomes the model for the kind of exchange by which Friday ‘consents’ to Crusoe’s society” (86).

Works Cited

Benavides, Ricardo. “Review of Nada a Pehuajó (un acto); Adíos Robinson. Mexico City. Katún, 1984. 70 pages.” World Literature Today, vol. 60, no. 1, 1986, pp. 77-8.

Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004.

Borgards, Roland. “Parrot Poll: Animal Mimesis in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” HUMaNIMALIA, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 2-24.

Cortázar, Julio. Adíos Robinson y otros pezas breves. Alfagura, Buenos Aires, 2014.

De la Guerra, Emilio Francisco. Julio Cortázar, de literatura y revolución en América Latina. Unión de Universidades de América Latina, Ciudad Universitaria, 2000.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, edited by Michael Shinagel. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1993.

DeGabriele, Peter. “Intimacy, Survival, and Resistance: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-23.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 2.  Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011.

Falcón, Rosa. Robinson y la isla infinita: lecturas de un mito. Fondo de Culturo Económica, Madrid, 2018.

Fallon, Ann Marie. Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Transnational Aesthetics. Ashgate, Burlington, 2011.

Graziadei, Daniel. “Islas fantásticas: espacialidades inuslares entre lo (neo-)fantástic y la posmodernidad en las obras de Adolfo Bioy Casares y Julio Cortázar.” La narración entre lo fantástico y la posmodernidad: Adolfo Bioy Casares y Julio Cortázar, edited by Daniel Graziadei and Michael Rössner, Greg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 2020.

Jager, Eric. “The Parrot’s Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, Spring 1988, pp. 316-33.

Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2016.

Kinane, Ian, editor. Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2019.

—— Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives. Rowman and Littlefield, New York, 2014.

Lipski, Jakub, editor. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media. Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 2020.

Marshall, David. “Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH, vol. 71, no. 4, 2004, pp. 899-920.

O’Malley, Andrew. “Foreword: The Progressive Pedagogies of the Modern Robinsonade.” Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, edited by Ian Kinane, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2019, pp. xiii-xiv.

Standish, Peter. “El teatro de Julio Cortázar.” Hispania, vol. 83, no. 3, 2000, pp. 437-44.

Stephanson, Raymond. “’Tis a Speaking Sight: Imagery as Narrative Technique in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” Dalhousie Review Halifax. Vol. 63, no. 4, 1982, pp.  680-92.

Yurkievich, Saul. Julio Cortázar: mundos y modos. Anaya y Mario Muchnik, Madrid, 1984.

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The Nature of ECCO-TCP

Stephen H. Gregg

AT ITS LAUNCH in 1999, the Text Creation Partnership was a breakthrough collaboration between libraries and commercial publishers of digitized material. It aimed to provide collections of electronic texts from the early modern period that were freely accessible to the public, transcribed to a high degree of accuracy, and encoded to enable re-use and analysis. Its initial impetus was the collaboration with ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO), but other collaborations were established with Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints and Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The TCP website provides a good history of its projects, and Shawn Martin’s 2009 essay “A Universal Humanities Digital Library: Pipe Dream or Prospective Future?” offers useful background as well as reflects on the possibilities and challenges of the TCP project as whole. However, the EEBO-TCP collaboration has generated most scholarly commentary (see, for example, Welzenbach, 2012; Mak, 2014; Mueller, 2018; Gavin 2019; Herman 2020). This interest reflects a number of factors peculiar to the success and visibility of EEBO-TCP. One factor was that, on its publication in 1999, EEBO consisted only of page images; in transcribing these page images, the TCP provided the text that enabled subsequent computational analysis and electronic text editing. The other significant factor was that the large number of texts transcribed—currently now around 65,000 texts—enabled the development of several large-scale projects for exploring and analysing the literature, language, and print culture of the period, for example, The Early Print Library, PRISMS, Visualizing English Print, the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP), and Linguistic DNA.

In contrast—and although it is also used in several of the projects just mentioned—few analyses focus on the history of the TCP collaboration with ECCO. Consequently, unanswered questions remain about the nature of ECCO-TCP which this short essay aims to answer. Why did ECCO-TCP stop after a relatively small number of texts were transcribed? What organisational pressures and individual human choices shaped the nature and biases of the ECCO-TCP collection? In addition—and aside from academic articles like this—how do we find the answers to such questions? As Roopika Risam has argued, “the reification of canons in digital form is not only a function of what is there—what gets digitalised and thus represented in the digital cultural record—but also how it is there—how those who have created their projects are presenting their subjects” (17). In short, how are such digital collections contextualised and their histories framed?

The scale of ECCO-TCP is relativity small compared to the larger and arguably more successful EEBO-TCP. Initial expectations for ECCO-TCP were high: 10,000 texts were planned to be transcribed.1 However, between 2004 and 2012 only 3,101 texts were eventually transcribed and encoded, comprising 2,473 fully edited texts, and 628 released without being subject to final proofing and editing.2 So, why did work stop? As I have suggested elsewhere, financial factors impinged on the sustainability of ECCO-TCP (75-76). The TCP is funded according to a “quasi-commercial model” in which libraries and institutions that purchased EEBO, Evans Early American Imprints, or ECCO could become contributing partners with the TCP; these funds were then matched by the commercial publishers, ProQuest, Readex, or Gale (Martin, 4).  However, in 2006 TCP’s executive board predicted budget deficits and sought to secure more funding from its partner institutions (“TCP Executive Board”). Paul Schaffner, director of the TCP, recalled that, “we never received the financial support that we hoped for” and at some time after 2009, “we ran out of money” and the ECCO-TCP project used “what was left to review and complete the books in the pipeline” (Schaffner). By 2012, these financial constraints prevented ECCO-TCP from populating its site with additional transcribed and encoded texts.

The other problem that seemed to have sapped the energy behind the ECCO-TCP project was the question of its very nature. First, what exactly were the benefits of transcribing material from ECCO? What did the project hope to achieve? As mentioned earlier, TCP’s collaboration with ProQuest’s EEBO responded to a vital need and had a rigorous rationale; namely, it provided the searchable text which EEBO lacked. However, ECCO already had searchable text, produced by OCR software. Of course, it is the accuracy of text transcriptions which underpin any digital scholarship that uses the TCP collections. One of TCP’s missions was to “Present the user with accurately keyed, modern-font texts that are faithful to the spellings and organization of the original works.” ECCO’s notoriously messy OCR-produced text, though, rendered this objective impossible (Gregg 62-66).Nevertheless, TCP’s mission was complicated by the sheer size of ECCO and which clearly presented a huge challenge: what criteria would be used to select texts that would benefit from transcription from over 180,000 titles?

ECCO-TCP, like all human artefacts of collecting, is a product of institutional and human choices. Martin Mueller describes it as “a cherry-picked collection with an emphasis on canonical high-culture texts.” But how did it become that way? The geographic and linguistic biases of ECCO itself undoubtedly shaped its bias towards canonical authors (Tolonen, et al. 22-27). To a significant extent, this legacy can be traced to the foundations of ECCO: the microfilming project which tended to favour canonical male authors and the Anglocentrism of the originary 18th Short Title Catalogue begun in 1976 (Gregg, 12-13, 23).3 In this context, the criteria established by a TCP “selection task force” set up in August 2005 is illuminating:

  1. ECCO-TCP will use the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature as a guide to begin the selection process, because this standard reference work is by no means confined in scope to ‘literature,’ but provides a good overview of writing of all kinds — philosophical, religious, travel, periodical, historical, and so on.
  2. ECCO-TCP will supplement these selections with suggestions from scholars, anthologies, and other bibliographies
  3. Titles in languages other than English normally will be excluded from selection in ECCO-TCP.
  4. ECCO-TCP will also, as far as possible, try to include works that will benefit from the added value the project brings (titles with complex structures like encyclopedias and works with bad OCR)
  5. ECCO-TCP will include authors who cross the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Defoe and Swift, and will include their political, religious, and economic texts where appropriate in order to provide complete representation of these authors in the overall TCP collection.4

Schaffner noted that, apart from the broad and ambitious aim of identifying “added value,” these criteria were largely workable (for example, non-fictional works by Defoe are very well represented, attribution questions aside). However, these guidelines resulted in an uneven set of texts: decisions were inevitably subject to institutional pressures and individual human choice. For example, the relatively good representation of medical texts and Irish-themed fiction reflect the demands of particular partner institutions; and Schaffner himself acknowledged that his own interest in hymn books probably resulted in the inclusion of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and Philip Doddridge (Schaffner). Decisions about what to include were also influenced by the use of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature volume 2: 1660-1800, published in 1971 (!) and its definition of “Major” authors. So, there are no works of fiction by the popular early women writers such as Penelope Aubin, Eliza Haywood, or Delarivier Manley, but—as an instance of individual choice—twenty-two works by “Minor” novelist Samuel Jackson Pratt are included. It seems the selection task force must have argued for Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative to be transcribed for the collection since it is not listed in the New Cambridge bibliography, but works by other writers of the early black Atlantic, including James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, or Ottobah Cugoano, were not selected.

The challenge presented by the lack of a clear argument for the project, a wide-ranging set of criteria, and the scale of ECCO resulted in a conservative and idiosyncratic collection that seems to have reflected eighteenth-century scholarship as it stood in the late twentieth century. On top of that, the small scale of ECCO-TCP arguably magnifies ECCO’s own inherent biases. Such biases also have the potential to impact any research based on the projects mentioned earlier. Literary and historical canons change, of course, and it might seem that I have unduly fixated on the use of a 1971 bibliography to decide in 2005 what texts were valuable for a digital collection. But while the ECCO-TCP webpage acknowledges that it is “perhaps better described as a proof of concept than as a completed project,” it avoids detailing the various factors that have shaped the nature of the collection (“Text Creation Partnership”). That is, despite TCP’s laudable claim that “Our policies were imbued with a librarian’s attitude toward content: a resolve to prepare materials without agenda or bias, and with a view toward wide use and reuse,” this oversight remains. The larger point is that we need to understand the nature of these collections and their biases, and that—without users and researchers having to carry out some additional detective work—an explicit framing of the financial, institutional, and human contexts that shape how and why they are made is essential for a more nuanced understanding and use of such digital collections. 

Bath Spa University

Notes

1 Initial estimate courtesy of Jonathan Blaney.

22Notably, Gale did not ingest the TCP transcriptions into ECCO. In contrast, the UK organisation Jisc, another partner of TCP, ingested ECCO-TCP texts in its Historical Texts platform in 2016 (“Developmental Roadmap”).

3 Relatedly, TCP itself is not without its racial and gendered dimensions, since transcription is outsourced to workers in the Global South. See Mattie Burkert.

4 I obtained this unpublished “Selection Task Force Report” (9-10 August 2005) courtesy of Paul Schaffner.

Works Cited

Blaney, Jonathan. “RE: ECCO-TCP research,” Received by Stephen H. Gregg, 2 December 2019.

Burkert, Mattie, “From Manual to Digital: Women’s Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 52. Forthcoming [2023].

“Development Roadmap.” Jisc Historical Texts, historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/developmentroadmap. Accessed 27 August 2020.

Gavin, Michael. “How To Think About EEBO.” Textual Cultures, vol. 11, no. 1–2, 2019, pp.70–105. https://doi.org/10.14434/textual.v11i1-2.23570.

Gregg, Stephen H., Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Cambridge University Press, 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/old-books-and-digital-publishing-eighteenthcentury-collections-online/058DB12DE06A4C00770B46DCFAE1D25E

Herman, Peter C. “EEBO and Me: An Autobiographical Response to Michael Gavin, ‘How to Think About EEBO.’” Textual Cultures, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 207–16. https://doi.org/10.14434/textual.v13i1.30078.

Mak, Bonnie. “Archaeology of a Digitization.” Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65, no. 8, 2014, pp.1515–26. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23061

Martin, Shawn. “A Universal Humanities Digital Library: Pipe Dream or Prospective Future?” Digital Scholarship, edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup, Routledge, 2009, pp.1–12.

Mueller, Martin, “Collaborative Curation of TCP Texts,” October 2018, https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/?p=565. Accessed 13 September 2019.

Risam, Roopika, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Schaffner, Paul. “Re: DCCHELP-1238 Researching a history of ECCO,” Received by Stephen H. Gregg, 19 Nov. 2019.

“TCP Executive Board Meeting Minutes 2006-09-16.” Archive-It, wayback.archive-it.org/5871/20190806191843/http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-board-meeting-minutes-2006-09-16/. Accessed 25 August 2020.

“Text Creation Partnership,” University of Michigan Library, textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-texts/eebo-tcp-early-english-books-online/. Accessed 27 September 2022.

Tolonen, Mikko S., et al. ‘Corpus Linguistics and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)’, Research in Corpus Linguistics, 9.1 (2021), 19–34.

Watson, George, ed., et al. New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature volume 2: 1660-1800. Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Welzenbach, Rebecca. “Transcribed by Hand, Owned by Libraries, Made for Everyone: EEBO-TCP in 2012,” University of Michigan Library, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/94307. Accessed 27 September 2022.

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Defoe and the Economic Sublime

Maximillian E. Novak

FEW CRITICS have had difficulty connecting Defoe as a writer of realist fiction and his interest in the economic problems of his time, but any association between his writings on Britain’s trade or labor or stock-jobbing and the sublime might at first thought seem to be a contradiction in terms. In his attack upon what he considered to be the excesses of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, the great commentator on the sublime in the eighteenth century, followed his sublime image of the besieged queen of France, whom he had once seen, “decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendour and joy,” with a disparaging picture of a new age from which chivalry, beauty, and the sublime had fled to be replaced by the lifeless products of “sophisters, economists and calculators” (66). According to Burke, these were the kind of thinkers who, in the name of social planning, had divided France into exact geometric squares without any consideration of tradition or the moral nature of human beings. He opined that the “cold hearts” of such thinkers would never be a satisfactory model for Britons (68). Burke’s contempt for “economists and calculators”—for their lack of sensibility and emotion—had some basis in reality. John Grant and Sir William Petty, who introduced political arithmetic to England in the seventeenth century showed a singular lack of feeling for human nature. Grant pondered on whether it would not be more profitable to introduce polygamy into England to increase the nation’s wealth, using animal reproduction in a manner similar to Swift’s future projector in A Modest Proposal. And Sir William Petty defied any notion of chivalry when, in responding to a challenge to a duel, suggested as his choice of weapons, axes in a dark cellar. There was evidence enough then for the image of the cold-hearted and very unsublime economist.

If as I intend to argue in this essay Defoe found sublimity in matters of trade, he was at least somewhat unusual. Yet it is also clear that economics is not unsusceptible to images of the sublime.1 Slavoj Zizek argues that the very concept of money contains within it what he calls “sublime material” when conceived of, in Marx’s terms, as that “’indestructible and immutable’ body which persists beyond the corruption of the body physical” (18-19). And Derrida has shown that the sublime ghost of Hamlet’s father wanders through much of Marx’s writing. Of course, there are few more sublime images than Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” which somehow guides individual self-interest to the goal of the national good. It is true that Smith deliberately muted this image in The Wealth of Nations, but he was more expansive in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he also used the image of the “insatiable desires” of the wealthy, who are led by an “invisible hand” to employ the poor to satisfy their egotism, thereby spreading the wealth of the world. Smith followed this with an expansive image of “the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine which “seem to move with more harmony and ease” because of individual self-interest (184-185). In his economic treatise, despite all the attention paid to it, the image appears with relatively little fanfare.

Daniel Defoe was numbered by his contemporaries among the important economic writers employing political arithmetic, and not surprisingly, it was he who most obviously provided a sublime image of economic activity. Like Adam Smith, but far more dramatically, he saw an “Invisible Hand,” guiding human economic activity. It is perhaps no accident that Smith was reported to have “quoted some passages in Defoe which breathed, as he thought, the true spirit of English verse” (Amicus 230). Admirers of Defoe’s poetry were rare enough in the late eighteenth century, but it is interesting to know that Smith was among them. For it was in what might be called the poetry of economics that Defoe must have stood out from his contemporaries, in his half mocking, half sublime hymn to money in the Review, his praise of industry in Caledonia (1706), and his glorification of the teleological force behind economic activity in his General History of Trade (1713). His hymn to money eulogized that very notion of money as a magical and unchangeable thing that Zizek considered a sublime object:

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 might 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 Physic of the secret Dispensation in human Affairs is administered, and by the Quality of which it operates to Blessing or Cursing? Well art thou call’d the God of this World; for in thy Presence and Absence consists all the heaven or hell of human Affairs; for Thee, what will not Mankind do, what Hazzards will they run, what Villanies perform? For thee, Kings Tyrannize, Subjects are oppress’d, Nations ruin’d, Father murther’d, Children abandon’d, Friends betray’d. Thou art the Charm that unlocks the Cabinet, unscrews Nature. (4:422-423)

When Crusoe was to carry off the gold he discovered on the wreck, despite his knowledge that it was useless on the island, he did not provide an explanation for his actions beyond some additional consideration. The reader is allowed to provide some explanations. Two come to mind along with some combination of both. Perhaps he was being practical in thinking that he might be able to use this seemingly useless commodity if he were rescued some day. Or perhaps, for all his understanding that an object such as a cooking pan would be more useful on the island, he could not rid himself of the symbolic and sublime value which inhered in it.

Although Defoe would hardly have conceived of writing a treatise on the sublime, he gave us enough examples of it throughout his writings to allow us to draw a number of general conclusions about how he used it and for what purposes.2 The most significant passage of course is the discovery of the footprint. One critic has pointed to this event as “an event of immense force,” a violent encounter with otherness that brings with it a sense of terror and dislocation (Brown 158). I raise this moment in Defoe’s writing because although he is often associated with the start of realist fiction, as well as fiction with economic concerns, he was also always capable of charging scenes with powerful emotions.3

I want to begin with a wonderful section of the Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. The narrator along with his companions have struggled through a mountainous region beset by an amazing snowstorm and terrible claps of thunder. At first they suspect it is a frightening explosion in a coal mine, but then confirm the possibility that thunder may accompany the snow. Although the narrow pass seems “horrible” to them, they keep on descending. But amid this “frightful country” the narrator finds a combination of running water and coals on the highest hills.” He ascribes this to

the wise Hand of Providence for the very purpose which is now served by it, namely, the Manufactures, which otherwise could not be carried on …. After we had mounted the third Hill, we found the Country, in short, one continued Village, tho’ mountainous every way, as before; hardly a House standing out of a speaking distance from another, and (which soon told us their Business) the Day clearing up, and the sun shining, we could see that almost at every House there was a Tenter, and almost on every Tenter a Piece of Cloth, or Kersie, or Shalloon, for they are the three Articles dof that country’s Labour; from which the Sun glancing, and, as I may say, shining (the White reflecting its Rays) to us, I thought it was the most agreeable Sight that I ever saw, for the Hills, as I say rising and falling so thick, and the Vallies opening sometimes one way, sometimes another, so that sometimes we could see two or three Miles this way, sometimes as far another; sometimes like the Streets near St.Giles’s, call the Seven Dials; we could see through the Glaces almost every Way round us, yet look which Way we would, high to the Tops, and low to the Bottoms, it was all the same; innumerable Houses and Tenters, and a white Piece upon every Tenter. (2:601)

The entire scene has to be regarded as a whole. The narrator moves from the horror of Black Edge, which seems to call up the supernatural type of explosive sound in the midst of terrifying mountains and a terrible snowstorm, to the scene of human activity in the foothills—equally staggering in its infinite number of tenters reflecting the sun in an amazing way. It is only here that the narrator calls upon the invisible hand of God (“the wise Hand of Providence”) as the ultimate creator of a nature made exactly right for the industriousness of the inhabitants. He is very much the God of industry, seemingly absent in the hills, but present everywhere in the nature that put together coal and water in such a way as to encourage industry. Where there is no industry, as in the area the narrator encounters on leaving Leeds, around Black Barnsley, the land is “dismal…and frightful,” but hardly sublime as he longs once more for a vision of the “Tenters with the Cloths shining upon them” (2:617).

As suggested previously, sublime scenes had almost become Defoe’s specialty by the time he came to write the Tour. His depiction of the Andes, with its terrifying gorges and frightening volcanoes, made up some of the best pages of A New Voyage Round the World (1725), a work Defoe published in the same year as the first volume of the Tour. But while he could depict natural scenery well enough, even scenes of this kind had an aura about them. He was reading Burnet’s Theory of the Earth in these years, and nothing so reminded him of the geological fall from a perfectly round earth as such terrifying spectacles.

The key to all of this is a teleological view of economics. In his General History of Trade, Defoe wrote that God created the world in such a way that the

Originals of Manufacture, the Essentials of Life, or of the Conveniences of Life, such as Physical Plants, Drugs, Spices, Metals, etc. were by the Wisdom of the first Disposer, dispers’d thro’ his whole Creation, so as to make every part of the World useful, nay, I may say, necessary to some, other part of it; which Diversity is the occasion of the Communications of Necessaries or Conveniences, one to another; from whence is raised this useful thing call’d Trade. (2:4-5.)

What follows this statement is a view of the world which would have warmed the heart of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss. The world was created the way it was, with various goods placed in countries distant from one another, so that human beings would trade with one another. The ocean was made to bear ships; God made wood and tar to build ships. But the reason all of this was done was “the Employment of the People.” (2:26.)

In laboring over the raw materials of the earth, human beings may produce wealth for the nation, but in another sense, they come closest to imitating the transforming power of God himself. Defining what he calls “Manufactures,” Defoe argues, “Those Materials which passing thro’ the Operation of Men’s Hands, lose the Face or Apearance of their first Quality, assuming New Names and Figures, as the several uses they are design’d for require, these are properly called Manufactures.” But it is in trade itself that man fulfills the will of God in distributing goods around the world. It is by this that man performs according to God’s will:

We Trade with Turks, Infidels, Idolaters, Gentiles, Heathens, Savages, it matters not what Gods they serve, so they serve our end, and we can serve our Interest by Trading with them; what if they Worship the Sun or the Moon, this Idol or that; Vistly-pustly, Teckoacomon, Mahomet, or Lucifer? Getting Money is the only Idol that Trade Worships, and it is nothing to the Merchant who he Trades with, if he can make a good Return. (3:46)

How can it be that so ungodly an action as trading with heathens can somehow be in the interest of the God who “design’d the World for Commerce” (1:10)? The answer is approximately the same as that one finds in Adam Smith. God operates through human self-interest to create a world which is generally happy. And this is so because of employment itself. One of the reasons that the mountains over which Defoe’s narrator has to cross in the Tour are so terrifying is that they are without human habitation and industry. The same is true of the mountains in A New Voyage Round the World. Defoe’s God is very much the invisible God that Goldmann described in his Le Dieu caché. He is most evident for Defoe (and comfortingly so) among scenes of human economic activity. His seeming absence among the mountains of the Andes and Britain is unpleasantly frightening.

In a Lockean passage, in A General History of Trade, Defoe argues that “Man’s utmost extended Capacity does not allow him to Conceive of any thing which is not, but by something that is; He can form no Ideas of what he has not seen, but upon the foundation, and by the Form of something which he has seen, or which has been described to him” (1:6). Although Defoe then proceeds to deride anthropomorphic images of an afterlife and the form of angels as being beyond our knowledge, such an argument rather proves the existence of a God behind nature than destroys it:

all the Power of Man’s Invention and Understanding, could not have conceiv’d any thing of what we call Manufacturing, had not the Materials been furnished by the Author of Nature, which, as it were, led our Forefathers by the Hand to the Improvements of those Materials. Spinning, Weaving, and Knitting had never been thought of, had not the Wool been first furnished by Nature; which by its very Figure and Substance, dictated to the Invention of Men and the Arts of Manufacturing. Nor could all the Wit of Man have form’d an Idea in his Mind of Wooll, Flax, Silk, or Hair, if there had not been such things form’d in the Creation. (1:7.)

Defoe’s God of economic activity does not give humanity manufactured products. He tests humankind to grasp the economic ends of things. In describing this process, Defoe calls upon his powers as a writer of prose to produce images of wonder, vastness, and the miraculous:

The World is now laid open; the Distant and Difficult Parts, are made familiar; the Dangers some have miscarried upon, are thereby avoided; the Dangers others have avoided, are known, and made easy; the Bays, Creeks, Ports, Harbours, Shores, and Seas, formerly Terrible, Unknown, and Unfrequented, are made familiar and easy; compassing the Globe, passing the Streights of Magellan, measuring the vast Southern Ocean, Coasting the Indies, and the Shores of China and Japan, and now no such extraordinary things, every Nation almost have done it as well as we, and we do that now every Year, which was accounted next to miraculous in the first Ages of Trade (1:42).

God’s most wonderful trick is in what Defoe calls, after his contemporary, John Cary, the “circulation” of goods. For Defoe, the circulation of goods throughout Britain is a miraculous way of enriching everyone. The more people who handle a product, the more the nation is enriched. The entire Tour is a hymn to the way in which goods circulate to that “great and monstrous thing” called London, and in the Atlas Maritimus, he used a combination of enumeration along with the language of the ineffable to attempt to describe what was too great to truly represent:

This Trade is so great, that no single Inland Trade in Europe can compare with it. We find it carry’d on by the help of innumberable Pack-Horses, Draught-Horses, Waggons and Carts: and as it employs a great many Ships, Barges, Lighters, etc. For the conveying of such Goods by Sea and in Rivers, as above; so it employs an infinite Number of Carriers, Waggoners, Pedlars, and travelling Chapmen on Shore, as well on Foot as on Horse backs; and maintains a proportion’d number of Publick Houses as Victuallers, Inns, and Ale-houses on the roads, the Number of which , if I should enter into the Particulars of them, would seem incredible. (108)4

What I am maintaining is that Defoe was one of the few economists who, while being capable of providing pages of statistics in An Essay upon Projects and Mercator, insisted on raising the spectacle of trade to the level of the sublime. In his Scots Poem, he made this into an ecstatic monologue imagining himself flying through earth’s geography to revel in the possibilities inherent in trade throughout the world:

I’d gladly breath my Air, on Foreign Shores:

Trade with rude Indian and the Sun-burnt Mores.

I’d speak Chinese, I’d prattle African.

And briskly cross, the first Meridian.

 I’d pass the Line, and turn the Cap about.

I’d rove, and sail th’Earth’s greatest Circle out.

I’d fearless, venture to the Darien Coast;

Strive to retrieve, the former Bliss we lost.

Yea, I would view Terra Incognita.

And climb the Mountains of America.

I’d veer my Course, next, for our Antipod’s,

I’d hunt for Monkey, in the Indian Woods.

…………………………..

Towards New Holland, I’d my rout advance

And know who harrows this vast Continent

`Where scarce e’re European has even sent

The greatest Dangers, n’ere shou’d make me faint. (lines 144-166)

Although Defoe occasionally speaks of “we” in speaking of the economic adventures that might be achieved by the Scottish nation if it dedicated itself fully to trade, there is little doubt that this passage is dominated by the image of Defoe’s visionary adventures. He is unafraid of experiencing the “greatest Dangers.” If Defoe was astonished by the scene of the products of labor flashing in the sun—by evidence of labor in the real world, he was also capable of conjuring up an imagined world of economic exploitation with himself as the center of these adventures—the hero of his own economic romance.

When he wrote in the Review that “Writing upon trade was the “Whore…[he] really doated upon,” he was not merely using a metaphor to express his preference for writing on economic subjects (1 [IX], 214).5 He meant that despite the banality of ordinary economic life, trade (which he depicted at times as a form of crime, and indeed a form of prostitution) inspired him as a writer and raised his passions as nothing else. If later economists such as Hume and Smith were to insist on a dispassionate style and Ricardo an entirely unreadable one, Defoe was to remain the one economist who raised the entire spectacle of manufacturing and the circulation of goods to the level of sublimity.6

University of California, Los Angeles

Notes

1 I used the term “economic sublime” in my biography (632) and writers on Defoe have used it occasionally. See for example, Edward 185.

2 For a discussion of the religious sublime in Defoe’s History and Reality of Apparitions, see van Leeuwen.

3 Alexander Welsh used Crusoe’s thorough methods for establishing the nature of the evidence for determining who might have made the print as an example of realist technique in fiction (2-6).

4 Defoe wrote only the section on economic geography for this work.

5 Defoe’s use of the notion of every man having his “Whore” is somewhat similar to Laurence Sterne’s later use of the Hobby-Horse, a kind of master passion or obsession.

6 In his Brief State of the Inland or Home Trade of England, Defoe wrote of the “Beautiful Order of Trade” (26). But his appeal was usually to that element of the sublime that belonged to the vast.

Works Cited

Amicus. “Anecdotes tending to throw light on the character and opinions of the late Adam Smith, LLD.” The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, May 11, 1791. Rpt. in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, edited by J. C. Bryce, Liberty Fund, 1983, pp. 226-31.

Brown, Tony C. The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic. Minnesota UP, 2012.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J. G. A. Pocock, Hackett Publishing, 1987.

Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s Review, edited by Arthur W. Secord, vol. 4, Columbia UP, 1938.

Defoe, Daniel. Atlas Maritimus et Commercialis. London, 1728.

———. Brief State of the Inland or Home Trade of England. London, 1730.

———. 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. London, 1727.

———. A general history of trade: and especially consider’d as it respects the British commerce, as well at home, as to all parts of the world. London, 1713.

———. A Scots Poem, OR a New Year’s Gift, From a Native of the Universe to his Fellow-Animals in Albania. Edinburgh, 1707. Reprinted in Poems on Affairs of State, edited by Frank Ellis, et al., vol. 7. Yale UP, 1954-1975.

———. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Vol. 2, Peter Davies, 1927.

Edward, Jesse. “Defoe the Geographer Redefining the Wonderful in A Tour Thro’ The Whole Island Of Great Britain.” Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse 1569-1750, edited by Judy Hayden, Ashgate, 2012.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford UP, 2001.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Liberty Fund, 1982.

van Leeuwen, Evert Jan. “The Religious Sublime in An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727).” Positioning Defoe’s Fiction, edited by Aino Mäkakalli and Andreas Mueller, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 169-185.

Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1994.

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Information and Credibility in A Journal of the Plague Year

Aaron R. Hanlon

 

Abstract: This article revisits the presentation and reliability of information in A Journal of the Plague Year, with particular attention to Defoe’s tendency to set up and interrogate problems of how trust and evaluate information under conditions of extreme uncertainty. It applies approaches in social epistemology to the scenarios Defoe depicts in Journal, showing that emphasis on the forms information takes in Defoe’s text are less epistemically important than the social dynamics Defoe illustrates.

Keywords: information; credibility; Journal of the Plague Year; data; epistemology

 

WHAT does credible information look like in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)? This seems an important question to ask of a text heavily reliant on the aesthetics of information, with its interpolated charts and figures. Credibility is central to how we read Journal, but also to how we evaluate information during any pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing at the time of this writing, has exposed vulnerabilities not only in healthcare systems, but also in civic and epistemic health throughout the world. As academics turn to Journal in the classroom—as I recently have—as a touchstone for thinking through the epistemic challenges of a scenario in which scientific knowledge is considerable, but fear, doubt, superstition, cynicism, and distrust all threaten to undermine the efficacy of what we know, the question of how we distinguish between the appearance of credible information and credible information itself becomes especially pressing. To understand the social nature of epistemic credibility and why vetting information remains so challenging today, it helps to understand how the distributed nature of information came about and the kind of problems it caused for H.F. in Journal.

Much scholarship on Journal focuses on the relationship between its strategies of representing and interrogating information—itself a changing concept during the eighteenth century—and its historicity. Reading Journal as a kind of apparition narrative, Jayne Lewis neatly summarizes such critical interest: “some of the most fruitful and provocative criticism of this manifest piece of ghostwriting turns on its claims to be counted as history, which is to say as a sign of the real” (111). For Lewis, Journal complicates the question of realist representation by foregrounding “writing’s visibility as a mediating frame.” She argues that Defoe aimed to “chart a representational field halfway ‘between imagination and solid foundation’” (Lewis 112, 114). Nicholas Seager reaches a similar conclusion from another angle, arguing that Journal reflects Defoe’s interest in probable rather than certain knowledge. It “endorses fiction, validating a version of honesty that admits the unattainability of absolute truth” (Seager 652). Both accounts portray Journal as using narratives and forms of the imagined, the dubiously seen, or the uncertain masquerading as certain to undermine the text’s surface-level reliance on numerical data and eyewitness testimony.

In what follows, I deemphasize formal matters of representing the real, or of the aesthetics of information in Journal, to focus instead, heuristically, on what Journal has to say about the social processes through which we vet information and come to understand something as credible or reliable. Accordingly, “What does credible information look like?” turns out to be the wrong question. Defoe notoriously used rhetorical forms designed to give the impression of immediacy and increasingly associated, from the late-seventeenth century onward, with epistemic certainty—lists, charts, numerical data—to undermine any notion of epistemic certainty as a function of form. Attention to the appearance or aesthetics of information doesn’t tell us enough about what actually makes information credible. On this point, attentive to the list as a formal feature in Defoe’s writing, Wolfram Schmidgen observes that Defoe owes something to “the desire for epistemological credibility, which some early modern genres articulated by concealing their inevitable selectivity through an appearance of arbitrary inclusiveness” (22). Helen Thompson observes in a similar vein that H.F. “cites the power of his descriptive prose to trigger the response historically produced by his ‘Sight,’” emphasizing Defoe’s preoccupation with empirical knowledge, and defining the text’s relationship to empirical knowledge production through H.F.’s stylistic preference for descriptive prose (153). In all of these critical observations we find that the relationship between Journal’s formal features—what something looks like—and the credibility of information is (to say the least) fraught.

Journal illustrates a familiar and consequential problem: We must make good decisions about information, even though for most people, by necessity, much of that decision-making will be based on what can seem like superficial parameters (What does credible information look like?). Do we stand a better chance of identifying and relaying credible information when it comes in a particular form, such as a chart, a numerical dataset, or an eyewitness narrative account? To what extent do we vest credibility in authorities simply because they are authorities? The paradox of the superficial—as I have characterized it here—is that superficiality is a necessity in vetting information. It’s often our only way of making decisions. But it’s also always socially mediated, contingent on far more than visual rhetoric or the form or presentation of the information at hand.

Information vetting is only partly a problem of virtual witnessing, the name Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer famously give to the seventeenth-century Royal Society practice of illustrating the scene of experiment in scientific atlases so that those not present could buy into the integrity of the experiment and its results (Shapin and Schaffer 60). Royal Society experimentalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries certainly emphasized particular forms—illustrations, diagrams, and charts—even while accompanying these with ample verbal description, narration, and explanation. Today, we have primers and explanations about the distinction between vaccine efficacy and effectiveness, or how mRNA vaccines work by triggering our cells to make a protein that brings on an immune response; we have illustrations and diagrams, we talk of R0. But when we decide on a course of action or belief, it’s largely down to trust; the belief that the people and institutions responsible for making and distributing vaccines or studying the public health benefits of mask wearing are not just trained, but personally or institutionally motivated in the right ways to do well by us.

This is partly why we sometimes see vaccine hesitancy in poor and minoritized communities for whom distrust in our scientific and government institutions can be rational, given disasters such as the Tuskegee experiments or the use of paper trails to locate and perform raids on the undocumented. In such scenarios, as in everyday information vetting, people who are not experts in virology or epidemiology or pathology or public health—who aren’t equipped to do their own controlled experiments or read specialist publications with an expert eye—nevertheless must make practical decisions about matters of grave consequence based on incomplete and often conflicting information. Scientific consensus, even, can’t simply be replicated in the minds of laypersons who apprehend, doubt, and benefit from it. Just as we are reasonably confident our phones will work—to the extent we rely on them for scheduling or other important matters—without necessarily understanding at a high level how they work, we have to be reasonably confident in the credibility of the informers and the processes by which we obtain information to believe that information credible. Journal illustrates this conundrum, in particular by taking up the concept of information as a call to epistemic scrutiny, then illustrating the role of credibility in such scrutiny.

I. Information

I have described the widely applicable conundrum Journal presents as one of judging credible information despite being, by necessity, ill-equipped to do so. This requires a brief overview of the development of the concept of information in Defoe’s time. Developing notions of information are key to the credibility issue in Journal and in a wider world of superficial judgments of credibility because, as Paul Duguid explains, “in the eighteenth century information deserves to be read as a keyword in discussions about relations between mind and world and between individual and state.” The “‘arc’ of information” Duguid traces reflects the expansion of the concept of information “from processes within minds to embrace both matter within books and and signals sent by senses and nerves that in their different ways initiate those mental processes” (Duguid 348). The stuff of information would come to include not only sense data, but the relation of data in books and conversations. Seager notes that in Journal, “reality as it is empirically observed must be compared with the numerical evidence for the latter to be either corroborated or invalidated” (640). This reading reflects how Journal involves the triangulation or norming of various types of information, whether observed first-hand, observed in written records, or related between persons.

The upshot of this treatment of information in Journal—the textual details of which I come to momentarily—is that Journal illustrates the challenging process by which information—a concept that shifted during the eighteenth century from a Baconian description of internal workings of the mind, or the mental response to a stimulus, to a description of a thing in the world, a stimulus in its own right—becomes shared knowledge, something we can trust collectively. Duguid argues that information “worked in tandem with knowledge yet escaped as a generally unindicted co-conspirator. Information allowed arguments to bypass epistemological angst and drive over philosophical conundrums with chassis unaffected” (354). In other words, information became something that invited further scrutiny—that required a credibility judgment—precisely because the concept could function as a suspension of claims to certainty and any attendant epistemic anxiety.

Furthermore, information was something for which judgments of credibility, if not made through some kind of triangulated process (comparing and aggregating sources of information as H.F. does), had at least to account for the collaborative nature of information as a thing itself. As Sean Silver notes, “under Bacon’s influence, under the pressure of reimagining knowledge as the stuff of large-scale projects and the exchange of facts, information starts to occupy a new ideal or conceptual role, beginning its long process of hardening into a thing” (278). The instantiation of information—a bill, a ledger, and so on—brought with it an authorship problem that remains relevant to assessing information’s credibility today. As Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass point out, the media forms accounted for in the “stockpiling of information” that took place between 1450-1800—“blank forms, bills of lading, printed slips, commonplace books, accounts, and paper money”—were products of many hands (140). Author credibility is dispersed, a matter of the integrity of many individuals and systems. H.F. acknowledges as much in his widely observed questioning of the Bills of Mortality, trying his best to work through the implications of the many hands who might have played a role in assembling the Bills and accounting for the rawest of raw data—the bodies the dead—that underwrite them.

When the word “information” comes up in Defoe’s novel, it appears in a couple of different contexts. First, it appears in the context of things related that they may impel action—that is, that one has been informed—but without any further epistemic weight. This is the new sense of “information” that Duguid associates with Vicesimus Knox’s claim that his (c. 1752-1821) was an “age of information,” for which information was a written or related stimulus (Duguid 348, 350). The acts of informing or receiving information are often calls to action based on something related and taken at face value. When, for example, a couple of watchmen relate “information” to the Mayor about strange things going on inside of a shut-up house, the Mayor orders the house be broken into “upon the information”:

He came down again, upon this, and acquainted his Fellow, who went up also, and finding it just so, they resolv’d to acquaint either the Lord Mayor, or some other Magistrate of it, but did not offer to go in at the Window: The Magistrate, it seems, upon the Information of the two Men, ordered the House to be broken open, a Constable, and other Persons being appointed to be present, that nothing might be plundered; and accordingly it was so done, when no Body was found in the House, but that of a young Woman, who having been infected, and past Recovery, the rest had left her to die by her self. (Defoe 44)

In this descriptive usage—descriptive in the sense of not presupposing any evaluative stance on the credibility of what is being related—information is simply the product of the act of informing or being informed, a call to action without epistemic scrutiny. “Information” in this sense also resembles what Duguid identifies as an earlier, legal context of a report given by and informant, reflecting a conceptual merging of “information” as report and as stimulus or call to action (based on the report, as it were) (355).

We get a slightly richer or more multifaceted usage of “information” when H.F. relates that his friend Dr. Heath has considered smelling people’s breath as a way of determining if they’re infected. Dr. Heath doubts this “information” on grounds of its implausibility:

My friend Doctor Heath was of Opinion, that it might be known by the smell of their Breath; but then, as he said who durst Smell to that Breath for his Information? Since to know it, he must draw the Stench of the Plague up into his own Brain, in order to distinguish the Smell! I have heard, it was the opinion of others, that it might be distinguish’d by the Party’s breathing upon a piece of Glass, where the Breath condensing, there might living Creatures be seen by a Microscope of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to behold. (Defoe 174)

In this example, information is, as above, a stimulus based in relation, a call to practice a particular set of methods of knowing (smelling the breath or capturing it on a glass for further examination) for the purpose of diagnosing the infected. But unlike the Magistrate ordering the breaking open of houses according to the information of the two men, Dr. Heath treats information as a stimulus for further inquiry (as opposed to a stimulus to act on the information taken at face value). Here is where Defoe’s novel treats information in an important new way, as something to be scrutinized rather than taken up on its own terms as a basis for action. In this way Journal anticipates a key development in the concept of information that came later in the century, the idea that “information” wasn’t up to the epistemic task of signaling reliable knowledge. Duguid observes “growing doubts about the adequacy of ‘information’” as early as Oliver Goldsmith’s Good Natur’d Man (1768), which features an ironic usage of “man of information” to describe the charlatan Lofty. The phrase “man of information” “increasingly appears with qualification” in the latter half of the eighteenth century, suggesting skepticism about the reliability of information (Duguid 365-66).

Returning to Defoe’s passage about Dr. Heath, knowledge, as opposed to information, would arise not from the act of smelling but from confirmation that one has smelled what one expects to smell in the breath of the infected. Curiously, however, Heath points out a complicating factor for any accounts of this smell-test method being themselves credible information: It’s unlikely that one would risk infecting themselves in an attempt to detect infection in another. Furthermore, the alternative method—having a patient breathe on a glass slide the doctor could then view under the microscope—is a matter of hearsay and speculation: “I have heard, it was the Opinion of others”; “there might living Creatures be.” As in the case of the Magistrate and the two men, for which information is a prompt for verification, H.F.’s account of Dr. Heath’s account (and of hearsay besides) treats information as a credibility-neutral matter for which judgments of credibility are less about form than context. But unlike the Magistrate passage, the Dr. Heath passage illustrates an interest in moving beyond credibility-neutrality, or in vetting the credibility of the information given while suspending any further action.

II. Forms of Information

I have suggested to this point that, in the above usages of “information” in Journal, we can observe an instructive contrast between a concept of information taken at face value and acted upon accordingly and a concept of information that demands epistemic scrutiny. In both usages, what matters is less the form of relation than the attitude toward information, one receptive and the other skeptical. Yet we might push a bit further on the question of the relationship between information and form, or to what extent information itself, in the above examples, could be considered a distinct epistemic form, if not a prominent eighteenth-century genre.[1] Clifford Siskin offers a helpful way of understanding the genre of information in the period, based in Francis Bacon’s thinking about the “discovery of Forms”: the new and useful. As Bacon writes in the Novum Organum (1620):

He who knows the cause of nature…only in certain subjects has an imperfect Knowledge of it…And he who knows only the Efficient and Material causes (causes which are variable, and merely vehicles and capable of conveying forms in some things only) may achieve new discoveries in material which is fairly similar and previously prepared, but does not touch the deeply rooted ends of things. But he who knows forms comprehends the unity of nature in very different materials. And so he can uncover and bring forth things which have never been achieved…Hence true Thought and free Operation result from the discovery of Forms. (103)

For Siskin, “This is what the word ‘currency’ was coined to convey: the new (what has ‘never been achieved’) and the useful (what is in ‘operation’) as the criteria for putting ‘things’ in ‘form.’ Information.”[2] Silver observes similarly that “information began . . . at the site where intention meets the material it molds.” Taken together, these accounts of the Enlightenment-era concept of information emphasize what Silver calls the metaphorical function of the concept as that which we put in service of shaping or molding, both materially (following Siskin, shaping the new) and conceptually (following Silver, shaping minds) (277).

From these observations we get a sense of what the Enlightenment genre of information was meant to accomplish, which is shaping and operationalizing the useful and the new. The “form” of information in this sense is not only what we conventionally understand as informational form—the form of a chart, a diagram, a paragraph with interpolated numerical figures, or a particular structure of narrative account—but also a way of organizing or structuring the relationship between the new and the useful. This account of Enlightenment-era information is compatible, moreover, with Duguid’s claim that “changing senses of information accompanied…changing accounts of the gap between mind and world and the theories about how that gap was bridged,” since the concept of information was being asked to serve as such a Baconian bridge (353-54). In practice, as Defoe was certainly attuned to, the organization or shaping of conceptual systems into material ones increasingly manifested throughout the eighteenth century as a scaling-up of the news, the circulation of newspapers and periodicals that demanded the triangulation of observations and accounts.

How then do we address the Dr. Heath problem at scale, or how do we identify credible information if not by and of the forms in which it is presented? For this we need some account of credibility to add to this account of information. Steven Shapin finds such an account in King Lear, though his reading of Lear has become part of a larger program of understanding how scientific credibility works in the world and is mediated by institutions.  

In the landmark essay “Cordelia’s Love,” Shapin explains how Cordelia is a modernist epistemologist—like Bacon and Boyle—while Lear “represents obdurate reality.” Cordelia expects that the light of the truth of her love for her father will shine on its own, that it will be enough. As a modernist epistemologist she believes, in Shapin’s words, that “the credibility and the validity of a proposition ought to be one and the same.” But we know that Lear doesn’t experience credibility in that way. For him, the plain-spoken statement and the simple demonstration lack credibility; Lear needs to be persuaded (Shapin 255-56).

The key insight of Shapin’s reading of King Lear is that there is no pure knowledge independent of credibility. No credibility, no knowledge. But a secondary insight is as I explained above, that, however rigorous is the scientific process by which we generate matters of fact, establishing the credibility by which matters of fact become seated knowledge often relies on what can seem superficial: What does credibility look like? At stake here is not simply the forms information takes, or how it’s represented, but the forms credibility takes. In the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, one might have been tempted to take the looking part literally. The Royal Society motto, “nullius in verba,” or “take no one’s word for it,” meant building credibility through “referring the reader to the figure,” as Robert Hooke does so frequently in Micrographia (1665) (211). This was a key strategy in virtual witnessing.

We see this strategy plenty in Journal, in its interpolated charts and ledgers. Journal frequently links H.F.’s “observations” to tables of numerical data, typically bills of mortality. “The figure” in this case isn’t a diagrammed illustration as in Micrographia, but numerical data that function both as a form of computational information and, aggregated, as a kind of paper trail or primary source documentation that, like the numerical figure, is recognizable as evidence at a glance. In other words, one version of credible information in Journal looks like stuff you can look at. The pioneering economist and demographer William Petty claimed, for example, that in expressing himself “in Terms of Number, Weight, and Measure” he might avoid dependence “upon the Mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men” (24). Weaving numbers into the narrative alongside narrative gestures to the tables, Defoe’s Journal bears strong resemblance to William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) essays, which also rely on interpolated figures to bolster and sometimes distract from subjective judgments or undemonstrated claims. “But to return to my particular Observations,” writes H.F., “during this dreadful part of the Visitation: 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…the particulars of the Bills are as follows, (viz.)” (Defoe 153-54). Petty, along with John Graunt, whose 1662 Natural and Political Observations […] upon the Bills of Mortality “aimed to show how statistics could and should be used to direct state policies,” frequently portrayed credibility as a function of form (Seager 643).

Beyond the charts and figures in Journal, Defoe deploys a rhetoric of the visual similar to what we find in Petty, Graunt, and Hooke, using language that conjures or connotes referentiality and visuality, such as “observe,” “see,” and “show.” He also makes reference to visuals in order to show instead of tell. H.F. gestures toward the chart with “viz.” (videlicet, from videre, “to see,” and licet, “it is permissible,” hence “it is permissible to see”) (179). Hooke makes similar gestures in Micrographia, as when he notes that “there are many other particulars, which, being more obvious, and affording no great matter of information, I shall pass by, and refer the Reader to the Figure” (211).

In one sense of “form” these are clearly formal features of the writing of Defoe, Petty, and Hooke alike—interpolated figures and charts, narrative references to the figure, rhetoric of the visual—but in another sense these are ways of showcasing an underlying interest in the minute particular as currency of information, the building blocks or means of scaling-up Siskin describes. In the foregoing examples from Journal, H.F. qualifies his “observations” as “particular” and then describes the evidence in the bills of mortality to which he refers the reader as “particulars.” These are not merely stylistic elements of Defoe’s writing; they are staging grounds for epistemological inquiry and the foundation of how Defoe imagines how assessments of credibility function and fail.

The trouble, of course, is that rhetoric of the visual and “show, don’t tell” aesthetics are signals of unreliability at least as much as of credible information. Visuality is also at the center of the incredible in Defoe’s text. Addressing the apparitions some Londoners claimed to see upon arrival of the plague, and the interpretations of the comet visible in the sky for months before the plague struck, H.F. writes “I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other” (21). In a key moment in the text, H.F. even undermines the credibility of the figures he presents. He reasons that the Bills of Mortality likely under-report the number of dead, since those employed to carry off the bodies were often working in the dark, or working under extreme pressure to keep up with the magnitude, so would not always keep accurate count of what they carried (Defoe 85-86). But then H.F. does something intriguing. He appeals to the figures in the Bills of Mortality themselves to verify his questioning of their accuracy. “This account is verified by the following Bills of Mortality,” he writes, before displaying the Bills (Defoe 85). Here we see hints of Lewis’s claim that Journal frequently works through equivocation and paradox, reflecting Defoe’s interest in finding “some ‘indeterminate’ ground between the visible and invisible worlds,” in this case the manifest figures in the Bills and the imagined scenarios that would have led to their inaccuracy (Lewis 113-14). H.F.’s rationale is that if the Bills show 50,000 dead in the span of only two months, and the reported total dead for the duration of the plague was 68,590, and the rate of death didn’t come down so drastically as would be required to square these figures, it’s unlikely that the total figure could be so low.

We can see in these brief examples that “nullius in verba” doesn’t quite hold up; that King Lear’s obdurate reality prevails. Information spreads with considerable efficiency throughout H.F.’s London, but the vetting process turns out to be trickier than referring the reader to the figure. Such moments are at the heart of how Journal represents the difficulty of ascertaining credible information and the futility of using what I’ve called the aesthetics of information as a signal of—much less a criterion for—credibility. In closing I’ll say a bit more about what we need for credible information in Journal, over and above what credible information looks like.

III. Credibility

Doing so requires us to consider the obverse of “nullius in verba”: Whose word do we take and why? Surveying the sociology of social and natural science, Shapin writes:

the study of credibility…became simply coextensive with the study of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. In sociological terms of art, an individual’s belief (or an individual’s claim) was contrasted to collectively held knowledge. The individual’s belief did not become collective—and so part of knowledge—until or unless it had won credibility. (257)

An important principle of Shapin’s observation that the study of knowledge production is coextensive with the study of credibility is that “if we say that scientific claims have always got to win credibility, then that makes them like the claims of ordinary life” (257). For Shapin, the fact that the study of credibility is a matter not strictly of scientific claims and methods but also of the claims of ordinary life “means that we can make use of many of the resources and procedures that features in academic inquiries about other practices” (259). Further, he remarks that “there is no limit to the considerations that might be relevant to securing credibility, and, therefore, no limit to the considerations which the analyst of science might give attention” (260). Examining how Journal portrays what Shapin calls the “credit-economy” of knowledge in Journal means attending not only to Defoe’s stylistic choices for representing information, but also to the social dynamics of information sharing that animate Journal, bearing in mind what we know of information’s history as a concept: that it is the product of many hands, or of a frequently invisible network of assemblage (Shapin 258). Defoe’s characters vest credibility in other characters in a number of ways, from evaluating storytelling and relation to considering the conceptual distance between the storyteller and the evidence behind the story.

H.F. certainly complains of what he calls “mere stories.” One such story is a repeated tale about nurses who smother their patients, either out of mercy or of haste. He writes:

They did tell me indeed of a Nurse in one place, that laid a wet Cloth upon the Face of a dying Patient, who she tended, and so put an End to his Life, who was just expiring before: And another that smother’d a young Woman she was looking to, when she was in a fainting fit, and would have come to her self: Some that kill’d them by giving them one Thing, some another, and some starved them by giving them nothing at all: But these Stories had two Marks of Suspicion that always attended them, which caused me always to slight them and to look on them as meer Stories, that People continually frighted one another with. (73).

The two reasons H.F. gives to disbelieve these stories are: (1) That the person relating the information always placed the scene of the incident at the other end of town, presumably to disarm suspicion that if such a thing happened locally people would have heard about it or known something further; and (2) That “the Particulars were always the same” across versions of the story (Defoe 74). This seems a probabilistic judgment of credibility: if all such incidents, independently related by direct observers, one would expect more variation.

If we look at the kind of story H.F. finds credible, we find a similar rationale based on the probability of direct observation. The story is that there is an indigent piper who wanders around door to door at public houses playing songs and entertaining people in exchange for victuals. As H.F. relates:

I know the Story goes, he set up his Pipes in the Cart, and frighted the Bearers, and others, so that they ran away; but John Hayward did not tell the Story so, nor say any Thing of his Piping at all; but that he was a poor Piper, and that he was carried away as above I am fully satisfied of the Truth of. (79)

H.F. hears the story from an undersexton he characterizes as “honest John Hayward,” an individual he can name, whose information is related directly to H.F. John Hayward helps care for the sick, and apparently treated this piper, so H.F. remarks: “It was under this John Hayward’s care, and within his Bounds, that the Story of the Piper, with which People have made themselves so merry, happen’d, and he assur’d me that it was true” (78). So here we have a “meer Stor[y]”—a story not without omissions that H.F. notes—but the proximity and specificity of it is enough to compel H.F. to believe Hayward’s part of it. The omission H.F. notes—that the piper “set up his Pipes in the Cart, and frighted the Bearers”—would go against Hayward’s credibility, but is balanced by H.F.’s impression of Hayward as “honest” and the fact that Hayward relates his story of the piper directly to H.F. (that is, this is not hearsay of the sort H.F. passes along to readers—“I know the Story goes”—to qualify Hayward’s account). In this otherwise unremarkable scene, we can observe in just a few of H.F.’s intimations of rationale how H.F. triangulates his own judgment, what he has heard, and his assessment of the trustworthiness of the teller (Hayward) and the extent to which what Hayward tells agrees with what H.F. has heard.

What we are left with is a basic problem of social epistemology. H.F. trusts a courageous undertaker, John Hayward, with the piper story but not the collective chatter about the smothering nurses or the “old women”—in his words—who see ghosts or dire warnings in the sky (Defoe 18-20). This is how H.F. describes their interpretation the comet that appeared in the leading up to the visitation of the plague as an omen, compared with his first thoughts on the comet as well:

[T]he old Women, and the Phlegmatic Hypocondriac Part of the other Sex, who I could almost call old Women too, remark’d (especially afterward tho’ not till both those Judgments were over) that those tow Comets pass’d directly over the City, and that so very near the Houses, that it was plain, they imported something peculiar to the City alone; that the Comet before the Pestilence, was of a faint, dull, languid Colour, and its Motion very heavy, solemn and slow: But that of the Comet before the Fire, was bright and sparkling, or as others said, flaming, and its Motion swift and furious; and that accordingly, One foretold a heavy Judgment, slow but severe, terrible and frightful, as was the Plague; But the other foretold a Stroak, sudden, swift, and fiery as the Conflagration…I saw both of these Stars; and I must confess, had so much of the common Notion of Things in my Head, that I was apt to look upon them, as the Forerunners and Warnings of Gods Judgments. (18-19)

We can see in this passage a negative, gendered judgment of the character of those who interpreted the comets preceding the fire and the plague as omens (“Phlegmatic Hypocondriac”). But in the next passage we also see H.F. appealing to expertise as a way of checking his fears about the comets-as-omens:

But I cou’d not at the same Time carry these Things to the heighth that others did, knowing too, that natural Causes are assign’d by the Astronomers for such Things; and that their Motions, and even their Revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated; so that they cannot be so perfectly call’d the Fore-runners, or Fore-tellers, much less the procurers of such Events, as Pestilence, War, Fire, and the like. (19)

H.F. not only makes credibility judgments on those who hold or relate information, but also appeals to expert knowledge to scrutinize and contextualize such claims. H.F. attempts to put all of this in perspective, noting the heightened degree of fear and concern among the people of London as the plague set in: “[T]hese things [superstitions, taking comets as omens] had a more than ordinary Influence upon the Minds of the common People, and they had almost universal melancholly Apprehensions of some dreadful Calamity and Judgment coming upon the City; and this principally from the Sight of this Comet” (19).

We find in the end, then, that trust and reputation, prejudice, probabilistic thinking, and independent verification all inform H.F.’s sense of what to believe. Credibility in Journal is not a function of form as such; it is rather a function of an assessment of an entire network of sources. Here my reading of Journal departs, by way of comparable observations, from those that understand Defoe as undermining the certainty of numerical data and other forms of visual rhetoric meant to convey immediacy or the absence of mediation. In suggesting that the form of information is, in Journal and in general, a poor indicator of credibility, I understand the credibility problem in Journal less as a problem of Defoe’s stance on certain knowledge (versus probable knowledge) than of Defoe’s interest in sociality of epistemic judgment.

In short, lacking the tools and expertise for any kind of large-scale analysis of the information networks he attends to, H.F. muddles through an epidemiological problem in the way one might a social-epistemic problem, like whether to trust a neighbor to watch the dog while you are away, or whether to open up to someone you have just met. Compatible with Shapin’s argument about social epistemology, we find in Journal that even questions about the workings of the natural world turn on interpersonal assessments of character, testimony, and rationale far more than on the forms of information presentation. Further, the social-epistemic quality of vetting information—even that which we would call scientific information—that Journal portrays is a function of how the concept of information developed during the historical Enlightenment. While it is true that information became a material thing—a chart, a ledger, a bill, a list—capable of shaping mental impressions (as opposed to merely a reflection of sense data), we also know that such forms were not constitutive of knowledge. Rather, they were rhetorical invitations to credibility vetting in the pursuit of knowledge, whether we think of knowledge on the scale of interpersonal relationships (Is this person trustworthy?) or scientific determinations (Is this person infectious?).

Colby College

Notes

1 Rachael Scarborough King makes a compelling case for distinguishing between form and genre as terms for different scales of analysis: “the key distinction between form and genre is that they operate at different scales” (261). Here I invoke King’s argument to suggest that the scale of the chart or numerical figure is a form, whereas the scale of information is more of a genre.

2 Clifford Siskin, “Enlightenment and the Vectors of Information.” This is from the unpublished manuscript of a talk Siskin delivered on September 18, 2020 as part of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence seminar.

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. The New Organon, edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge UP, 2000.

Blair, Ann and Peter Stallybrass. “Mediating Information: 1450-1800.” This is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, U of Chicago P, 2010, 139-163.

Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Louis Landa, Oxford UP, 2010.

Duguid, Paul. “The Ageing of Information: From Particular to Particulate.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 76, no. 3, 2015, pp. 347-368.

Hooke, Robert. Micrographia. London, 1665.

King, Rachael Scarborough. “The Scale of Genre.” New Literary History, vol. 52, no. 2, 2021, pp. 261-284.

Lewis, Jayne. Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794, U of Chicago P, 2012.

Petty, William. Political Arithmetick. London, 1690.

Schmidgen, Wolfram. “Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration, and the Mercantile Fetish.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2001, pp. 19-39.

Seager, Nicholas. “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Epistemology and Fiction in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 103, no. 3, 2008, pp. 639-653.

Shapin, Steven. “Cordelia’s Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science.” Perspectives on Science, vol. 3, no. 3, 1995, pp. 255-275.

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. 1985. Princeton UP, 2011.

Silver, Sean. “Information and Irony.” Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660-1714, edited by Elizabeth Sauer, Cambridge UP, 2019, 276-291.

Siskin, Clifford. “Enlightenment and the Vectors of Information.” Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence Seminar, 18 September 2020, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK and virtual (Zoom).

Thompson, Helen. “‘It Was Impossible to Know These People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 153-167.

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Introductory Essay

David Fletcher

THIS PLAY was written to mark the 300th anniversary of the UK’s first great stock market crash—the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720.[1] When I started research for the play, it was not long before it became clear that the works of Daniel Defoe would provide the best source material. Defoe’s extensive writing about the South Sea Company, his dramatic writing style, and the brilliance of some of the characters in the journals provided a wealth of potential material.

The central theme of the play is the psychological effect of the mania that surrounded the Bubble and the crash. The imagery of the play is rooted in contagion, perhaps inevitably as the initial draft of the play was written at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Defoe’s extensive writing about plague provided many potent metaphors of disease, fever, infection, and corruption. I hope that this has given the play a disturbing relevance.

One important task in writing the play was the selection of extracts from primary sources for inclusion in the text. In this respect, there are three phases in the play. In the early scenes there are a number of extracts from Defoe’s 1719 pamphlet The Anatomy of Exchange Alley: or, A System of Stock-Jobbing. In this pamphlet, Defoe’s attacks on the “scandalous trade” include reference to “Sham Reports, False News, Foreign Letters, &c. are Things that have been often trumpt upon us”—a verb that was irresistible for a play written in 2020 (cover, 17). The central part of the play draws heavily on the journals that were edited by Defoe, but without entering into the debate about which pieces were written by Defoe himself. Most of the extracts from the journals were taken from editions published in 1720, during the period of the Bubble and the crash.[2] In the final scene of the play, Defoe is confronted by the corruption at the heart of the South Sea project. This scene uses extracts from a source that was not written by Defoe—The Several Reports of the Committee of Secrecy to the Honourable House of Commons, Relating to the late South Sea Directors &c.

About two-thirds of the play is based on these primary sources—the rest is my own invention. The sections of the play that are not drawn from sources are mostly the scenes between Defoe and his daughter Hannah. I wanted to introduce a personal dimension into the play and to create opportunities for us to hear what might have been Defoe’s private thoughts. It was clear that this would be more dramatically interesting if he had someone to talk to and the character of Hannah grew in importance during the gestation of the play. There may not be sources for everything I have invented, but I hope there is nothing that clashes with the sources. As Hilary Mantel said in her BBC Reith Lectures about historical fiction, “don’t lie. Don’t go against known facts …. You can select, elide, highlight, omit. Just don’t cheat.”

Audio-plays work best with a variety of sound worlds, so the selection of locations is crucial. Having decided to place the scenes between Defoe and Hannah in his private study, I needed to set other scenes in more public places. Some are set in the street, but the main “external” setting is Jonathan’s Coffeehouse, a specific location referenced by Defoe in The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (35). It is clear from Defoe’s works and other sources that the coffeehouses of the time would have been buzzing with South Sea talk.

Pragmatism influenced some of the choices I made when writing the play. There are so many possible lines to follow in dramatizing the story of the South Sea Bubble. It was necessary, for practical reasons, to keep the length of the play to about one hour, so it was not possible to follow all these potential pathways. Regrettably, the play contains only a brief section that recognises the involvement of the South Sea Company with the slave trade. There is also only a passing mention of the issue of the financial structure of the Company and the national debt. There was also not room to accommodate all of Defoe’s changing views about the South Sea Company, the Bubble, and its aftermath. Also, when casting the play, it became clear that I had a wealth of female actors to choose from, so I changed the gender of some of the characters. This was not without some basis in the historical record, as there were many female investors in the South Sea Company. Before settling on Defoe as the central character, I briefly considered using the story of Lady Betty Hastings and her half-sisters. Anne Laurence has examined the differing ways in which these women managed their finances in the context of the financial revolution of the early 18th century, and the South Sea Bubble in particular.

It was an enjoyable experience living with Defoe while writing this play. He was one of the most fascinating characters at a time when fascination was not in short supply. So much of his writing is truly engaging and witty. It is a shame that Defoe was something of an anti-theatrical, as I believe he would have made a fine playwright. As Hannah says in the opening monologue of the play, “there was always that twinkle in his eye. The wit that was in so much of his writing was fundamental to the man – it’s who Daniel Defoe was. His sense of mischief was infectious, and we loved him for it.”

University of Warwick

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Professor Mark Knights for inviting me to write a play about the South Sea Bubble, and for providing me with help and encouragement throughout the project. I would also like to thank Sue Moore, Alison Pollard, Michael Rolfe, Dr Edward Taylor, and Gordon Vallins for their valuable advice.

2. Most of these extracts were taken from Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings.

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley: Or, a System of Stock-Jobbing. London, 1719.

Laurence, Anne. “Lady Betty Hastings, Her Half‐Sisters, and the South Sea Bubble: Family Fortunes and Strategies.” Women’s History Review, vol. 15, pp. 533-40.

Lee, William. Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings: Extending from 1716 to 1729. London, 1869.

Mantel, Hilary, “Can These Bones Live?” BBC Radio 4, July 2017. https://medium.com/@bbcradiofour/can-these-bones-live-b015dc8397c6.

The Several Reports of the Committee of Secrecy to the Honourable House of Commons Relating to the Late South Sea Directors &c. London, 1721. https://archive.org/details/pp1312061-2001.

 

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The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, vol. 1, “Early Manuscript Books,” edited by Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff; and vol. 2, “Later Collections, Print and Manuscript,” edited by Keith and Kairoff

Reviewed by Andrew Black

What if the early eighteenth century were the “Age of Finch”? For reasons that are fairly easily justified, it’s not. In her own time and immediately after, Finch was a modest poet with a minor reputation. She received praise from Delarivier Manley, Nicholas Rowe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope – for the last hundred years or so of eighteenth-century literary history, the latter two names could have followed the words “Age of” on a monograph. To wit, Pope’s poems occupy seventy-four pages of the most recent tenth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, while Swift’s prose and poems take up 206. Preceding both is Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie”; in volume nine, one could also find her caustic “The Introduction,” which has since been removed. Her biographical caption begins in the middle of page 252, after a similarly concise excerpt from Mary Astell, and “A Nocturnal Reverie” ends halfway through page 254, where Swift’s work, long enough to be its own book, begins. By contrast, I could scissor out the Finch entry and probably find a way to glue it to the front of a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper.

To some degree, the Norton realistically registers the lack of a footprint that Finch had in the later eighteenth century. Often Finch’s lack of presence is suggested as a product of that aforementioned modesty: perhaps a fear of criticism kept her poems “in the shade” (as per Volume C of the Norton [253]) and “might have made her shrink from exposing herself to the jeers that still, at the turn of the century, greeted any effort by a ‘scribbling lady.’” This and similar descriptions of Finch have become the reigning speculation that one finds when first confronting her work. This “shrink[ing]” feeling, the argument goes, led her to publish only one collection, the 1713 Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions “in spite of her skepticism about readers’ abilities to appreciate the quality of her (or her contemporaries’) compositions” (I:lviii). She was fifty-two at the time, and would die seven years later and leave behind manuscript volumes that were preserved, if not meant for publication.

Yet a fuller survey of Finch’s rich corpus reveals the tensions that are elided in that fairly convenient modesty narrative. In the 1680s, Finch and her husband Heneage were aspirants in the vexed Stuart court of James II, with Anne serving as maid to Mary of Modena. Following James’s “bloodless” ouster after the Glorious Revolution, the Finches lived out a tumultuous 1690s in Kent. The poems that emerge from this period, only a few of them published later in the Miscellany Poems, reflect her grief and uncertainty. In “Ardelia to Melancholy,” she tells the titular foe: “Thou, through my life, wilt with me goe, / And make the passage, sad and slow” (I:54.37-38). She also remained deeply attuned to, and cynical about, public affairs that became “discreet but persistent” topics (I: xlviii). The Finches would return to public life in 1702 with the ascension of the more tolerant Queen Anne, and Finch’s work would occasionally appear anonymously in miscellanies. The first printing of Miscellany Poems were attributed to “a Lady.”

That Finch has posterity at all may because of the surprising endurance of “A Nocturnal Reverie.” In the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the 1815 Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth celebrated “the nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelseaalongside “a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope” as the rare exceptions of an Augustan poetic canon between Milton and Thomson that “does not contain a single new image of external nature” (73). It’s likely that Wordsworth’s endorsement of “Lady Winchelsea” led to her inclusion in the 1825 Specimens of British Poetesses, edited by literary historian Alexander Dyce. Wordsworth would send him a letter of praise, offering to suggest more poems by this female writer to whom he was “especially partial.” Five years later, he would write to Dyce:

Her style in rhyme is often admirable: chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture which reminds one, by its broad glare, its stiffness and heaviness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields. (qtd. in Lonsdale 6)

Thus the canonization of Wordsworth as a major poet who never went out of print led to the republishing of these tantalizing notices of a talented woman whose work had not been reprinted in full since the 1713 publication of her Miscellany Poems. Reading Wordsworth’s insistent praise of Finch is charming, sort of like your friend who keeps demanding you listen to some band you’ve never heard of. Yet there’s also something confoundingly frustrating about this dynamic in which Finch needed the assistance of a cultural heavyweight like Wordsworth to avoid her complete disappearance as a “specimen.”

How and why Finch resurfaces across the nineteenth century is difficult to track, but Wordsworth’s praise is almost always involved. In an essay from an 1847 collection, Leigh Hunt refers to her as “one of the numerous loves we possess among our grandmothers of old, or rather not numerous, but select and such as keep fresh with us forever” (107). He follows this up by mentioning Wordsworth’s praise, before excerpting “The Spleen,” one of the poems included in Dyce’s collection. It’s a brief summary, and Finch receives more praise than Aphra Behn (possessed of a “thoughtless good humor” [107]) or Anne Killegrew (who “reminds the reader of her great friend” John Dryden [103]). Finch is invoked in a work by the fiery Welsh poet Lady Jane Williams, who went by the wonderful bardic name of “Ysgafell.” Ysgafell registers her anger at the minimal place for women in the literary tradition, but she gives Finch a mixed review: “Nocturnal Reverie” is “wonderfully true to nature” but “The Spleen” is “very poor, and ill deserve[s] the praise lavished . . . by contemporary flatterers” (qtd. in Reynolds lxxxi). By the late nineteenth century, Finch found another male admirer who argued for her inclusion in a broader anthology. That man, the magnanimous literary historian Edmund Gosse, was convincing enough that Finch got six poems (along with Gosse’s critical introduction) placed in Thomas Humphrey Ward’s 1880 four-volume anthology The English Poets. In that introduction, Gosse longed for “those unpublished poems, to which reference has been made . . . still in the possession of her family,” adding, “it is highly desirable that they should be given to the world” (27). Gosse was able to hunt down from a catalog of obscure books Finch manuscript, or what he called “a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch” (lxxxvii). This opened the door for Myra Reynolds.

Myra Reynolds isn’t a name you find much referred to in contemporary scholarship outside of a footnote, but she’s an intriguing, prolific figure for the turn-of-the-century study of letters. She was one of the first four fellows at the (then-new) University of Chicago in 1892, where she earned her Ph.D., rose through the ranks, and even became an administrator. She wrote a critical work on Pope and Swift, as well as the insightful and progressive overview The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760. But it’s Reynolds’ editing of The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, published in 1903, that is perhaps still the reason we know Finch today as well as we do. The work includes a lengthy introduction that, more than any preceding work, clarifies Finch’s biography, contextualizes her in the period, and offers incisive close readings of her poems. Reynolds is not exactly a defiant feminist: like the speaker of “Ysgafell,” she’s often critical of Finch and the women she surveys in The Learned Lady in England. The availability of the Poems as a digital edition once it entered public domain has likely made the growing field of Finch studies possible. Yet Reynolds relied on print sources alone, and “because her edition lacks a textual apparatus, it necessarily effaces Finch’s different use of manuscript and print” (liv).

There were three editions between 1928 and 1987, all relying on Reynolds’ fading original. The 1990s saw important and illuminating monographs on Finch by two scholars, Charles Hinnant and Barbara McGovern, who jointly published a volume of poems from the so-called Wellesley Manuscript, containing occasional and religious poetry as well as verse epistles that did not appear in Reynolds’ edition. The edition is a valuable contribution, and was to that point the most exhaustive critical edition of Finch’s work. In a 1995 review of Charles Hinnant’s The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay of Interpretation, Kathleen Kincade appropriately notes that the book is hard to process because of the “unavailability of her works” that “most scholars have not had the opportunity to see” (428). This was a fair assessment of the difficulty of reading Finch’s work before digitization made Reynolds’ edition available.

* * *

The two-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch: Countess of Winchelsea allows us to imagine an alternative Age of Finch. The editors, Claudia Kairoff and Jennifer Keith, have completed with astonishing thoroughness, sensitivity, and seriousness one of the landmark pieces of eighteenth-century scholarship of this century. Given their prior work on her poems, they are not exactly looking through Finch with fresh eyes, but allow us to. They have consumed, synthesized, and responded to the scholarship that led up this moment, and the availability of this work will allow for more. Their critical framing has enhanced and complicated Finch’s modesty. Finch is a poet who “repeatedly explores the powers and limits of language” (xlix). She is a “critic of patriarchy” and “an innovator of poetic kinds and modes . . . along with the themes and value systems that accompany them” (xlviii). While her political views where clearly aligned with the deposed Stuart monarchy, she explored and even interrogated these through devotional poetry, fables, occasional verse, and of course the nature poems that Wordsworth publicized.

Volume I contains her earliest, unpublished manuscripts, mostly poems prior to 1704. This was a period when the Finches were mostly in exile from public life, and the work consists of devotional and love poetry, odes, songs, satires, fables, and occasional verse. Throughout, Finch “experimented with formal hybrids and complicated the associations of certain themes with particular kinds and forms” (lxxvii). Volume I also contains Finch’s two never-staged plays, The Triumph of Love and Innocence and Aristomenes or the Royal Shepherd, which both of the editors have insistently kept alive through earlier scholarship. As the editors explain, these works “pose special, intriguing problems in text and authorship” (cxiii). By necessity, the editors provide ranges of dates for composition, while offering possibilities that go far beyond speculation. These manuscripts, primarily transcribed by her husband Heneage, are “authorized” rather than “authorial,” and represent the work completed before 1702, much of which would be published in the 1713 Miscellany Poems (cxiii-cxv).[1] The editors’ description of the two manuscripts that make up this volume illuminates and brings to life early modern manuscript practices in ekphrastic detail regarding binding, gatherings, stamps, and ornamentation.

Tellingly, the title page of the later Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia includes an epigraph from Finch from Edmund Spenser: “I play to please myself, albeit ill” (I: 21). The poems of the first volume indeed attest to a deeply personal poetics, one that resists what Finch calls in a preface (never published) the “daring manifestation” and “confident producing” of publication. While some poems are certainly wracked with a despair that accompanied exile, others allow her wit to shine, particularly in the caustic political tone of fables that “amuse while exposing . . . Whig innovations such as the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, mercantile ventures, and a generally commercialized culture” (I:xcvi-xcvii). These works now have the generous attention they deserve.

Volume II presents the later collections, and particularly the remaining poems in the 1713 Miscellany Poems and what is known as the “Wellesley Manuscript,” which were unavailable to Myra Reynolds and difficult to find digitally. In their introduction, the editors explain the tensions that Finch felt in publishing her work, as well as the possibilities. Challenging Finch as a writer who hid behind modesty tropes, the authors point to the ailing health of Queen Anne and the succession crisis that she anticipated. The timing of the volume allowed it to “participat[e] in a vigorous campaign to persuade English readers of the respective merits of Stuart and Hanoverian rule” (lxii-lxiii). Finch is a “woman censuring – without apology – the moral and political ills of the past and present” (lxiii).

The editors’ critical attention clearly makes the argument for the vitality of Finch’s poems. For instance, one of her most frequently anthologized poems is “A Petition for an Absolute Retreat, Inscribed to the Right Honorable Catherine Countess of Thanet; Mention’d in the Poem, under the Name of Arminda,” usually with an abbreviated title. Noting that the edenic setting recalls Milton, the editors then turn our attention to the tradition of the Horatian “happy man” tradition and the politically potent “retreat poems of Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley (I: 650). However, Finch avoids “Marvell’s misogyny and Cowley’s preference only for a spouse,” while sharing Philips “intimation that her garden provides a retreat . . . in a specific time of political danger” (I: 651). The poem becomes a complex engagement not only with a century of Royalist verse, but also with a tradition of nature writing that associates the feminine with sport or frailty. In the editors’ glosses to the poem itself, a “lonely, stubborn Oak” is connected to Stuart iconography (I:653). The sobriquet for the Countess of Thanet, “Armida,” is linked to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (I:652). A “Cordial drop” is linked to a matching phrase in Rochester (I:653). Clarified here are references to Romans Silla and Sertorius, and the editors explain which competing translation of Plutarch Finch might have encountered. And, as with every poem, the editors carefully lay out variants, marks, and emendations.

In other glosses, we find exhaustive and exciting references that make legible the previously elusive nature of Finch’s encounters with literary tradition. In addition to linking her to poetic superstars like Marvell and Milton, the editors clarify the sweeping intertextuality of these poems, their references to minor, forgotten writers like Christopher Clobery. You find yourself nodding along as the editors explain that Finch’s image of “melting words . . . to catch the Soul, when drawn into the eye” recalls Philip Sidney’s Astrophil longing for Stella to receive his poems so that “reading might make her know” (I:464). To place Finch in a constellation with Sidney, even in a concise footnote, is to acknowledge her participation in a poetic tradition that she felt was denied to her.

In a playful but problematic poem called “Apollo Outwitted,” Jonathan Swift pestered Finch to be more public. The demure Ardelia consistently refuses the coercive sun god who has descended to “pick up sublunary ladies,” and must face the following curse:

Of modest poets be thou first

To silent shades repeat thy verse

Till Fame and Echo almost burst,

Yet hardly dare one line rehearse. (57-60)

Swift shifts Finch’s modesty from self-imposed to divinely enforced. There’s a critical insight here that Swift might not have intended: that the overseers of the same print marketplace that allowed him to thrive had different expectations and outcomes for a woman. Finch could not expect readers to have sensitivity and generosity, and worried about the adverse effects of fame. As she writes in “The Introduction,”

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. (I:33.9-13)

Against centuries of incomplete attention to Finch, Keith and Kairoff have “redeemed” her in a triumphant act of feminist intervention and recovery. Future generations of Finch readers, and there will be more, will no longer have to scour digitized sources to piece together her archive. The Cambridge Finch can join such noteworthy appellations as the Cambridge Swift, the Twickenham Pope, the Yale Johnson, and that level of prestige is overdue. The next necessary step is obviously an inexpensive teaching edition that draws upon this luminous edition.

Andrew Black
Murray State University

NOTES

1. One exception is intriguing: the later poem “Reflections . . . upon the Late Hurricane” was transcribed and added by Heneage in 1704.

WORKS CITED

Gosse, Edmund. “Lady Winchelsea” in The English Poets, edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward, vol. 3, 4 vols. Macmillan and Co., 1884, pp. 27-28.

Hunt, Leigh. Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs. Harper & Brothers, 1847.

Kincade, Kathleen. Review of The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation by Charles H. Hinnant. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. vol. 20-21 (1994/1995), pp. 428-429.

Lonsdale, Roger. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Reynolds, Myra. “Introduction” in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchelsea. Chicago UP, 1903, pp. xvii – cxxxiv.

Swift, Jonathan. “Apollo Outwitted: To the Honourable Mrs. Finch,” in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, edited by Harold Williams, vol. 1, 3 vols. Clarendon Press, 1958, pp. 119–21.

Wordsworth, William. “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 3, 3 vols. Oxford UP, 1974, pp. 62-107.

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The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West, by Ning Ma

Reviewed by Jenny Mander

The Age of Silver is an important, timely, and potentially paradigm-shifting study that deserves widespread attention especially (but not only) from those with research interests in the novel and its modern history both before and after 1800. Indeed, although focusing essentially on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Ning Ma makes a compelling case for why modernists need to return to the early modern period in order to rethink their understanding of the past on which their notions of the history of the present are grounded. Ambitious in conception and boldly articulated, the five-chapter monograph should also earn a high-ranking place on university reading lists, both introductory and advanced, not least, it might be added, on account of the rich and “professionally-aware” bibliographical apparatus and the comprehensive digest that constitutes much of the opening chapter in which the author situates her thesis in relation to a series of salient concepts drawn from some of the most influential twentieth-century theories of the novel. To convey a sense of the theoretical self-awareness that shapes this project, suffice it to say that this opening survey ranges from Georg Lukács (“transcendental homelessness” and “reification”), Mikhail Bakhtin (“heteroglossia”), Benedict Anderson (“imagined communities”) and Fredric Jameson (“national allegories”), without, of course, omitting Ian Watt and Franco Moretti inter alia. In order to align her own project with what she sees as a “new ethics for world literature,” the author sets about “reinventing” and “reconfiguring” these major novelistic theories. She does so by drawing (a trifle less digestibly) on a yet wider set of more recent (largely postcolonial) theoretical concepts including Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity,” Edouard Glissant’s “creolity,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizomes,” Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory,” Homi Bhaba’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and Wai Chee Dimock’s discussion of world literature as a “lexical” form of “global civil society.”

At the theoretical core of nearly all the major theories of the novel that have shaped discussion over the past century, Ma identifies three common presuppositions. The first is that the genre of the novel is the quintessential embodiment of literary modernity; second, the modern novel is distinct from earlier heroic modes of narrative fiction by virtue of variously defined notions of “realism” or a tendency towards materiality; third, it is a Eurocentric genre. She concurs – perhaps a little too readily – with the first and second of these presuppositions. The transcultural category of the modern realist novel on which she builds her own argument does not, however, aim (or need) to depart from these perhaps overly narrow conventions for her particular purposes. The force and originality of her Ma’s thesis lies in her outright rejection of the third presupposition. The arresting and ultimately convincing primary argument of The Age of Silver is that the modern realist novel, as identifiable by conventional features, did not ‘rise’ uniquely in Western Europe, either in eighteenth-century England (as is the contention of Watt in his Rise of the Novel) or (as Hispanists have long insisted) in Golden Age Spain. The emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era are also to be found in late Ming Chinese society and that of Japan of the same period without any apparent or necessary ties of direct European literary influence.

To sustain her proposition, she devotes the second chapter to a historically-contextualised reading of a Chinese literary landmark, circulating towards the end of the sixteenth century, the anonymous Jin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase, hailed by Patrick Hanan as “the first true Chinese novel.” In chapter four, the focus is on the “floating world” narratives of the seventeenth-century Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku, who, we are told, became known at the end of the nineteenth century as “Japan’s realist.” Through these case studies – fascinating in themselves – Ma opens up a novelistic landscape that, she argues, is essentially continuous with the worlds of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe which are, respectively, the subject matter of chapters 3 and 5. The study concludes with a more speculative epigraph which develops further parallels between novels in both East and West during this period in their representation of the virtuous female heroine, building from an observation made by Goethe who had sensed a strong resemblance between Chinese novels and the works of Samuel Richardson.

Capturing a “forgotten” period where European readers had a greater awareness of Chinese fiction and felt a sense of kinship with its protagonists, Goethe’s comment (made to his young assistant, Johann Peter Eckermann, in January 1827) also serves as a clever and colourful benchmark in Ma’s overarching historiography. Over the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – the final tipping point being the First Opium War – the dynamics of the early modern global economy gave way to a new world system from which emerged a new world view that placed Europe at its centre. A quotation from The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is neatly invoked to capture this seismic shift and to spell out its consequences for the understanding of world literature, the European historical imagination and its “ideology” of modernity. Whereas Goethe, but twenty years previously had proclaimed the epoch of world literature to be at hand, anticipating “a great discourse” on an international scale between Europe, China, the East Indies and the United States (167), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could only conceive of the imminent birth of a Weltliteratur that would arise as a result of a world market created by the European bourgeoisie who are henceforth cast as the revolutionizing “subject” of history (16). Theorists of the novel, Ma argues, have for generations been straightjacketed and blinkered by this subsequent “diffusionist” model of “Euromodernity,” and this, she argues diplomatically, continues to inform more recent critical projects, including those (she hints) that are undertaken in a political spirit of decolonisation. The Age of Silver is thus conceived as a project in re-excavating the dynamics of an earlier world system the memory of which has subsequently been repressed by the “hegemonic constituents of nineteenth-century Euromodernity” (6). Through this excavation it aims to disrupt “routinized Eurocentric narratives of linear development” and clear the way for the reconstruction of a different genealogy of novelistic modernity and, by extension, modernity itself.

Hence a second compelling and perhaps even more important argument advanced by The Age of Silver: a corollary of the main thesis is that the modernity of which the realist novel is understood to be an expression is not inherently tied to the forces of industrialisation, capitalism, colonialism or indeed to notions of Enlightenment science and subjectivities. With reference to the transcultural category of the realist novel, and foregrounding social mobility and critical consciousness as the quintessential hallmarks of modernity, Ma is able to illustrate that just as the modern novel did not arise alone or even first in Europe, so too the social and political transformations of modernity were not unique to the West. The chapters on The Plum and on Saikaku’s “floating world” fictions expound on these changes with reference to China and Japan, both through the analysis of the novels themselves and through contextualising discussion. They provide ample evidence to back up her assertion that: “The emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era – whose Eastern development has been theoretically ignored – can be broadly correlated with the social and political significances money and material objects rapidly assumed during the period” (7).

Such a statement may appear to be a self-evident truism and it would be if simply applied to the European novel. The traction of her thesis lies in her conceptualisation of the novelistic response to “cultural displacement” at local level to “transregional conditions” which she frames in terms of the global dynamics structuring Eurasian relations through the circulation of silver.  The “borderless and transmuting motions” of this white metal “connected nations, peoples, and individuals in covert yet profound ways” (23) creating what the author describes as a new planetary environment or “anthropocene” to which she gives the label “Age of Silver,” hence her memorable book title. Drawing insights from Andre Gunder Frank, author of Re-Orient (University of California Press, 1998) and other East-West world-system analysts such as Kenneth Pomeranz, this focus on the global dynamics opens up the history of the novel to the insights of recent comparative history undertaken by historians and economists who have been working against the Orientalist foundations of Western social and historical thought.  Within this undertheorized world-system, it is to China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via her exports of consumer goods that we need to look in order to understand the “crucial substructural conditions of coeval European and global developments” (52). The less informed reader is reminded of Japan’s historical role as a major silver exporter, responsible for perhaps one third of the global total output of silver during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which as much as 75% was traded with China. As regards the Spanish colonies in South America, which were, of course, the largest producer of mined silver in the period, the reader is again reminded that a substantial quantity of this also found its way to China, either directly via the Mania galleons, or indirectly, via Europe, through subsequent trade with the East.  The point being stressed here is that during the early modern period, it was China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via her exports of consumer goods that created the “crucial substructural conditions of coeval European and global developments” (52).  There is therefore no need at this point of the story to explain the rise of the modern novel with reference to European ideas or European industrialisation; furthermore, The Age of Silver displaces the centrality of European colonialism to the genealogy of the modern novel, or at least relocates it within less familiar global dynamics, the author gently noting: “In comparison to the more established transatlantic approach to early modernity and its focus on European colonial operations, the question of coeval Eurasian relations harbors a much less noted world-historical dynamic.”

Against a background in which differing methodologies and ideologies have, on occasion, brought the fields of world literature and postcolonial studies into conflict, we might glimpse here the potentially thorny nature of the path that Ma navigates so thoughtfully and at times cautiously in The Age of Silver and we might understand why, perhaps, she builds up such a tremendous theoretical armoury in the first chapter. On the subject of disciplinary “turf wars,” she maintains a dignified silence. This is a book which maintains the hope and ambition that it is not only possible but also ethically imperative to attend simultaneously to distinct yet interlocking systems of power relations and tease out their entanglements in and through the critical consciousness cultivated by modern fiction.

So, to conclude, what new perspectives does Ma bring for the study of Defoe and the later eighteenth-century English novel? In this context, Defoe is no longer positioned at the origins of the modern novel’s “rise” but construed as a belated response to the global dynamics of the “Age of Silver.” There are, of course, much earlier English examples of novelistic realism – Robert Greene’s cony-catching tales from the late sixteenth century might, for example, be said to present analogous features to those of The Plum in the Golden Vase.  The point that is emphasized in this study, however, is that Defoe, at any rate, engages with this global order at a critical juncture and plays an instrumental role in the construction of later nineteenth-century Anglocentric narratives of homo economicus. Drawing especially on the work of Lydia Liu and Robert Markley, The Age of Silver reframes twentieth-century readings of Robinson Crusoe as allegories of British colonial conquest within the wider context of Eurasian trading relations. From this perspective, Defoe’s novel emerges as fantasy or “science fiction” written with the objective of disavowing the pre-eminence of China and the unfavourable state of the British economy about which he writes critically in The Complete English Tradesman and A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.

In order to read Robinson’s island sojourn in terms of repressed English-Chinese trading relations, Ma insists on the importance of the two sequels, above all the Farther Adventures, pointing out that these were typically included in eighteenth-century editions and only became divorced from Robinson Crusoe well into the nineteenth century. Connections between the texts are cleverly focused with reference to the hard “glazed” earthenware pot that Robinson successfully fires after numerous attempts – the subject of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay.  Whereas Woolf is drawn to the the symbolic and secular materiality of this pot, Ning Ma connects it to the fashion for Chinese porcelain that was flowing into Britain at the expense of national manufacturing. Thus understood, Robinson can be seen as achieving not only a form of colonial mastery over the island (as according to familiar readings); he also technically masters the manufacturing process of “China ware,” expressing a fantasy of an Anglo-centric global economy – a reading that Ma helpfully aligns with the trading strategies proposed in A New Voyage whereby silver would flow back to Britain.  By refusing to name the pot anything other than “earthenware,” the author suggests that Defoe is refusing to give any place at all to China in his economic fantasy.

This is, however, an ambition that Defoe knows is at odds with contemporary reality and Ma suggests that what is repressed in Robinson Crusoe re-emerges in the sequel where the protagonist abandons his New World territory that has become unprofitable in favour of trade with the East Indies. The return of the repressed is illustrated with reference to two passages in particular.  The first is the description of the “China house” that the protagonist stops to consider, putting him a good two hours behind schedule. The other is that of a statue of a Chinese idol which the protagonist finds incomprehensible from every angle, presenting a perplexing hybridity, conjoining a diversity of beings as interrelated equals with indistinguishable bonds. Seeing in both a monstrous reappearance of the earthenware pot, both passages are invoked as evidence of the sustained theme of Chinese negativity across the two sequels “reveal[ing] that one of their primary purposes is to de-Sinicize the early-eighteenth century global order, or, in other words, to attack a powerful civilizational Other that conflicts with Defoe’s ideology of an Anglocentric world system” (157).  The sequels, she argues, reveal Defoe’s recognition that China was an unrivalled mercantile centre during this period beneath strategies of disavowal. Defoe’s objective, from her perspective, was to undo the threatening hybridity represented by the indistinguishable parts of the idol and by the infinite connectivity and self-similarity of the artificial porcelain tiles on the excessively extravagant “China house.” Robinson Crusoe, read in tandem with the sequels, thus emerges as a fantasy born from fear in the context of the “Age of Silver.”  Once the fantasy became fact, the sequels became redundant and economic theorists referred simply to the founding myth of the island.

The Age of Silver thus offers a very clever reading of Defoe which sharpens colonial criticism. Defoe stands accused, so to speak, of not only colonising ambition but also Sinophobia. This is a larger story than the one with which many readers are familiar. But is it the whole story? Rhetorically speaking, the texts invite pause for further thought. It is not only the protagonist who stops for a long time to contemplate the China house. The ekphrastic description also invites the reader – past and present – to ponder the many entanglements of trade and travel during this period. The Age of Silver is an important and timely contribution to scholarship not least because it poses these questions anew.

Jenny Mander
Cambridge University

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Defoe, Dorset and the Bloody Assizes

Sheldon Rogers

IN THIS ESSAY, I aim to demonstrate the significance of Dorset for Daniel Defoe in two sections. First, using Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), I establish how this county frames Defoe’s early trading life and suggest that Defoe was trading out of Lyme Regis due to his extensive knowledge of the people and customs of the area. Then I turn to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), with Dorset appearing allegorically as the location for two lifesaving events.

I

Among the various counties Defoe visited during his lifetime, Dorset appears to have had a special place in his heart and mind. It can be established from Defoe’s trade as a hosier that visits to the West-County during the early 1680s for woollen products were the probable reason for his intimate knowledge of the area (Defoe 45). Defoe was also acquainted with Lord Maitland, Earl of Dorset, whose possible patronage gave Defoe access to a small but exclusive English literature society during the same period. Defoe quotes and states the purpose of the society by using founding member Wentworth Dillon, Earl Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684):

For who did ever in French authors see

The comprehensive English energy?

The weighty bullion of one sterling line,

Drawn to French wire would through whole pages shine. (An Essay 138)

Defoe’s appraisal of Dorset was complimentary in A Tour. It is worth mentioning first a recent addition to Dorset, Christchurch (from 1974 formerly in Hampshire):

From hence there are but few towns on the sea coast west, nor are there any harbours, or sea ports of any note, except Pool. As for Christ Church, though it stands at the mouth of the Avon, which, as I have said, comes down from Salisbury, and receives also the Stour and Piddle, two Dorsetshire rivers, which bring with them all the waters of the north part of Dorsetshire; yet it is a very inconsiderable poor place, scarce worth seeing, and less worth mentioning in this account; only, that it sends two members to Parliament, which many poor towns in this part of England do, as well as that.

Defoe obviously did not spend much time in Christchurch, if any, and had he done so, Defoe would have discovered the rich history of this ancient town. Perhaps he rode through on horseback or drove through in a horse and carriage, neglecting to appreciate properly the “worth” of the place.

As Defoe ventures into Dorset, his views, however, changed. The next town he comments on is Wimborne, which unbeknown to the author, would prove an important depository for the manuscripts of his first discovered works, Meditations (1681) and Historical Collections (1682). These priceless items were kept safe after Defoe’s death (1731) by his spinster daughter Hannah in Wimborne, until her death on 28 April 1759. Hannah is interred in Wimborne Minster along with her sister, Henrietta, and brother-in-law John Boston. The plaque marking their place of burial has been removed, though through the writings of Nicholas Russell, it is possible to recover their final resting place. The plaque was in the early nineteenth century, “about the middle of the [North] Aile” (A Historical Account 27).

Ironically, Defoe quotes from a burial, in the same church during his visit, as well as providing the fact that Wimborne Minster had a spire:

The church, which is indeed a very great one, ancient and yet very well built, with a very firm strong square tower, considerably high; but was, with out doubt, much finer, when stood on top of it, stood a most exquisite spire, finer and taller, if fame lies not, than that at Salisbury and, by its situation, in a plainer, flatter country, visible, no question, much farther…..[F]or here are the monuments of several noble families; and in particular of one king, viz. King Ethelred, who was slain in battle by the Danes. He was prince famed for piety and religion, and, according to the zeal of these times, was esteemed as a martyr; because venturing his life against the Danes, who were heathens, he died fighting for his religion and his country. The inscription upon his grave is preserved, and has been carefully repaired, so as to be easily read, and is as follows

In hoc loco quiescit Corpus S. Etheldredi, Regis West Saxonum, Martyris, qui Anno Dom. DCCCLXXII. Xxiii. Aprillis per Manus Danorum Paganorum Occubuit.

In English thus:

Here rests the body of Holy Etheldred, King of the West Saxons, and martyr, who fell by the hands of the pagan Danes, in the year of our Lord 872, the 23d of April. (A Tour 206)

After Wimborne, Defoe turns his attentions to Poole; his interest here was the oysters trade, these oysters being, according to him, “the best” in the West-Country, and were pickled in barrels and taken up to London as well as sent to “the West Indies, and to Spain, and Italy, and other parts.” Pearls were often found in Poole’s oysters, and considered to be “larger than in any other oysters about England” (A Tour 207).

Another industry worthy of Defoe’s compliments was the stone quarries of the Isle of Purbeck. He notes:

This part of the country is eminent for vast quarries of stone, which is cut out flat, and used in London in great quantities for paving court-yards, alleys, avenues to houses, kitchens, footways on the sides of the high-street, and the like; and is very profitable to the place, as also in the number of shipping employed in bringing it to London. There are also several rocks of very good marble, only that the veins in the stone are not black and white, as the Italian, but grey, red, and other colours. (A Tour 207)

Defoe mentions Dorchester next, commenting on the liberal attitudes of the town dwellers and remarking that, “the people seemed less divided into factions and parties, than other places; for though here are divisions and the people are not of one mind, either as to religion, or politics, yet they did not seem to separate with so much animosity as in other places.” So much so, that he observed a Church of England clergyman and the Dissenting minister taking tea together. And of the town, he awards the honour that “a man that coveted a retreat in the world might as agreeably spend his time, and as well in Dorchester, as in any town I know in England” (A Tour 209).

While information about his residence in Dorset is perhaps coincidental, Nathaniel Mist, the likely author of A General History of the Pyrates (1724, 1728) and an associate of Defoe’s, chose Dorset as a place to convalesce. It is also possible that Mist spent time writing in Dorset for seven months and almost certain that he went to Dorchester on Defoe’s recommendation (Nathaniel Mist 31).[1]

Defoe comments extensively on the surrounding areas. He was amazed at the number of sheep in the downs around the county town. He was advised that there were 600,000 sheep fed on the downs within six miles of the town. This at first he found to be unbelievable, but on closer consideration and inspection, he concludes “I confess I could not but incline to believe it. The grass, or herbage of these downs is full of the sweetest, and the most aromatic plants, such as nourish the sheep to a strange degree, and the sheep’s dung again nourishes that herbage to a strange degree” (Tour 209). Defoe’s visit to Dorchester appears to have been from 1705 when he wrote to Robert Harley, the then Secretary of State, during a fact-finding mission (The Letters 105).

After Dorchester, Defoe mentions the costal town of six miles distance, Weymouth. Of interest to him here was the trade between the port and France, Portugal, Spain, Newfoundland, and Virginia. Defoe recollects an incident that occurred when he was there some time before of a merchant vessel, homeward bound from Oporto to London, which took shelter from a storm in Portland Road after it lost an anchor and struck her topmast. Giving distress signals, the Weymouth men went to her rescue and worked out what to do:

Upon this, the Weymouth boats came back with such diligence, that in less than three hours, they were on board them again with an anchor and cable, which they immediately bent its place, and let go to assist the other, and thereby secured the ship. ‘Tis true, that they took a good price of the master for the help they gave him; for they made him draw a bill on his owners at London for 12l. [£] for the use of the anchor, cable and boat, besides some gratuities to the men. But they saved the ship and cargo by it, and in three or four days the weather was calm, and he proceeded on his voyage, returning the anchor and cable again; so that, upon the whole, it was not so extravagant as at first I thought it to be (A Tour 210-211).

Frank Bastian believes that this incident could well have been Defoe’s ship (probably the Pride of London) with him on board. The time of this incident, in the late 1680s, links in with the expanding of his trade to incorporate “wines and brandies.” P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens comment that Defoe was at this time “in correspondence with France, Spain, Portugal and America” (The True-Born viii).

II

Another similarity that points to Defoe’s participation in this incident appears in Robinson Crusoe (1719). As with the ship of the Weymouth storm, Crusoe’s ship was in a previous storm, after leaving from Hull on its way to London, with a second storm in Yarmouth Roads:

Towards Evening the Mate and Boat-Swain begg’d the Master of our Ship to let them cut away the Foremast, which he was very unwilling to: But the Boat-Swain protesting to him, that if he did not, the Ship would founder, he consented; and when they had cut away the Foremast, the Main-Mast stood so loose, and shook the Ship so much, they were obliged to cut her away also, and make a clear Deck. (12)

Another trip to Dorset and the West-Country is noted by Bastian as the basis of the information provided by Defoe in his Tour. It was in the early summer of 1700, according to his calculations, that Defoe made a trip with his brother-in-law Robert Davis, an inventor of a diving machine, to Cornwall’s Polpeor Cove at the Lizard, to look for rich pickings off shipwrecks.

They “rode in view of the sea” to Weymouth and then ferried across “with boat and a rope” to the Isle of Portland where, “tho’ seemingly miserable, and thinly inhabited, yet the inhabitants being almost all stone-cutters, we found there was no very poor people among them.” Passing the famous swannery at Abbotsbury, they continued along the coast towards Bridport, observing the fishermen seining for mackerel, which that year were so plentiful that the country folk came with carts to buy fish to manure their fields. (Early Life 222)

Portland is mentioned for its stone, being the place “our best and whitest free stone comes, with which the cathedral of St. Paul’s, the Monument, and all the public edifices in the city of London, are chiefly built.” It is in the following line that his purpose of travelling to a destination is revealed. “Tis wonderful,” Defoe exclaims, “and well worth the observation of a traveller to see the quarries in the rock, from whence they are cut out, what stones, and of what prodigious a size are cut out there” (A Tour 211).

Bridport, as mentioned above, was famous for its mackerel. Even so, Defoe relates a curious anecdote about the farmers who came to manure their fields with the fish and who were prevented from buying by “the justices and magistrates of the towns about.” After some enquiry, Defoe found out that it was “thought to be dangerous, as to infection.” So plentiful was the catch that year, that fish, which were fine and large, “were sold at the sea side a hundred for a penny.”

From Bridport, the next stop on the journey west was Lime, where he mentions the Duke of Monmouth briefly, and boasts about its the harbour, “’tis such a one as is not in all Britain besides, if there is such a one in any part of the world” (A Tour 212). Known as the Cobb, it was a

massy pile of building, consisting of high and thick walls of stone. The walls are raised in the main sea, at a good distance from the shore; it consists of one\ main and solid wall of stone, large enough for carts and carriages to pass on the top, and to admit houses and ware houses to be built on it; so that it is broad as a street; opposite to this, but farther into the sea, is another wall of the same workmanship, which crosses the end of the first wall, and comes about with a tail, parallel to the first wall. Between the point of the first or main wall, is the entrance into the port, and the second, or opposite wall, breaking the violence of the sea from the entrance, the ships go into the basin, as into a pier, or harbour, and ride there as secure as in a mill pond, or as in a wet dock. (A Tour 213)

It appears from his Tour that Defoe and his companion, stayed some time at Bridport. Though it is apparent that Defoe’s knowledge and connection with the local trade indicate a deeper connection than that of a mere traveller. So much so, that he has the time to explore the friendliness of the people as well as “observe the pleasant way of conversation, as it is managed among the gentlemen of this county, and their families, which are without reflection some of the most polite and well bred people in the isle of Britain.” Of the ladies, he was particularly admiring of the way they were treated when it came to marriage, “no Bury Fairs, where the women are scandalously said to carry themselves to market.” Defoe ascribes this treatment to the plain fact that “the Dorsetshire ladies are equal in beauty, and maybe superior in reputation. And yet the Dorsetshire ladies, I assure you, are not nuns, they do not go veiled about streets, or hide themselves when visited.” So well acquainted was he with the gentry of Dorset, that Defoe could make the statement that he met no equal “in all my observation, through the whole isle of Britain” (A Tour 213-14).

Evidence of Defoe’s early trading links includes his visits to Blandford and Stalbridge. Blandford is noted as having “the finest bonelace in England.” Stalbridge would appear to have been a well-known place as it used to make “the finest, best, and highest prized knit stockings in England; but that trade now is much decayed by the increase of the knitting-stocking engine, or frame which has destroyed the hand knitting-trade for fine stockings through the whole kingdom.”

Defoe was among the men who appeared on the side of the Duke of Monmouth after his landing at Lyme Regis, during the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.[2] Various explanations have been offered for his mentioning involvement; some attribute it to a total fiction, while others suggest he escaped back into London or to Europe.[3] But the most in depth and best researched is offered by Bastian, who states that Defoe was only with the Duke and his followers for a short period of time. He left the army and returned to London when the Duke’s tactics proved indecisive (Early Life 114). However, it is more likely that Defoe fled abroad and gained his pardon via requests from his wife.

As soon as the news had reached London of the Duke’s arrival, the city was sealed off to stop Protestants leaving and joining Monmouth. According to Elizabeth D’ Oyley, Defoe “was on the road, a young man of twenty five,” when Monmouth landed (The Duke 281). In his Review, Defoe reflected that “I remember how boldly abundance of men talked for the Duke of Monmouth, when he first landed; but if half of them had as boldly joined him sword in hand, he had never been routed at Kings-sedg-moor” (Review 154).

As for the pardon, that came some years later (my italics):

1687 May 31. Windsor.

Warrant to the Justices of Assize and Gaol Delivery for the Western Circuit and all other whom it may concern – after reciting that the King had extended his grace and mercy to Thomas Pluse of Edington, Henry Pitman of Yeovell, Wm. Pitman of Sandford Oreas, Daniel Pomroy of Taunton, John Edward of Trull, Azarians Pinny of Axminster, George Mullins, sen., of Taunton, John Collins of Chard. George Pickard of Rhode, Joseph Gayland late of Exeter, Wm. Savage of Taunton, Edward Babke late of Tull, John Oram of Warminster , Thomas Pumphrey late of Worcester, William Horsley late of St. Martin in the Fields, Nicholas Scading of Bhgon Green, James Canyer of Ilminster, John Bovett of Taunton, William Way of Combe St. Nicholas, Robert Hucker of Taunton, woolcomber, William Gaunt of Wapping, Richard Lucus of Dulverton, John Marther alias Marder of Crewkerne, George Puvior of Longport, Benjamin Alsopp late of London, Christopher Eason of Chard, Brian Connory, John Woolters, Andrew Speed, Daniel Foe, John Harper, George Richmond, and Martin Goddard who, were engaged in the late rebellion – for causing the said persons to be inserted in the General Pardon, without any condition of transportation. (State Papers 440; my italics)

The fact that Defoe was pardoned in this list among non-combatants indicates that he was in the area as a tradesman, caught up in the mêlée of preparations and the need for transport for battle. A hosier with cart transport would have likely been pressed into service to assist by transporting goods to and wounded from the battlefield.

Defoe mentions the Battle of Sedgemoor later in his life, in A Tour:

Had he [Duke of Monmouth] not, either by the treachery, or mistake of his guides, been brought to an unpassable ditch, where he could not get over, in the interval of which, the king’s troops took the alarm, by the firing a pistol among the duke’s men, whether, also, by accident, and his own fate, conspired to his defeat, he had certainly cut the Lord Ferersham’s army (for he commanded them) all to pieces; but by these circumstances, he was brought to a battle on unequal terms, and defeated: the rest I need not mention (A Tour 354).

Among the executed men were three former members of Rev. Charles Morton’s Dissenter Academy in Surrey, which Defoe attended. Defoe refers to them in 1712, as the members of the ‘West Country Martyres . . . Kitt. Battersby, Young Jenkins, Hewlin’ (The Present State 319). As Bastian points out, Battersby, was Christopher Battiscombe, son and heir to a Dorset country estate. The other two were executed at Taunton on 30 September 1685, which could have been Defoe’s twenty-sixth birthday.

In Robinson Crusoe (1719), considered by many and mentioned by Defoe as an allegory, he has his character saved in “a strange Concurrence of Days, in the various Providences which befell me,” for “The same Day of the Year I was born on, (viz.) the 30th September, that same Day I had my Life so miraculously saved 26 Years after” (Crusoe 113). In the preface to The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Defoe states: “I Robinson Crusoe being at this Time in perfect and sound Mind and Memory . . . that the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical; and is the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexplained Misfortunes.” This of course would make the year of Defoe’s birth 1659, and not 1660 which is often stated. His birth is not registered in any Parish Records that have been consulted to date, and most probably it has not been recorded in any.

This note has endeavoured to articulate the importance to Defoe of the county of Dorset. A large proportion of Defoe’s early trading life can be framed in the towns of Stalbridge and Blandford. These two places, with Lyme Regis servings as a trading port, would have offered the answer to one of the great mysteries of Defoe’s life. How did he manage to evade capture after the unsuccessful Monmouth Rebellion? If Defoe was trading at Lyme during the landing of Monmouth, then his escape from James II’s army was by sea. Defoe, by his own claims, knew the way of life of the gentry very well, even the details of women’s marriage arrangements. It can be safe to argue, that Defoe’s escape from the Bloody Assizes was from Lyme Regis, probably to Holland where Monmouth’s army originated. Two incidences that appear in the early part of Robinson Crusoe stem from this county. With one of Defoe’s daughters marrying a Dorset Customs Officer and two daughters’ burials in Wimborne Minster, this provides a lasting testimony to Defoe’s connection to and fondness for Dorset.

University of Exeter

NOTES

1. For reports of Mist’s stay in Dorset see Daily Journal.

2. Monmouth and his men landed on the coast of Dorset at Lyme Regis in the afternoon of 11 June 1685. For more information on this invasion, see Earle.

3. Paula Backscheider, for example, believes that Defoe had taken part in the decisive Battle of Sedgmoor and possessed “the kind of pass that merchants got from lord major or the secretary of state. Certainly he had travelled enough on his business to be a more credible traveller than most” (39).

WORKS CITED

Backscheider, Paula. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Bastian, Frank. Defoe’s Early Life. Macmillan, 1981.

Bialuschewski, Arne. “Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 98., no. 1, 2004, pp.21-38.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. James II, Volume II, January 1686 – May 1687. HMSO 1964.

 Daily Journal, 25 April 1722, The Weekly Journal; Or, British Gazetteer, 28 April 1722.

Defoe, Daniel. An Essay Upon Projects (1697). Cassell & Company Limited, 1887.

———. Review, Vol IX. Columbia UP, 1938.

———. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings (1701, edited by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Penguin Books, 1997.

———. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, edited by George H. Healy, Oxford UP, 1955.

———. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, edited by Pat Rogers, Penguin, 1971.

———. The Present State of Parties in Great Britain (1712). Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale.

———. Robinson Crusoe, edited by Thomas Keymer and annotated by Keymer and James Kelly, Oxford UP, 2007.

D’Oyley, Elizabeth. The Duke of Monmouth. Geoffrey Bles, 1938.

Earle, Peter. Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor, 1685. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977.

Russell, Nicholas. A Historical Account of the Antiquity, Ancient Funeral Monuments and Endowments, of the Colligiate Church of Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset; and Chapel of St. Margaret. John Nichols and Son, Red Lion Passage, Fleet Street 1803.

Sutherland, James. Defoe. Methuen, 1937.

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Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century: Pirates, Merchants and British Imperial Authority in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, by David Wilson

Reviewed by Manushag Powell

There is no shortage of books on British piracy, but David Wilson’s evidence-driven examination of the final phase of the Golden Age phenomenon is, if the reader will forgive me, a welcome piece of new scholarship in which there is much to be treasured. Focusing on the period 1716-1726, which witnessed a shocking resurgence and proportional diminution of maritime piracy in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Wilson’s book, which “contains pirates” but is “not a book primarily about pirates” (xi), engages a vast and complicated maritime network of imperial merchants, colonial settlers, and naval forces touched by and touching piracy. Well-paced and clearly written, Suppressing Piracy mounts a persuasive challenge to the broadly accepted narrative of the late Golden Age “War on Piracy,” arguing instead that the isolation and eventual collapse of large-scale European-captained Atlantic piracy was the result of trade pressures and colonial allegiances, and not the straightforward result of a decision that the British navy should at last get tough with respect to the plague of the hostis humani generis.

Wilson’s book opens by painting an image, to which it will periodically return, of the just-hanged bodies of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew, in one of the most famous anti-pirate victories of the eighteenth century. In Wilson’s framing, though, Ogle’s triumph over Roberts is the exception that proves the rule: this was a famous victory in part because it had little company. Historians have conceded that the British lacked the naval capacity simply to suppress pirates in the 1670s through early eighteenth century. They did not miraculously develop this capacity in 1722 (the date of Roberts’ defeat).

Instead, posits Wilson, effective anti-piracy efforts were localized, which meant allying with various colonial and mercantile stakeholders to bolster Parliamentary and Admiralty campaigns. Even so, Wilson is not precisely arguing that the British presence was weaker than we have been led to believe; the overall direction of the piracy suppression efforts amount to a solidifying of British imperial reach and ambitions. Wilson’s interest is in the understudied mechanisms of how that solidification happened, which he attains by turning to the accounts of merchants and captains trying to effect local change in the service of imperial stability. There is something faintly reminiscent of Tolstoy in the way Wilson lays out his careful analyses, always cautious of assigning too much agency, blame, or achievement to single actors – though he might not appreciate the comparison I’m making here, for there was, Wilson insists, no war against the pirates (nor was there really much of a pirate peace). There were only sporadic reactive measures to soothe the ruffled feathers of aggrieved mercantile interest groups.

The tides of piratical fortunes in peacetime ebbed and flowed largely at the behest of “legitimate” imperial and transatlantic trade. Wilson makes the crucial distinction that, hostis discourse aside, the English government saw pirates less “as a threat to imperial authority” than as an irritant to important mercantile interests who could be appeased (it was hoped) by measures well short of an expensive and difficult project like eradication (74). Whether a colony or trade route received meaningful protection from the Royal Navy was a function of whether the area was already a well-established trade hub with lobbyists in England. Private colonies, like the Carolinas or the Bahamas, were considerably under resourced compared to Crown colonies like New York and Virginia. The governments of private colonies only organized effective resistance to piracy when their own local people and merchants found it more profitable to do so than to tolerate the pirates.

Essentially, no concerted effort would be made against pirates until enough of the Atlantic was profitable enough to European investors to make it worthwhile, which meant that through much of the end of the Golden Age, the Navy was instructed to, for example, protect Massachusetts but not Rhode Island. While the Navigation Acts attempted to draw a bright line between piracy and legal action, actual suppression of piracy was not consistently attempted until colonial-domestic trading ties made it desirable; only once the London merchants had reason to advocate for the interest of colonial ones – and specifically, the tobacco, sugar, and, pulling all together, the enslaving trades – did suppression efforts begin to grow teeth.

Wilson gives more attention than most to the important question of what becomes of pirate spoils: if a pirate accepts a pardon, what becomes of his booty? What redress was possible for merchants who claimed their belongings had been stolen? Most pirate treasure was not metal specie but rather fungible goods, and often, as Wilson often highlights, this included human prisoners, for whom the capture of a pirate usually meant only further captivity as they were enslaved or re-enslaved “legally.” Wilson traces, for example, as far as he is able, the fate of the skilled diver named Ned Grant, hired out by a white enslaver named Catherine Tookerman, captured by pirates twice – and then sold by a vengeful Tookerman who needed to pay a share of his price to the pirate hunter who’d declared him salvage.

The Venn diagram of enslavers and pirates shows much overlap. It is generally understood that it was their damage to the post-Asiento transatlantic trade in African prisoners that finally made pirates too annoying to European authority to be tolerated; still, for far too long, popular histories, wanting to celebrate pirates as anticapitalist freedom fighters, have nonetheless tended to give piracy credit for antislavery impulses that were never manifested on any significant level. While enslaved people appear throughout Wilson’s text, Chapter 5 specifically addresses the interactions of piracy and the slave trading lobby, and brings Wilson’s characteristic nuance to the fore. The pro-slavery lobby was not unified, but comprised of different factions: the so-called anti-monopoly separate traders (such as those encountered by Defoe’s Captain Singleton), and the Royal African Company, who regarded the separate traders as akin to the pirates (they not infrequently had been, but they also not infrequently were attacked by current pirates). Indeed, for a period the depredations of pirates elsewhere near the West African coastline were advantageous to the RAC traders who stuck to the Gold Coast, argues Wilson. It was innovative collaborations between the Royal Navy and the enslavers that eventually deterred pirates from the worst of their West African predations.

Meanwhile, as Chapter 6 details, the far more powerful East India Company lobby was able to secure a significant naval patrol for the Indian Ocean despite far less evidence of pirate problems than those faced by those in West African waters – setting aside their self-serving contention that Kanhoji Angria, leader of the Marathon navy, was piratical. Pirates and separate traders based in Madagascar were, however, a real impediment to the BEIC’s fledgling efforts to establish their own transatlantic Malagasy trading and enslavement faction.

After 1722, piracy within the bounds of the expanding British Empire became less profitable and more difficult, leading to a marked decline in piratical reports. The trading functions that had enabled pirates to recruit and find safe harbor had been superseded by determined imperial and colonial networks of sugar and enslaving merchants. The pirates were pushed out, one among many casualties – albeit perhaps among the least sympathetic ones – of imperial mercantilist or nascent capitalist development. This is less evidence of the omnipresence of British naval power than of its limitations in the face of a far more complex cultural shift, and of the importance of colonial maritime forces. Moreover, concludes Wilson, “It was legitimized maritime predation, rather than outright piracy, that proved the more prevalent threat to British commercial interests in the western Atlantic after 1722” (233).

In other words, belief in the decline in piracy depends a great deal upon how one defines piracy. Thus it ever has been. But Wilson’s corrective contribution to this old tale amasses evidence form under-used sources, adding voices and challenging pirate historians to revisit received wisdoms in the face of his evidence that piratical matters were overwhelmingly local and transient. This should be required reading in Pirate Studies.

Manushag N. Powell
Purdue University

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Reflections on Recovery

Stephanie Insley Hershinow

When our plague years began, I thought less of H.F.—or even of Crusoe—than of Moll Flanders. Every time I’ve taught Moll Flanders, my students have asked, But where are her children? It’s a fair question, even if it tends toward moralizing. Where are Moll’s children? The Shakespeareans launched a whole literary theoretical subfield when they asked “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” and then debated whether this was even a question worth asking. For readers of Defoe, the question may be even more complex for the ways that the demands of child-rearing serve as the implicit inverse of Moll’s life as flâneuse. As is to be expected from the author of The Family Instructor and Conjugal Lewdness, Defoe is less content to allow the question of Moll’s children to remain abstract. Unlike Lady Macbeth’s, Moll’s children flit in and out of the narrative in ways that give the question more urgency. Then, in Roxana, we see a continuation of this concern: Roxana’s plot reaches its climax in the return and demise of her daughter, Susan. Roxana is forced to reckon with the presence of her daughter in her life, suggesting that her children (and perhaps Moll’s as well) have been more assertive in their impingement on the narrative even in their absence than we may have thought.

I kept thinking of Moll not only because I happened to be writing about her, but because, unlike Moll, I knew exactly where my children were in those days. One was a constant companion (his daycare closed from mid-March 2020), the other kept even closer, as I entered my third trimester with what would soon be called my “pandemic baby.” My classes, my deadlines, my committee meetings didn’t really accommodate the fact that my children were home; they kept chugging along their various tracks. On social media, some observers (as is their wont) criticized parents for their complaints. “If you don’t like being around your children,” they asked, “then why did you have them?” As one Twitter Cassandra pointed out, parents should have taken the possibility of a global pandemic into account when planning their families. For so many parents, and disproportionately for mothers, the pandemic revealed the fragility of our various compartmentalizations, our attempts to do…well, anything while secure in the knowledge that our children were safe and accounted for. The insistent domesticity of the first few months of the pandemic has now lessened—my classes meet in person, my children spend their days in school and not in my lap—but I still keep thinking about Defoe’s ambiguous provocation.

As I started editing this collection of essays, my children (inevitably, it seems from this vantage) caught Covid. They were and are fine. And now, as I send this collection to be posted, news of the Omicron variant has renewed concerns that grow familiar, if still urgent. Which is to say that the editors of Digital Defoe know that our issue’s theme of “recovery,” however qualified, was premature. Still, we have gathered with these reflections a snapshot of meditations on pandemic life as filtered through the prism of Defoe’s works. The writers gathered here shared their reflections on the pandemic in mid-summer 2021, some have chosen to update their thoughts to reflect the changes of the past few months. These brief, informal essays capture something of the flux Defoe also seemed drawn to—the way that extreme circumstances (plague, shipwreck, poverty) can sharpen psychological response. “A little recovered”? Maybe just a little. Let’s check back in again next year.

Baruch College, CUNY

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After the Plague Year?

Travis Chi Wing Lau

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

—Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004)

In the thick of quarantine over the past eighteenth months, I never thought I would share the desires H.F. confesses with such conviction in A Journal of the Plague Year: “my own Curiosity…was sufficient to justify my running that Hazard” (54). Defoe emphasizes the affective force of this desire—an undeniable compulsion to witness for himself London’s devastation, here embodied in the burial pits filled with the dead. To refuse a “strict Order” in pursuit of the freedom of mobility even at great risk—that was how much of the pandemic felt to me. That is, aside from a crushing banality of days melting into one another much like the meandering, recursive form of the Journal (53). But most striking to me now is how Defoe’s novel holds space for what feels like an illicit desire in the face of epidemic crisis. As Christopher Loar has brilliantly argued, “Defoe’s texts identify this insular approach to the epidemic constitution as inadequate. Instead, they seek to supplement it with a different ecology: a vision of vulnerability, a perspective that underscores the dependence of human bodies and lifeways on their environments—indeed, their embeddedness in them” (44). Rather than an irrational, contradictory behavior and characterological flaw, H.F.’s persistent refusal to remain quarantined reflects an intimacy with risk that recognizes the futility of absolute security (from the Latin sēcūrĭtās, to be untroubled or free from cares), a fantasy that Defoe himself acknowledged was impossible to achieve beyond a measured preparedness for the inevitable return of crisis.[1]

As a Chinese American, I also experienced first-hand the unique stigma of those H.F. observes being “shut up” in their houses: those deemed infected or even possibly infected were sealed into their homes painted with red crosses and policed by city militia. While I do not claim to share the same experience of medical neglect and state cruelty, the feeling of being marked out as infectious and even deserving of debilitating illness or death feels all too familiar. To have my body presumed viral after being identified by the nation as a threat even despite my citizenship is not novelty but refrain: the same yellow peril bleeding red again as friends, family, and community became targets for blame, for violent containment. My racialized body itself became what H.F. repeatedly calls “tokens” of the plague—legible signs of risk in need of mitigation or violent expulsion from the nation’s white, healthy body before it was too late. What underpins the proclamation “that the city was healthy,” that our nation be “yet alive!” in the face of a global pandemic that has (and continues to) “swept an Hundred Thousand Souls / Away?” (Defoe 9, 193). Almost two years into this pandemic, when can we ethically claim to be “after” COVID-19? And if we make such a claim, at whose continued expense does this “after” become possible, especially given the ongoing forms of anti-Asian racism and the necropolitical refusal to enable global access to vaccines?

To consider the stakes of these questions, I return to where my 2016 essay began: the Royal Experiment of 1721 that would, as part of the collective efforts of Hans Sloane, Charles Maitland, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Caroline of Ansbach, help to popularize smallpox inoculation—variolation—throughout Britain. Seven Newgate prisoners—John Alcock, John Cawthery, Richard Evans, Elizabeth Harrison, Ruth Jones, Mary North, and Anne Tompion—condemned to death were selected as experimental subjects and in exchange granted pardons in the form of transportation to the Americas. While at the time of my first essay I had not fully learned the already limited history about these seven prisoners, I am struck now by the state’s dependency on criminalized bodies to legitimize a medical practice for the aristocracy and ultimately for the general British public. To put this in Spencer Weinreich’s assessment, the prisoners were “both the experimental subject and the royal subject, for the human experimental subject is always also the political subject” (38). Because these experiments were done in the carceral space of Newgate where the subjects were also in the care of these physicians, we can see the ways in which preventative medicine has always depended upon (and subsequently disavowed) the disenfranchised to produce immunity and health security for the nation. Political benefit was also expected, as “inoculation’s success, assuming it materialized, would bolster the Hanoverians’ reputation as enlightened monarchs” (34). These prisoners would not enjoy the protected life their bodies were making possible for others. The all-too-convenient “yet” of H.F.’s concluding lines underscores the privilege of immunity made possible by the Royal Experiment held the very same year that Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year.

In the current moment of mounting vaccine resistance and robust anti-vaccination and anti-masking campaigns, I have been meditating on what Kathryn Olivarius has aptly called “immunoprivilege”[2] and what Martha Lincoln has termed “immunosupremacy.”[3] Both of these terms signal the ways in which immunity has come to be touted by many countries in the Global North as a moral virtue and civic expectation critical for a “return to normal”: many businesses, for example, have begun mandating complete vaccination for employment. Yet the racial and geographic disparities surrounding access to COVID-19 vaccination and testing reveal the unacknowledged immunoprivilege of predominantly wealthy, white communities in the U.S. and Europe who were able to self-isolate comfortably and have the luxury of choosing whether or not be vaccinated at all. These countries also continue to manufacture and stockpile the largest supply and most effective forms of COVID-19 vaccine. Thus, the dismissive choice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director, Rochelle Walensky, to refer to the current rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” bypasses fraught histories like that of the Newgate Experiment and of medical racism in Britain and America that continue to animate legitimate skepticism and suspicion of medicine, especially among Black communities.[4] To be clear, I am not endorsing an anti-vaccination view, but rather calling attention to how Western public health’s uncritical valorization of vaccination as a panacea must necessarily confront the historical inequities in which it remains complicit and the markedly disparate ways the pandemic is being lived (or not lived) out globally. Whose health gets to matter and thus merits protection? Whose health must necessarily be sacrificed for the wellbeing of others and then subsequently blamed for their failure to uphold wellbeing that is not their own? 

Kenyon College

NOTES

1. See “What Preparations Are Due?” (Lapham’s Quarterly, 2020), where I discuss Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague, a plague treatise that was published but one month before A Journal of the Plague Year, and its pre-epidemiological vision for national preparedness.

2. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege.” The New York Times, 13 April 2020. See also “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.”

3. “Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19.”

4. See “C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” The New York Times, July 16, 2021.

WORKS CITED

Anthes, Emily and Petri, Alexandra. “C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” The New York Times, 16 July 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/health/covid-delta-cdc-walensky.html.

Lau, Travis Chi Wing. “Defoe Before Immunity: A Prophylactic Journal of the Plague Year.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries. 8.1 (2016): 23-39, https://digitaldefoe.org/2016/10/19/defoe-before-immunity-a-prophylactic-journal-of-the-plague-year.

—. “What Preparations Are Due?” Lapham’s Quarterly. XIII.3 (2020): 209-217.

Olivarius, Kathryn. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege.” The New York Times, 13 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/opinion/coronavirus-immunity-passports.html.

—. “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.” American Historical Review. 124.2 (2019): 425-455.

Lincoln, Martha. “Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19.” Open Anthropological Research 1.1: 46–59.

Loar, Christopher. “Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitution.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32.1 (2019): 31-53.

Weinreich, Spencer J. “Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721).” History Workshop Journal 89 (2019): 22-44.

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The Daily Ledger

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

And now being to enter into a melancholy relation of a scene of silent life, such perhaps as was never heard of in the world before, I shall take it from its beginning, and continue in its order.

—Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 

In March of 2020, the early days of the pandemic in the US, when the college where I was then teaching made the decision to move all classes online for the remainder of the semester and shipped us all home, or at least, elsewhere, I sent all of my students an email to see how they were doing, and to offer them a piece of advice. “Consider keeping a journal—this is a unique experience!” I wrote, chirpily. “Someday people might be asking you what it was like! You will be glad to have a record of your thoughts and impressions. As well, writing is a really good way to work through fears and trauma. Writing out your feelings—without judging or criticizing yourself!—can be a great way to check in on yourself; to identify things that are scaring you; to examine things from various perspectives; etc.”

This last bit is drawn from Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis, a pop psychology text that had been assigned in the college’s first-year course for a few years, and would therefore (hopefully) ring a bell for some of my readers. In Chapter 7 of the book, Haidt considers the questions of whether adversity sets us back, or spurs us to growth—whether what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Reviewing the evidence from various psychological studies, he finds mixed results, but something that is quite clear from the research is that one of the most tried-and-true ways to recover from tragedies—not just to survive, but to grow and develop resilience—is to write about them. By writing, he says, we actively process our feelings and find ways of making meaning, and this turns out to be crucial to our ability to flourish in the wake of disaster.

At a moment when so many people felt isolated, cut off from others, confronted with a new reality, it seemed wise to counsel my students to write, both for themselves, and for posterity. But, I must confess, I did a rather middling job of following my own advice.

Rather than writing about my thoughts or feelings, I mostly made check-lists of all the things I wanted to get done that day—both to organize myself, and for the small thrill of mastery when I could cross things off the list: chaos tamed, accomplishment in spite of everything. I kept a log of case numbers in my county, and a record of what my partner and I had for dinner (very useful, it turns out, if you’re wondering how old those leftovers are), and noted what variety of tea I’d made that day (mostly because my partner suspected that I wasn’t really drinking all those different teas I kept buying). This seemed different from the drive to quantify one’s life with a FitBit or music scrobbler: I wasn’t interested in aggregating the data, or discovering patterns. Just in making some kind of mark that left a trace of the day, of what was happening when it felt like so much was happening, but also, nothing.

A page from a calendar with brief notes about events. From late July and early August.

Note: White Trash Bash was not an event I attended, but one that took place nearby (yes, really) and was noted so as to see if it produced a spike in cases.

I thought that I would spend my quarantine year writing, but instead, I mostly spent it…buying books. And teas. And t-shirts supporting various restaurants and small businesses that I was desperate to help in the only way that I could. And above all, I kept those various logs of things I was eating, drinking, doing (mostly on Zoom). It turned out, as my friend Stephanie put it, the basic mode of being in pandemic is not production, but consumption. Rather than writing a diary of my own, I read diaries and letters written by other people: Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, Zygmunt Bauman. I was surprised to find that what I really enjoyed in those texts, during that anxious Spring and weary Summer, was not the profound reflections and record of emotional lives so much as the very minor details, the little minutia of everyday life that snuck in. What they had for dinner. Gossip about a friend. A plan to go skating tomorrow. My own checklists suddenly began to seem more interesting. I went back to an old diary I’d half-heartedly kept years earlier and discovered that there too, it was not the accounts of thoughts and feelings that surprised or interested me, but the references to minor detail, the scrawled to-do lists—still trying to finish writing this chapter, need to read this thing, schedule this appointment.

Perhaps the work of a diary is not, as Haidt suggests, to process feelings and build a narrative—or rather, perhaps that process emerges from those trivial details that seem so forgettable later. It is only now, a year and a half later, that I am beginning to do the kind of reflective writing that I thought I would spend my time in quarantine producing. For that first year, all I could really muster was a running tally of mundanity.

But in this, I find, I am not so different from that notable predecessor of the human in extremis, for the portrait of life in isolation that is Robinson Crusoe is also, for the most part, a product of emotion recollected in tranquility. Crusoe does recover paper, pen, and ink from the shipwreck, but he does not use them to write the memoir that we read. That supply, it turns out, is used up for somewhat less memorable documents.

The first text he produces is a preliminary effort to get a grasp of his situation, a comically literal reckoning of the evil and good of his situation. The effort to do some accounting of the pros and cons is strangely touching in its determination to produce a balanced ledger. To paraphrase:

Con: I am cast upon a horrible desolate island, void of all hope of recovery.

Pro: But I am alive!

Con: I have not clothes to cover me.

Pro: Who needs clothes, in this heat?

This is the sort of reflection that is clearly the product of a sense of obligation: what one ought to write, in order to begin grappling with the conditions one faces. It is a touchingly laughable document, and one that does not provide much insight into the emotional realities of Crusoe’s astonishing experience.

Then he begins to write a journal. It is only once he has gotten his living quarters situated, he says, and some time has passed, that he is able to begin writing, for, “at first I was in too much of a hurry, and not only hurry as to labour, but in too much discomposure of mind.” If he had started writing immediately, he says, “my journal would ha’ been full of many dull things.” He provides an example of what such a dull entry might be, a fake entry for Sept 30th, one that is in many ways quite similar to the entry he actually provides for Sept 30th…which is itself a fake, because we know he only began the journal later. Both are notably different from the more extended account that we first get of the same day, provided in narrative form. But after this preliminary entry, once the space as been cleared, as it were, the journal becomes something that now seems much more familiar to me: a combination of checklists and logs. “November 1. I set up a tent under a rock, and lay there for the first night, making it as large as I could with stakes driven in to swing my hammock upon.” “November 3. I went out with my gun, and kill’d two fowls like ducks, which were very good food. In the afternoon went to work to make me a table.”

I suspect that many readers of Robinson Crusoe have forgotten this portion of the text entirely. Crusoe himself seems largely uninterested in it, freely jumping in to offer longer elaborations that seem like later additions. The text ends abruptly—he quits writing, he says because he runs out of ink—and the regular flow of the retrospective narrative resumes without significant comment. But I have a new appreciation for this section now, after my time as a castaway on the shores of my own apartment. Those brief entries turn out to be a far more compelling representation of the experience of being cut off from a larger social world than I could ever have imagined: the realism of a new kind of reality.

Ithaca College

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“Living this novel”: (Accidentally) Pairing Plague with Plague

Christopher Charles Douglas

And here I may be able to make an Observation or two of my own, which may be of use hereafter to those, into whose Hands this may come, if they should ever see the like dreadful Visitation.

Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

For the Spring 2020 semester, I put Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) on my eighteenth-century novel syllabus seemingly on a whim. The subject matter—an outbreak of the bubonic plague in London in 1665—was distant from life at a rural state university, but felt likely to generate interest. Who doesn’t love a medical disaster narrative?

We read the text early in the semester and were done by the first week in February. We debated its non-linear structure and its use of statistics and primary sources before moving on. Defoe’s attempt to cash in on a plague scare in the 1720s receded in my own mind. This was until the last few weeks of the semester. My institution closed its doors to in-person classes on Friday, March 13, 2020. I kept the class mostly on schedule, and we continued our new readings. Defoe’s Journal, however, started to creep back into the sorts of things I found myself talking and thinking about. Our class discussions, which took place on asynchronous video uploads, had the same sort of broken-up feeling that Defoe’s Journal has, and that feeling of taking in the lists of the dead and dying in Defoe’s novel felt like the lists and numbers I saw reflected in my own online newsfeeds.

There is a strange divide between reading A Journal of the Plague Year before a pandemic and during it. The somewhat jumbled structure—where the narrator H.F. picks up ideas, is interrupted by something, and comes back to them dozens of pages later—suddenly makes sense. My social media is filled with people joking about how time does not exist in the same way anymore. The text’s repetitions also rings true, as the same arguments, the same sorts of reports, and the same actions repeat themselves in my own life. Defoe’s “Repetition of Circumstances” in the text has gained significance for me (163).

More so than this, though, I spent the last few weeks of the spring 2020 semester in reflecting on all of those little moments from the text that made up the bulk of the Journal—the reports of the dead, the anecdotes, and the observations by H.F. Many of the orders Defoe reprints from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London in 1665 now feel strangely prescient: accurate death records must be kept and published, the ability to properly diagnose the disease must increase in every parish, persons confirmed to have the disease must go under home quarantine, funerals are to take place without family members or friends, public entertainments and feasts are to be canceled, and taverns and coffee shops are to close early to prevent socializing and drunkenness (34-41).  Each of these now carry a new weight, as I reread passages and think to myself, “Yes, self-quarantine. Yes, work on social distancing. Yes, increase testing. Yes, stay at home and don’t congregate in restaurants and bars.”

It is odd watching history, if not repeat itself, at least slip into an old groove for a moment. Our “asymptomatic carriers” are Defoe’s “THE WELL” who had “received the Contagion… yet did not shew the Consequences of it in their Countenances” (164) and our “we’re going to appreciate life when this is over” is Defoe’s “scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing Eyes” (151). That this text, written in 1722 to try to take advantage of a plague scare, is relevant again during COVID-19 is a strange rebirth; when Defoe wrote the text, he was already too late to cash in on the anxiety, and it didn’t see a second edition for more than two decades after his death. In April of 2020, it had become the inescapable novel on my syllabus. I asked my students to give a reflection back on the course as a whole as their final video assignment. One of my students called A Journal of the Plague Year “a transcendent constructing of an eighteenth-century Center for Disease Control” and another stated that “little did we know we would be living this novel.” More than any other text on the syllabus, Defoe’s work connected with my students.

While my students’ reactions to the novel formed a sympathetic connection back to this nearly three-hundred-year-old text, the negative connections were likewise inescapable. H.F. rails against “Doctors Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows; quacking and tampering in Physick” made by persons who used the fear of the plague as a way to make fast money from desperate people (27)—the colloidal silver and hydroxychloroquine of the seventeenth century. In a world where cellphone towers were being burned down in England in April of 2020, the easy explanation of “those were simpler people who believed in superstitions” becomes impossible to believe (Rachel Schraer & Elanor Lawrie). One of my students who initially did not like the book admitted at the end of the semester that the ways that Defoe pressed on “what is truth” and “can we distinguish between fact and fiction?” made him reevaluate the novel’s value, in the context of being confronted with just that dilemma in the world around him. Defoe’s claim that “no Body can account for the Possession of Fear when it takes hold of the Mind” is as true for us as it was for his original audience (207).

Defoe likewise has his narrator call the working poor “the most Venturous and Fearless of it [who] went about their Employment, with a Sort of brutal Courage,” memorializing the people who were the essential workers of his day who kept London going by “tending the Sick, watching Houses shut up, carrying infected Persons to the Pest-House, and which was still worse, carrying the Dead away to their Graves” (78), while also morbidly admitting that their deaths from these tasks were inevitable. Stories about essential workers and minorities dying at disproportionate rates show the same inequality in our society as existed during H.F.’s imagined day.

Reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year in the year of the COVID-19 pandemic became a learning experience for me. It brought the text I taught out of my lessons and into my own life in unexpected ways. It left me with two opposing feelings: hope for the future and worry over the shape that it will take. The Plague of 1665 ended. After about a quarter of London’s population died (a far larger percentage than any estimate of COVID-19), the people who were left were able to pick up, rebuild, and carry on. Yet, for the many who died, this would not be a world that they would shape or be a part of. And, so it seems, the world we inhabit today continues to expect the most out of those who can least afford it. Journal leaves me with no easy answers, at least not now. But, for the moment, I think it’s replaced Robinson Crusoe and Roxana on my syllabus. I think my students will have a lot to say about it. I’ll be ready to listen.

Jacksonville State University

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Edited by Louis Landa. Oxford UP, 2010.

Schraer, Rachel and Eleanor Lawrie. “Coronavirus: Scientists brand 5G claims ‘complete rubbish’,” BBC News, 15 April 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/52168096.

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Privacy in the Plague Year

Caitlin Kelly

In A Journal of the Plague Year, H.F. tells his readers, “What I wrote of my private Meditations I reserve for private Use, and desire it may not be made Publick on any Account whatever” (65-66). I’ve always found that claim puzzling. What are those “private meditations”? What makes them different from the rest of the journal? Why is it so important that they be kept from us? Why not share them?

Even before the pandemic, I was skeptical about H.F.’s ability to compartmentalize, but now I find it even more perplexing. To H.F.’s mind, the things he observed and heard as he walked around London, and that he then recorded in his journal, were distinct from his “private Meditations.” The Journal seems to suggest that he found those private reflections and ruminations inadequate or inappropriate for the public record he was aiming to create.

In the wake of the past two years, however, I find myself doubting that it is possible to make distinctions between private and public records amidst a community crisis of the magnitude of a pandemic. Now I find myself re-reading A Journal of the Plague Year and asking: what if the existence of “private meditations” as distinct from public ones is a fiction itself?

As I have argued elsewhere, the first-person narrative that Defoe gives us in the Journal is actually a blending of multiple first-person narratives: much of the content of the Journal comes from H.F.’s observations as he walks around London, and so, while the Journal is H.F.’s, it tells the stories of the people he interacts with, such as the stories of a man at a mass gravesite (54-55) and three travelers he comes across in his own wanderings (100-102). In other words, these people’s experiences of the pandemic become part of H.F.’s own experience, and their stories are absorbed into his Journal.

Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, I found my inner narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic being shaped in the same way as H.F.’s seems to have been. Living in isolation, my experience of the world was reduced to the bits and pieces I could gather through phone and video chats, texts, faculty meetings and classes on Zoom, and the occasional backyard meetup of friends. It was as if I had gone from being the protagonist in a first-person novel to a reader of someone else’s story narrated in third person. No longer going from building to building and conversation to conversation on campus, meeting up with friends at happy hour, and slipping away to the art museum for lunch and a quiet moment in the galleries, I suddenly had no story of my own to tell when I did call or visit family or friends.

In my experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, other people’s experiences were not just part of my own narrative: they were the totality of it. With my daily activities and interactions so drastically reduced, I had nothing to recount and nothing to worry over with friends and loved ones. This seems like it would be liberating, but it wasn’t. The mental space that isolation freed up just filled with generalized anxiety and panic. There was no room for the peaceful contemplation and “sitting with my anxiety” that emails from my employer suggested. In the absence of inner peace, my private meditations became nothing more than anxious ruminations on the things I saw—empty grocery store shelves and shuttered businesses—and the things related to me by others—the Governor’s daily briefings, texts from friends reporting where they found Clorox wipes or good toilet paper in stock. There just wasn’t much more than observation to record of those months alone in my small apartment, and that’s what made me think about H.F. and his “private meditations.”

I think a lot about the terms we’ve used to describe our isolation, and the differences between “social distancing” and “physical distancing.” Even though “social distancing” is the term that has been used most widely, it isn’t at all accurate. As Paula Backscheider notes in her preface to the Norton Critical Edition of the Journal, a plague “allows no individuals” and “emphasizes human relationships” (ix). This, unlike H.F.’s claims about his private meditations, makes sense to me. As the crisis developed, I could see the boundaries between private and public eroding as our interdependency was laid bare in discussions first of closures, then masking, and then vaccinations. Thanks to my institution’s mask mandate and rigorous quarantining protocols, I was able to safely return to the classroom in the fall of 2020. Yet, now at a different institution that does not require masks or vaccinations, my colleagues and I can only hope that our students choose to vaccinate, mask, and test. The reality of a pandemic, it turns out, is that you don’t lose connection to people—you lose the agency to determine what those connections look like.

As private and public experience blend together, the inequities we already know exist have become impossible to ignore. In A Journal of the Plague Year, we see who has economic and political power through who is able to flee for the countryside and who is forced to stay in the city, who still has the means to make a living and who does not. We’ve seen the same in our own time as the wealthy fled to vacation homes, while others were deemed “essential” with little choice but to expose themselves to the virus, and still others lost their jobs. Even for those of us lucky enough to be able to work remotely, inequities became more starkly visible. Working from home via videoconferencing software completely collapsed the boundaries between private and public life for so many of us. I watched as tenured faculty and administrators joined meetings from houses they owned, with dedicated office spaces and, on nice days, patios to sit on while they worked. Meanwhile, many graduate students and contingent faculty joined from cramped apartments. Students joined classes from their childhood bedrooms and kitchen tables where they could no longer conceal from their peers and professors their material living conditions and familial dynamics.

Then as now, we see that even as a plague isolates us physically, it always seems to find ways to intertwine our lives even more than before. It no longer becomes possible for us to neatly separate our private and public lives and experiences, and, in making the power disparities among us so transparent, pandemics disrupt our relationships to one another. In turn, our individual reflections are never really, fully our own. Like those collected in this issue of Digital Defoe, they become part of a public record and a community history.

Georgia Institute of Technology

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. Norton, 1992.

Kelly, Caitlin L. “Private Meditations and Public History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The Explicator, vol. 71, no.1, 2013, pp. 52-55.

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How to Cure the Plague of Solitary Woe by Reading and Writing like Defoe

Eileen M. Hunt

As the coronavirus pandemic escalated in the winter of 2020, I found myself reflecting on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) as a classic of epidemic literature in the tradition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Prior to the pandemic, I had thought of her second great work of “political science fiction” after Frankenstein (1818) in other terms. Her novel about a global plague that triggers a near-extinction event for humanity then seemed to me to be Shelley’s unwieldy metaphor for all forms of artificially-made disaster, not a realistic literary depiction of the spread of a lethal contagion across national borders to overwhelm the whole world.

By mid-March 2020, I learned to read Shelley’s “PLAGUE” on two levels at once: metaphorical and realistic (vol. 4, 139). Like A Journal of the Plague Year, on which it was partly based, The Last Man told a grimly realistic political story about how human beings catch and transmit infectious diseases as a result of the drama of their interpersonal and international conflicts. As I prepared to teach Defoe’s novel as a source for Shelley’s poliscifi, I also began to appreciate the metaphorical layers of meaning in his fictional re-working of his uncle’s journal of survival of the Great Plague of London of 1665-66.

A fictional version of his uncle Henry Foe, Defoe’s narrator H.F. offers a poetic definition of plague near the end of his tale: “A Plague is a formidable Enemy, and is arm’d with Terrors, that every Man is not sufficiently fortified to resist, or prepar’d to stand the Shock against” (271). Plague, in this sense, is not so much a pathogen or a disease as it is a psychological test of the individual to face the worst and deepest of their fears. With this metaphor, Defoe returned to Biblical conceptions of plague, as found in Job and Exodus. In those ancient texts, plague is a metaphor for being beset by hardship, feeling the blows of fate, or suffering tragedy beyond one’s control. The ten plagues of Egypt were not solely infectious diseases, but rather a range of terrifying and life-endangering hardships inflicted by the Hebrew God upon the Egyptian people to compel them to free the Israelites from slavery.

While it can be read on both levels—historical and literary—A Journal of the Plague Year is ultimately a novel like Defoe’s earlier classic, Robinson Crusoe (1719). H.F., like the shipwrecked sailor Crusoe striving to escape from the cannibal island with the aid of purchased servants, endures the plague of solitary woe, but never faces up to the limits of his solidarity with other human sufferers. H.F. ended his months-long quarantine with the verse, “A dreadful plague in London was/ In the year sixty-five,/Which swept a hundred thousand souls/ Away; yet I alive!” (287). With this concluding quatrain, H.F. does not dwell so much on the immensity of the loss of life as he does the good luck of his own survival.

When Shelley read Defoe’s Plague Year in 1817, she may have found in its closing poem the narrative kernel for The Last Man. The ostensible sole survivor of her fictional global plague is Lionel Verney, who is an avatar for the author herself in this roman à clef. Like the young Shelley mourning the death of her husband Percy and three of their children, Verney suffers solitary woe in the extreme as do H.F. and Crusoe. But Verney survives the global plague to develop a truly solidaristic vision of his relationship with the whole planet and all of its life forms: he summons the hope that a new Adam and Eve might be out there, somewhere, already with child, and looking for others with whom to rebuild human society in a way that is humane.

While the solitary woe of Crusoe led him to escape from the cannibal island, and the solitary woe of H.F. pushed him to survive the plague intact, the solitary woe of Verney inspired him to set sail upon the sea: not only in search of other survivors, but also on a quest to discover a whole new way of life that might sustain the best in humanity while leaving the worst of its conflicts and other social diseases behind.

It is this global vision of solidarity with life itself that inspired me to ask my students at Notre Dame to emulate Defoe and Shelley during our plague year of 2020 to 2021. As part of my undergraduate and graduate seminars on political thought and plague literature, they wrote a series of 1000-word “pandemoirs” (pandemic memoirs) that wove together their difficult and sometimes even harrowing experiences of infection, quarantine, contact tracing, social distancing, vaccination, isolation, depression, loss, and mourning, alongside their readings of classics of plague literature from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2003-2013) and Handmaid’s Tale (1985-2019) series.

In a poignant moment of communal reflection, my first-year students and I looked back on our plague year of Zoom seminars by sitting down for an international Zoom call with anthropologist Eben Kirksey. In early May, he taped the deeply personal interview with the students for public viewing on YouTube as part of his “Multispecies Coronavirus Reading Group” series. The hour-long session provides a deep-dive into the psyches of the students, who had only recently been vaccinated in a mass campus drive, as they shared the real-life stories of resilience behind the personal and creative essays they wrote for our year-long humanities seminar. Though the technology had changed since Defoe and Shelley composed their plague memoirs with pen and paper, the purpose of our digitally-preserved pandemoirs was the same: to cure the plague of solitary woe with the incisive power of words to tie humanity together through time, space, and the depths of sorrow.

University of Notre Dame

WORKS CITED

Botting, Eileen Hunt. Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2020.

—. “Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein—And Then a Pandemic.” The New York Times. 13 March 2020.

Defoe, Daniel. 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. London: E. Nutt, 1722.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man, in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook. London: Pickering & Chatto, (1996) 2001.

 

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That Uncertain Feeling: Plaguetime and Judgment, Medieval to Modern

Karl Steel

The Tiber overflowed in the last decade of the sixth century, flooding granaries, uprooting houses, and heaping up carcasses on its banks, even into Rome itself. Soon thereafter followed new catastrophe, when the Justinian Plague made its way West from death-struck Byzantium. When they met it, the Romans called it an inguinarium, after the telltale swelling of the inguen, the groin. The Byzantine Emperor survived his encounter with it; the bishop of Rome did not. Gregory, later honored as “the Great,” stepped in reluctantly after the death of Pope Pelagius II to lead a penitential procession in hopes that such a demonstration of sorrow might prove the salvation of his city.

More keenly, though, Pope Gregory I hoped to save souls. What chiefly worried him was not disease but damnation. Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century biography of the Pope has him explain that “each one is snatched from life before he can turn to thoughts of penitence. Think, therefore, how he arrives in the presence of the severe judge when he has no time to atone for what he has done.” Gregory and Rome with him hope the plague will stop, but in the meantime, the procession aims primarily to save the Romans from dying unprepared. Every Roman, like everyone, is a sinner, and mostly what can be done is “to take refuge in tears of penance when there is time to weep and before we are struck down.” Death will take us, now or later, but we might still avoid unending torment.

What is absent, in other words, is any particular blame. Plague follows the Tiber’s flooding, and its end occurs sometime after the procession, though not during it: as they wend their way through Rome, in the very midst of their piety, eighty penitents drop dead. But from there, they and those who watched them die expect them to go on to eternal felicity. As all must die, they must die too, but perhaps not hopelessly.

That universal concern for our general mortal condition is nowhere near as present in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The work is remembered for its formal peculiarities—its tabulations and calculations and its episodic attention to an ever-shifting set of victims and grifters—but no one can emerge from it, either, without feeling at least slightly uneasy about their neighbor’s behavior or even about their own. Though the Lord Mayor’s orders of late June 1665 seem, usefully enough, to target crowds (“loose persons and assemblies,” “public feasting,” “disorderly tippling in taverns, alehouses, coffee-houses, and cellars”), its chief targets are, obviously, any pleasure or activity or person, like the “swarms” of beggars, undevoted to the prevailing commonweal. It leaves unmolested any meeting for respectable commerce, for parliament, for hearing out the importunities of London’s citizens, or for study or experiment or dignified edification.

As dire as it was, the plague generated no reevaluation of values. There is no new form of care but only a crescendo of old condemnations from an office held by “a very solemn and religious gentleman”—historically speaking, John Lawrence, a businessman already inclined, one imagines, to wish to clean away the city’s beggars, alehouses, ballad-singing, and the like. Our narrator joins in this show of sobriety, complaining about an encounter with those “not afraid to blaspheme God and talk atheistically,” and praising, at length, a poor waterman whose faith is only increased by the likely mortal peril of his family, locked away from him in a house shut fast by plague. Piety, though, is not necessarily the right way either. For H.F. comes at last to condemn even those who abandon themselves too much to God: although God is reasonable insofar as he has “formed the whole scheme of nature and maintained nature in its course,” and majestic insofar as he might execute through means either natural or supernatural either “mercy or justice” (note the terrifying brevity of that two-item list!), anyone who decides that God’s overwhelming power means nothing needs to be done – that, our narrator insists, is nothing but “a kind of Turkish predestinarianism.”

We remain in this time of blame. Many of us are certain that bad actors, indifferent to the general good, are keeping our present plague going. But we also have something else: we moralize, some of us, and we thereby lift ourselves up, transfiguring our discomfort and inconvenience into sacrifice and semi-secularized penance. We grouse, some of us, at watching others whom we know to be tedious or otherwise burdened with a host of venial social faults apotheosize themselves by the simple expedient of donning a mask or by getting the jab expeditiously. Anyone reading this is likely already vaccinated: we did it to help others, to help ourselves, to save our families, to save what remains, to help ourselves by finally being able to lounge poolside someplace just warm enough. We did it for whatever reason. The others too have their own reasons, not all of them reducible to antisocial cussedness. What each side possesses, though, is, mostly, the ease of certainty.

Certainty is not what Gregory’s procession offers, nor, finally, does Defoe offer it either. The Journal of the Plague Year, of course, particularizes blame in a way Gregory’s Rome does not, but that particularization wanders, as H.F. does, always landing somewhere not quite foreseen. The Journal leaves us uncertain precisely about what we ought to do in the face of God’s majesty or the implacable plague. A posture of sobriety is necessary, but that would be necessary anyway for anyone with a streak of mercantile respectability.

It’s easy to hit an easy target. I’m not sure when you’re reading this but, as hard as this might be to believe, in late Summer 2021, a host of Americans were poisoning themselves with a multipurpose ointment, as helpless against Covid as it is effective against equine worms. Most of them, we have to assume, took it because they didn’t want to die. People are scared. Nothing could be simpler than mockery, nothing simpler than acquiring the congratulations the mocker gives themselves by jeering.

Gregory’s procession, a universal attempt to set ourselves right amid an inevitable mortality, at least targets those puffed up and convinced of their own perfect health: that condition, as always, is temporary, and more temporary now than usual. We cannot help but blame others, but Defoe’s blame, swirled as it is in uncertainty, without being inclined to elevate the observer H.F. into a hero, might be the best model the rest of us can imitate, while we too await mercy, or justice.

Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

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The Fire the Next Year

Carly Yingst

The Violence of the Distemper, when it came to its Extremity, was like the Fire the next Year; The Fire, which consumed what the Plague could not touch, defied all the Application of Remedies; the Fire Engines were broken, the Buckets thrown away, and the Power of Man was baffled and brought to an End.

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

Looking back at 1665 from 1722, the “Fire the next Year”—the fire of 1666—appears as a strange kind of afterthought in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (35). Although the journal’s narrator, H.F., clearly marks it as a disaster, one comparable to the plague his Journal narrates, Defoe nevertheless uses it primarily as that: a means of comparison. In just a few words, he invokes the suffering and destruction of the next year’s crisis, but he ultimately does so not to describe that catastrophe, but to make the distress of the plague more palpable. One might pause to wonder whether H.F.—likely a survivor of the fire as well as of the plague—has stories to tell of the conflagration as he as of the pestilence. But one crisis, it seems, at a time.

That Defoe’s concern when he began writing was with the plague, not the fire, is understandable. Writing in the immediate wake of the 1720 outbreak of the plague in Marseilles, Defoe turns back to the last great plague in London in a way not unlike the many who, two hundred years later, have turned to Defoe’s novel in the face of the spread of Covid-19. It was the plague that Defoe had reason to recall to mind. Yet, over a year following that renewal of public interest in Defoe’s narrative—hailed as a “guide book” with “startling parallels” to our own moment—one might query how Defoe relegates the last great fire to the margins of the last great plague, as news of Covid-19 shares more and more space with news of wildfires that, in the summer and fall of 2021 alone, have devastated entire towns from California to British Columbia, burnt through tens of thousands of acres of sequoia groves, and engulfed the Mediterranean and Siberia.

I started thinking about the Journal’s brief mentions of the fire in mid-June, amid news of the heat dome descending over parts of Canada and the United States and the heatwave in the Middle East, with temperatures hitting 50 degrees Celsius—but before the U.S. surge of the Delta coronavirus variant began in July. When I started thinking about this moment in relation to pandemic life and recovery, that is, it was possible to believe we were in fact recovering, at least from Covid-19. I wanted, then, to raise a series of questions about how Defoe’s two crises might help us think about the ways we have been pivoting between disasters, with the recovery from one seeming to mark the intensification of another. The pandemic lockdowns, as many observed, sent carbon emissions plunging as the economy ground to a halt, offering a flicker of hope that, in the internet’s terms, nature might be healing, returning like it does in Defoe’s plague-stricken London, where, with its bustling commerce suspended, “the great streets…and even the Exchange itself, had grass growing in them” (87). For those in the future—for those writing from the same distance from Covid-19 as Defoe wrote from the 1665 plague—I wanted to ask what the crisis of the past year might look like in retrospect. How would the pandemic of the past year be understood in relation to the fires of the next year? Would it become a footnote in relation to the greater, more immediate threats of climate instability? Would we return to treating the idea of plague as a disastrous metaphor, in the way one New York Times writer was able to in 2019, when she wrote that “Climate change might be our successor to the Black Death”? How might we understand the way that pandemic recovery—at least economic recovery—was not only met with news of climate disaster, but also, perhaps, drove that disaster further, with emissions levels ultimately recovering with the economy itself?

But that surge of the Delta variant has changed things. There is, now, no plague of this year and fire of next year, no clear narrative sequence that moves from one crisis to another, with one emerging while the other ends, as it was possible to imagine for a few months following the release of the vaccine. Those broader narrative forms, like Defoe’s, that would have us attend to one crisis at a time seem to be cracking under the pressure of this simultaneous rise of global temperatures and Covid-19 cases, failing against the backdrop of a wider challenge to structures for comprehending catastrophe. What we still call once-in-a-century storms and floods, for instance, are predicted soon to become annual occurrences, unsettling the sense of disaster as occurring at distant, periodic intervals. As the formerly slow rhythms of crisis rapidly accelerate, then, we are faced with a challenge similar to that posed by the overlap of pandemic and wildfire: how to both imagine and respond to a tangle of multiple, ongoing crises, related yet distinct.

From an imagined retrospective position, looking back on the present from a distance of sixty years, perhaps the particular tangle of climate crisis and pandemic will still be unraveled into a clearer narrative. Perhaps 2020’s catastrophe will ultimately be a brief note relative to the more pressing history of how, to use Defoe’s words, the “power of man was baffled and brought to an end”—a history that might find its turning point not in 2020 but in 2021, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report sounded a “code red for humanity,” or when youth activists filed a petition with the United Nations to demand real climate mitigation measures following another round of apparently empty pledges from COP26 representatives. For now though, as we live through overlapping surges of plague and fire, reading news of both side by side, it remains difficult to imagine one becoming a footnote or metaphor for the other—almost as difficult as it is to try holding both crises in mind at once. Perhaps the question to ask of Defoe’s Journal now, then, is not how our twin crises fall into the retrospective model Defoe sketches, but whether that model can still be a guide for 2021 as it was for many in 2020. Perhaps the question to ask now is how we read the novel’s closing line, taken, as H.F. tells us, from the end of his “ordinary memorandums the same year they were written”: “Yet I alive!” (212). Can we still read that note of optimistic survival without imagining how H.F.’s own journal of disaster might have gone on, to tell of the fire, after these concluding words of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague? Can we still imagine a narrative of crisis with such a clear end?

Harvard University

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Edited by Louis Landa, Oxford University Press, 1969.

 

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Bubble Fever: A New Audio Play, Based on the Works of Daniel Defoe and Other Sources

David Fletcher, Writer and Director; Jonathan Fletcher, Producer and Composer; Loft Theatre Company, Performers

Photo of staged version of the play. One younger woman in a pink dress and an older man sit at a table strewn with papers and documents.

Pictured: Laura Hayward (as Hannah Defoe) and Robert Lowe (as Daniel Defoe).
Photo Credit: David Fletcher

Written and directed by David Fletcher

Performed by the Loft Theatre Company, in association with the History Department of the University of Warwick

Recording produced and music composed by Jonathan Fletcher

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A Journal of the Plague Year as a Sequel to Robinson Crusoe

Ala Alryyes

REFLECTING ON his own thoughtless lack of preparation for the Plague, H.F., Defoe’s narrator in A Journal of the Plague Year, enumerates his “Family of Servants” (“an antient Woman, that managed the House, a Maid-Servant, two Apprentices and my self”), and describes how he employs his time “writing down my Memorandums of what occurred to me every Day, and out of which, afterwards, I [took] most of this Work as it relates to my Observations without Doors” (8, 75-6). Hierarchy and solitude; a journal kept and a special sense of being set apart (if not called); fear for “the preservation of my life in so dismal a Calamity” and a desire for “carrying on my Business [and preserving] all my Effects in the World” are but a few of the similarities between A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Robinson Crusoe (1719). Just as Crusoe does, furthermore, H.F. considers “seriously with my Self … how I should dispose of my self” (8) and believes Providence to be directly involved in his fate. (Although, as his merchant brother warns H.F., such surrender of the will to “Predestinating Notions” comes dangerously close to the fatal “Presumption of the Turks and Mahometans in Asia and in other Places” [11].) More centrally and formally, just like Robinson Crusoe, A Journal pretends to document a disaster that reduces the narrator to living a mostly solitary life, describing many men and women almost reduced like Crusoe to “a meer State of Nature” (Robinson 118). And, it is the ambivalence of the state of nature, which functions as a sort of a bridge between states of war and of civil society, that I want to explore today.

In my paper, I will make the case that we can read or ought to read A Journal of the Plague Year partially as one afterlife of Robinson Crusoe, especially when it comes to H.F.’s interpolated story of the “Three Men,” in whose debates and actions the boundaries of war and peace, of force, constraint and consent, are negotiated anew, as the Plague calls forth a new “social contract.” Crusoe’s solitude and ingenuity as well as his struggle for sovereignty (which is also a struggle to define his political position) over his island are here recast into the isolation of the three men, who join together their various areas of practical knowledge in order to survive in a “Native Country” that would deny them the right to move and to live (for to move is to live) (124). It is not only their skills and gumption that resonate with Crusoe’s, however, but their war-colored reasoning and self-justification in response to the breakdown of the political norms of everyday life. Peter DeGabriele has admirably written about the matter of survival for H.F. and A Journal’s hesitation between isolation and community (his keyword is “intimacy”). As he puts it, “what Defoe’s protagonists repeatedly discover is that the social contract and the civil society to which it gives birth do not provide anything like the total security against the problems that come from interacting with others” (1). Although I fully agree with him that “the civil society that Defoe represents is plagued by the persistence of the laws that govern the state of nature” (1), I would stress a different provenance of such laws and a different understanding of the formative role of the fiction of the State of Nature for Defoe, which I will take up a bit later.

My central focus today will be on war and “peace” and the three men. But I’d like first to examine briefly how Defoe uses war more generally to depict London’s plight during the Plague. Defoe’s thinking with war in A Journal exemplifies a central structuring element of his fiction and thought. War was a major interest of his: in An Essay upon Projects (1697), Defoe praises the advance of science in his age, and notes:

the Art of War, which I take to be the highest Perfection of Human Knowledge, is a sufficient Proof of what I say, especially in conducting Armies and in offensive Engines. Witness … the new sorts of Bombs and unheard-of Motors of seven to ten ton Weight, with which our Fleets, standing two or three Miles off at Sea, can imitate God Almighty Himself, and rain Fire and Brimstone out of Heaven, as it were, upon Towns built on the firm Land. (3)

Juxtaposing rational and supernatural elements, Defoe’s wondrous assessment of war’s “art” in this early work is of a piece with his representations of war in later fictional worlds. (Scholars have not sufficiently addressed this mythopoeic function of war in Defoe’s writings, one related to, but not identical with Defoe’s moral, commercial, or patriotic attitudes towards war.)

Thus, in A Journal, one unifying compositional technique is to portray the Plague as a virtual war. Some prescient Dutch merchants, H.F. remarks, “kept their Houses like little Garrisons besieged, suffering none to go in or out, or come near them” (55). Physicians, venturing and losing their lives “in the Service of Mankind,” were “destroyed by that very Enemy they directed others to oppose” (35-6). Some of the infected “walk’d the Streets till they fell down Dead, not that they were suddenly struck with the Distemper, as with a Bullet that kill’d with the Stroke” (168). The war metaphor—or rather cluster of metaphors—allows Defoe to depict the Plague as both crushingly real and intangibly elusive. War, in short, brings together the suffering of the victims and the power of the Plague, but also its relentlessness, cruelty, unpredictability, and—as with modern war—anonymity.

But the war conceit allows Defoe to accomplish a rarity. As the disease almost destroys London’s population—just as quick lime does the corpses thrown willy-nilly in collective pits—Defoe manages a remarkable “reportorial” feat: he evokes a whole and represents “society.” Defoe accomplishes this unity of representation by following a number of narrative strategies. Whereas, as we know, Defoe’s novelistic heroes are solitary individuals, Defoe makes London his hero in A Journal of the Plague Year, in addition to his narrator. “London might well be said to be all in Tears,” writes H.F., who wonders that “the whole Body of the People did not rise as one Man, and abandon their Dwellings” (16, 19). Despite the extraordinary variety of incidents and fates suffered by the citizens of London—which H.F. distinguishes parish by parish—Defoe impressively renders wholes. Even when he describes people leaving the city, he reverses the terms of part and whole: “indeed one would have thought the very City it self was running out of the Gates” (94). Defoe manages to intermesh a fictional memoir with what Charlotte Sussman has termed a “fiction of population,” which “narrates the story of a corporate entity” (192).

Let us now go back to the matter of the “state of nature” and consider how Defoe, the fiction maker, uses it. Questions regarding the state of nature allowed political philosophers and jurists both to probe the nature of domestic sovereignty and to engage in thought experiments that supported colonial expansion and in which war figured prominently. Literary and cultural scholars tend to think of the state of nature as a conceptual device that political philosophers used to theorize the rise and development of pacific civic politics and rights from discussions of natural rights. We are used to the narrative that sees John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau opposing an essentially peaceable natural man to Hobbes’s bellicose one. But the state of nature—and here Hobbes and Locke are not far apart—can only be fully understood if we take stock of the fact that natural law was used to theorize the rights of war and peace domestically, within the European state system, and globally in the European colonial context. Indeed, as the political theorists Richard Tuck and James Tully have shown, anatomies of the state of nature in the seventeenth century were often intertwined with novel arguments for rights of war, possession, and punishment.

In theorizing the transition from a presumed past simple existence to the conditions of current European civil life, seventeenth-century political thinkers produced imaginary genealogies that began with the putative past experience of “the individual placed in the apolitical or prepolitical condition of the state of nature,” rooting their new science in “the terrible vulnerability of the individual reduced to his or her own forces,” as Pierre Manent argues (23). By imbuing the original political scene with war and its passions, Grotius and his descendants Hobbes and Locke gave birth to political narratives of association that also reflected and justified the existential reality of the European state at war in the seventeenth century. Solitude, which shapes Crusoe’s psychology on the island, structures how the novel intermeshes his subjectivity and his worldly apprehensions, a word that neatly bundles senses of understanding, fear, and possession, thus epitomizing the very fabric of Defoe’s novel. That to which Robinson Crusoe condemns its hero is what Enlightenment thinkers agreed was the beginning and precondition of knowledge. (Descartes’ remarkable thought experiment, staged in his Meditations on First Philosophy [1641], is fundamental in this regard.) Yet not only have hypothetical scenes of solitude shaped modern epistemology; they have also molded modern political thought, underpinning “state of nature” and natural law arguments that structure Crusoe’s stance towards his “barbarian” enemies. The natural law tradition was widespread in the seventeenth century, and, as Maximillian Novak has explained, “as a child of his age, Defoe formulated his own scheme of natural law, and by borrowing, combining, and emphasizing various concepts in the writings of Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and many other philosophers, he was able to achieve a certain eclectic originality” (3).

I argue elsewhere that Defoe’s representations of his hero’s achievements—both Crusoe’s astute seafaring and his later claims to sovereignty and possession of “his” island—build on extraliterary systems of knowledge in which war offers blueprints for grasping (the politics of) colonial encounters and global space. War thought in A Journal similarly lays bare and as it were dissects communal ties in the strange interpolated story of the Three Men, related by the narrator. When the contagion finally attacks the “Easter-most Part” of London, coming upon the residents “like an armed Man,” three poor men who have lingered so far decide to escape the city. The men—one, “an old soldier, but now a Biscuit Baker; the other a lame sailor, but now a Sail-maker; the Third, a Joiner”—enact a kind of a philosophical dialogue and a series of encounters in which the boundaries of war and peace, of constraint and consent, are negotiated anew, as a new “social contract” is called forth by the Plague. The men’s professions and skills, as it turns out, both fit into the realist vignette and its symbolic referent. As they set to leave the infected city, Thomas, the sail-maker, reminds John, the old soldier, that previous escapees have reported that “the People offered to fire at them if they pretended to go forward.” John answers that he would have faced their fire, and to Thomas’s ribbing that “you talk your old Soldier’s language, as if you were in the Low-Countries now,” John retorts, he would “plunder no Body; but for any town upon the Road to deny me Leave to pass thro’ the Town in the open High-Way, and deny me Provisions for my Money, is to say the Town has a Right to starve me to Death, which cannot be true” (123). John further insists that “the whole Kingdom is my native Country as well as [London]” and that, as he “was born in England,” he has the right to move about and live in it. The Plague, in effect, revivifies and makes urgent the ancient concept of the “King’s Highway”: no threat, John insists, should deny the three travellers their freedom of movement. The nation can be imagined only in terms of the collective arts of resistance to the Plague, itself envisioned as a war that has effaced social ties and topographical markers.

Isolated and skillful, the three men resemble Robinson Crusoe, though their story is more socially nuanced. The Joyner has “a small bag of tools”; the sailor, using his “Pocket Compass,” advises them on the safest route to follow considering the current wind’s direction; the sail-maker makes a tent for the group. The story also reproduces the ambiguity of peace and hostility in Defoe’s earlier novel. Determined to be as self-sufficient as possible, they set out, “three Men, one Tent, one Horse, one Gun, for the Soldier … said he was no more a Biscuit-Baker but a Trooper” (127). Fear of contagion, unsurprisingly, sets the residents of the surrounding boroughs against these escaping Londoners. As the brothers attempt to walk north, the Constables of Walthamstow obstinately refuse them entry and supplies. John comes up with a military plan that echoes Crusoe’s assumption of the role and aura of the invisible “Governour” in Robinson Crusoe. He first “sets the Joyner Richard to Work to cut some Poles of the Trees, and shape them as like Guns as he could, and in a little time he had five or six fair muskets, which at a Distance would not be known.” Just as he rejects any one’s right to besiege him to death, John pretends to enact a siege on the town. The town people are tricked into believing that the travellers had “Horses and Arms,” and decide to parley.

Defoe fits circumstantial realism into an overall plot. He also skillfully ties material representation and genre. The “guns” fool the people both because of the men’s distance and because “about the Part where the Lock of the Gun is, [John] caused them to wrap Cloths and Rags, such as they had, as Soldiers do in wet Weather.” By a sort of an optical illusion—one that mimics the consensual “suspension of belief” in a historical play (“Oh, for a muse of fire”), say, where a few arms and a fire stand for a whole regiment of soldiers—he deceives the people into believing a large crowd has encamped just outside their town. This dramatic conceit resonates with the form of the narrative at this point, which switches to a dialogue between John and the constable. H.F. then supplements his scene with a number of footnotes that clarify John’s tactics. When the constable arrives, the old soldier asks, “what do ye want,” and H.F. explains, “It seems John was in the Tent, but hearing them call he steps out, and taking the Gun upon his Shoulder, talk’d to them as if he had been the Sentinel plac’d there upon the Guard by some Officer that was his Superior.” Yet the plain dialogue form also accentuates the conceit of the narrative as a nascent “social contract.” Refusing the demand to go back “from whence [they] came,” because “a stronger Enemy than you keeps us from doing that,” John cleverly offers that “we have encamp’d here, and here we will live.” His argument, that “if you stop us here, you must keep us … and furnish us with Victuals,” seems to convince the town officials of their obligation.

This show of hostility, remarkably, forces an explicit consideration and a tacit acknowledgment of societal ties. The incorporation of war in the analysis of normative social relation should not surprise is, echoing as it does almost all modern narratives of the rise of civil society. Defoe uses this skirmish to emplot a “social contract” in which new consensual relations are thrashed out. As Defoe concludes, “John wrought so upon the Townsmen by talking thus rationally and smoothly to them, that they went away; and tho’ they did not give any consent to their staying there, yet they did not molest them” (144; emphasis mine). As we see, the Plague makes society by animating dead but key metaphors of individual rights and association and by instituting new forms of social communication. Both, then, by means of the overarching metaphor of warfare and invasion and by the interpolated narrative of the three men, A Journal of the Plague Year conjures and represents society. His portrayal (although Defoe doesn’t use the word itself) is all the more interesting for taking place early in the century which, as Raymond Williams pointed out, witnessed a profound change in the meaning of “society,” from “companionship or fellowship” to “our most general term for the body of institutions and relationships” and as “a system of common life” (243).

Queens College, City University of New York

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. Essays Upon Several Projects: or, Effectual Ways for Advancing the interest of the Nation, London, 1702. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, http://find.gale.com.queens.ezproxy.cuny.edu/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=cuny_queens&tabID=T001&docId=CW115925382&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.

——. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Edited by Louis Landa, Oxford University Press, 1969.

——. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. 1719. Edited by J. Donald J. Crowley, Oxford University Press, 1972.

De Gabriele, Peter. Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political. Bucknell University Press, 2015.

Manent, Pierre. Metamorphoses of the City. Translated by Marc Lepain, Harvard University Press, 2013.

Novak, Maximilian. Defoe and the Nature of Man. Oxford University Press, 1963.

Sussman, Charlotte. “Memory and Mobility: Fictions of Population in Defoe, Goldsmith, and Scott.” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, edited by Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, pp. 191-213.

Tuck, Richard. The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Tully, James. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, 1976.

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Re-Humanizing Robinson

Christopher Borsing

IN APRIL 1713, Daniel Defoe published a political polemic with the rather arresting title, An Answer to the Question that No Body Thinks of, Viz. But What if the Queen Should Die? His monarch and indirect employer, Queen Anne, was at that time gravely ill and would indeed later die in August of the following year. This paper will now propose, “An Answer to a Question That No Body Thinks of, Viz. But What If the Imperialist-Colonialist-So-Called-King Crusoe Should Die?” It is not intended to be provocative nor merely contrarian but simply aims to restore balance to a certain image of Defoe’s fictional character that has reigned supreme for over a hundred years.

Clark and Pine’s well-known woodcut frontispiece from the first edition of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe depicts a bearded weaponized survivalist on a deserted island, staking out European Civilization in the New World. This enduring image of the shipwrecked sailor gained some refinement with Leslie Stephen’s late-Victorian assessment of Crusoe as emblematic of Englishmen of the time:

shoving their intrusive persons into every quarter of the globe; evolving a great empire out of a few factories in the East; winning the American continent for the dominant English race; sweeping up Australia by the way as a convenient settlement for convicts; stamping firmly and decisively on all toes that got in their way; blundering enormously and preposterously, and yet always coming out steadily planted on their feet; eating roast-beef and plum-pudding. (46)

James Joyce later identified Crusoe as “the true prototype of the British colonist” (24). American academic sources have lately whispered that the current student generation disdains reading Robinson Crusoe as not cool—in the postcolonialist world, the story of an eighteenth-century English slave trader is a canonical embarrassment. However, this paper will argue that such an understanding is deformed by a partial and limited access to only the first of Defoe’s Crusoe trilogy. It will argue that Defoe’s lesser-known sequel The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe undermines any picture that Crusoe may have peddled of himself as global ambassador for militant English Christianity. In the errant course of his colonial, commercial, and religious account of circumnavigation from the Americas to Africa, from India to China to Siberia and back to England, he repeatedly, if only metaphorically, shoots himself in the foot. The Farther Adventures is a narrative of empire unravelling delivered by the designated author of the original albeit fictional imperial script. As such, it is a vital text for today at the other end, as it were, of the chronological telescope.

Defoe’s first volume may bring Crusoe home wealthy and secure, but the sequel quickly establishes its hero’s disillusionment. Crusoe may set himself up as a country gentleman in Bedfordshire as he once occupied his country seat on a Caribbean island, but this self-appointed governor proves of little note in his native land, the modern nation-state. Following the death of his wife, Crusoe realizes that “it is not one Farthing Matter to the rest of his Kind, whether he be dead or alive” (10). When his nephew, a sea captain, offers him a berth on a trading voyage to the East Indies, enabling a return visit to his island as he had long dreamed of, Crusoe joyfully accepts. He advises the reader, as in a helpful footnote, that “Nothing can be a greater Demonstration of a future state, and of the Existence of an invisible World, than the Concurrence of Second Causes, with the Ideas of Things, which we form in our Minds, perfectly reserv’d, and not communicated to any in the World” (10). His renewed faith in the alignment of his inner visions with Providence restores his urge to command so that when, on the Atlantic crossing, a ship is seen on fire in the night it is Crusoe, not the captain, who takes charge: “I immediately order’d, that five Guns should be fir’d” (14). This is the Crusoe, so confident, so masterful, so bossy, that so many of us have learned to love or to loathe.

However, when he reaches his island, his account becomes so much taken up with third-party narratives of what had happened during his absence, and with the current activities and relationships of the Spanish, English and Carib colonists, that Crusoe must remind himself that he “shall not make Digressions into other Men’s Stories, which have no Relation to my own” (30). After giving blessing to the settlers’ own chosen arrangements, and hosting a farewell feast, he attaches himself to his nephew’s onward voyage to the Spice Islands. As he departs, Crusoe recognizes that he was by no means a colonist, much less a Crown imperialist:

I pleas’d myself with being the Patron of those People I plac’d there, and doing for them in a kind of haughty majestic Way, like an old patriarchal Monarch … But I never so much as pretended to plant in the Name of any Government or Nation; or to acknowledge any Prince, or to call my People Subjects to any one Nation more than another; nay, I never so much as gave the Place a Name; but left it as I found it belonging to no Body.” He vows: “I have now done with my Island, and all Manner of Discourse about it. (125)

After berating himself for such a lack of imperial spirit, he blithely points out that had he stayed on the island or returned to Lisbon as was offered, “you had never heard of the second Part of the Travels and Adventures of Robin. Crusoe; so I must leave here the fruitless exclaiming at my self, and go on with my Voyage” (127). At all times, he must act as the hero of his own tale for the pleasure of his readers.

J. A. Downie suggests, in his 1983 article, “Defoe, Imperialism, and the Travel Books Reconsidered,” that Crusoe acts as an adventurer who “clears the ground for the level-headed hard-working settler to follow” (82). An adventurer takes risks, seeks out the short cut to a quick profit, prefers not to hang around for consequences but hunts the next prize. This is a reasonable psychological portrait of Crusoe that precludes any systematic, overarching imperialist masterplan to govern foreign lands and their inhabitants. His first venture to Africa returned almost three hundred pounds for an investment of forty pounds. The second venture, on the other hand, resulted in capture by corsairs and being sold into Moorish slavery. After escape and rescue by a Portuguese ship, early financial success in the Brazilian plantations ensured “my Head began to be full of Projects and Undertakings beyond my Reach” (126), leading to an illegal venture to obtain African slaves for the plantations, a venture that shipwrecked him on an uninhabited island for twenty-eight years. Some you win. Some you lose.

As Crusoe admits, after leaving his island the second time, he had no business continuing a voyage around the world on his nephew’s ship. By the time they reach India, the ship’s crew are in full agreement and demand he be set ashore. Dwelling in a Bengal boarding-house for the next nine months, considering his options, Crusoe reflects that “I was now alone in the remotest Part of the World, as I think I may call it; for I was near three thousand Leagues by Sea farther off from England, than I was at my Island” (143). Another Englishman persuades him into a joint venture, a thousand pounds each, for a trading voyage to China. At this point, Crusoe clarifies that he is not only not an imperialist or colonist; he is not even homo economicus, for it is not the promise of profit that motivates him: “if Trade was not my Element, Rambling was, and no Proposal for seeing any Part of the World which I had never seen before, could possibly come amiss to me” (144). This is not the man to send on any organized expedition: tempted by any novel prospect, or short cut to wealth, he will always stray into more strange and surprising adventures. Yet profit the partners do, so enormously that Crusoe can now understand how those East India Company nabobs return to England bearing fortunes of sixty to seventy thousand pounds. And, of course, he gets greedy. Offered a Dutch coaster at a knock-down price, Crusoe persuades his partner that owning their own ship would be even more profitable; however, he adds, “we did not, I confess, examine into Things so exactly as we ought” (147). Why would you, indeed?

They trade profitably for the next six years, but when they put into the Bay of Siam for repairs, an English sailor gives fair warning that Dutch and English ships are moored upriver. Crusoe now learns that their ship had been seized in an act of piracy, and that they are being hunted as outlaws facing summary execution. As they take an evasive route towards Formosa, Crusoe realizes that he was “as much afraid of being seen by a Dutch or English Merchant Ship, as a Dutch or English Merchant Ship in the Mediterranean is of an Algerine Man of War” (159). In truth, Crusoe has been taking to the dark side for some time, perhaps fulfilling postcolonialist interpretations not only in creating and projecting an Orientalist Other, but also in identifying with and becoming that Other. Certainly, the sailors who reject him at Bengal believe he is no longer one of them, at least not since Madagascar. Ah, you ask, what happened in Madagascar? Some perfectly peaceable natives who had welcomed and traded with the sailors suddenly attacked them in the night. The attack is fought off and the ship’s cannon fired in the direction of the village. Crusoe later learns that a crewman had abducted and raped a local young woman, naturally provoking the villagers’ anger. Dispatched to assess the effect of the cannon shot, sailors discover the body of their comrade, the rapist, tied naked to a tree and with his throat cut. This incites them to bloody revenge, burning huts and killing all who would escape. Coming on the commotion, Crusoe tries to save some women, but sailors greet him as though he is there to help round up and dispatch the villagers. Seeing flames and hearing screams and gunfire, the captain, his nephew, his own flesh-and-blood, hastens to the rescue from the ship with more men and promptly joins in with the slaughter. Appalled, Crusoe compares the scene to Cromwell’s action at Drogheda, “killing Man, Woman and Child,” and to Tilly’s sack of Magdeburg, “cutting the Throats of 22000 of all Sexes” (136). As they voyage north along the East African coast, alienation grows between Crusoe and the ship’s crew. When five men venture onto the Arabian shore and disappear, either killed or enslaved, Crusoe brands the men “with the just Retribution of Heaven” (136). As so often, however, with his homespun theology, he is challenged when the boatswain observes dryly that none of the missing men had been involved in the massacre since they had been left behind to guard the ship. Crusoe’s temporary silence soon gives way however to further preaching and scolding which finally drives the crew to cast him ashore. Much later, as they repair a leak on shore in the Gulf of Tonkin, Crusoe and his new crew fight off another native attack but Crusoe is happy to report that their defence is effected without bloodshed,

for I was sick of killing such poor Savage Wretches, even tho’ it was in my own Defence, knowing they came on Errands which they thought just, and knew no better; and that tho’ it may be a just Thing, because necessary, for there is no necessary Wickedness in Nature, yet I thought it a sad Life, which we must be always oblig’d to be killing our Fellow-Creatures to preserve, and indeed I think so still. (158)

Crusoe is a long way from the shipwrecked sailor who once boasted a double-entry tally of dead cannibals.

Far from being a one-dimensional portrait of a white supremacist Englishman, it is possible that Crusoe is a hybrid fabrication. Traditional and common understanding has taught that the fictional Crusoe originated in the history of the Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk. William Dampier, as commander of the ship St. George, had left Selkirk on Juan Fernandez Island off the coast of Chile in 1704, following a dispute. Some four years later, sailing under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers, Dampier witnessed the sailor’s recollection. Selkirk had survived by singing hymns, reading the Bible, and dancing with goats. Rogers brought this castaway’s account to public attention in his 1712 travel narrative, A Cruising Voyage Round the World. As it happened, Juan Fernandez Island had earlier featured in Dampier’s 1697 account, A New Voyage Round the World. This records that Dampier visited the island, in passing, to look out for a Moskito Indian accidentally abandoned three years previously by a Captain Watlin when he had hastily set sail under pressure from marauding Spanish warships. Dampier found the Moskito to be alive and well. Stranded so unexpectedly, his only possessions had been a gun, a knife, a small horn of powder, a few shot, and his clothes. After the powder and ammunition were spent, he used the knife to saw the gun-barrel into small pieces. Heating these in a fire struck off the gun-flint against the gun-barrel, he fashioned harpoons, hooks, lances and another knife. He lived on goats and fish, built a hut lined with goatskins and, when his clothes disintegrated, tailored a goatskin to wear about the waist. Dampier remarks that “All this may seem strange to those that are not acquainted with the Sagacity of the Indians; but it is no more than these Moskito Men are accustomed to in their own Country.” When the castaway identified Dampier’s approaching ship as English, he slaughtered three goats and dressed them with cabbage for a welcoming feast: “He then came to the Seaside to congratulate our safe Arrival” (52). As cool and as courteous a host as the best Crusoe imaginable.

Does Crusoe become a humane, tolerant twenty-first-century man? No, he does not. Defoe’s two-part adventure narrative is no nineteenth-century bildungsroman. He does not develop as a model of improvement for the benefit of his readers. After travelling through China, continually emphasising Chinese inferiority to Western civilization and lambasting European addiction to silks and other luxury items that draw off English bullion and depress the English wool trade, Crusoe is happy to reach Christian Muscovy. However, widespread worship of idols soon appals him. A Scottish merchant assures him that the native people, apart from garrisoned Russian soldiers, are the worst of pagans. When Crusoe encounters “an old Stump of a Tree, an Idol made of Wood, frightful as the Devil, at least as any Thing we can think of to represent the Devil can be made” (192), Crusoe becomes so apoplectic with rage that he decides to attack it. His pragmatic Scottish friend advises him that this could lead to war between the Tartars and Muscovites and adds that the last person who had caused such offence was shot full of arrows and burned as a sacrifice. Crusoe tells him how the similar fate of a sailor in Madagascar had led to a wholesale and bloody massacre. Incredibly, though, instead of reiterating and reinforcing his previous condemnation of such behaviour in that overbearing self-righteous manner that had turned his nephew’s crew against him, he now proposes that they should obliterate the pagan village in the same thorough and bloody manner. In the end, he merely captures local priests and forces them to watch their idol-god burn. The next day, he slinks away amongst a caravan of travellers, denying any knowledge of the night’s incendiary activities.

Overwintering in the Siberian capital of Tobolski, on the last part of his global tour, Crusoe overhears a Prince, a minister banished from Moscow, discourse on the might and magnificence of the Russian Emperor and all his possessions. Crusoe simply cannot restrain himself, loudly interrupting, “I was a greater and more powerful Prince than ever the Czar of Muscovy was tho’ my Dominions were not so large, or my People so many.” Admittedly he makes it clear to his reader, if not initially to his audience, that his announcement is an exaggeration and a banter of “Riddles in Government” (205). He has yet to learn the additional irony that a letter has been chasing him around the world, imploring him to rescue his people from his island. The sobering truth is that they are indeed no longer “so many” and that the island is long lost to any European control.

Crusoe is variously deluded, brave, foolish, resourceful, cowardly, generous, tyrannical, and ridiculous. Crusoe is recognizably human. And we are all subject to cultural bias and formation. In his introduction to his 1997 biography, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe, Richard West explains how he became fascinated by his subject in part because of a common involvement in professional journalism but also because Defoe, had he lived in modern times, would doubtless have shared West’s position as a Eurosceptic, rejecting the role of Brussels in British affairs quite as much as he had refused and deplored any interference by the French Catholic monarch. This came as quite surprising news to me. Surely, I thought, there are not still people who seriously imagined, towards the end of the twentieth century, that Britain should turn back the clock and withdraw from the European Union? They’ll invoke the Second World War next, I mused to myself amused, or resurrect Shakespearian myths of the battles of Crécy and Agincourt. How little did I know. How foolish ignorance will always appear in hindsight.

It has not been easy to get a copy of The Farther Adventures in the English language for the past hundred years or more. You would have better luck in translation. The default edition in continental Europe consists of the first two volumes of the Crusoe trilogy. This was the common edition in the English language throughout the nineteenth century. Melissa Free’s article “Un-Erasing ‘Crusoe’” analyses this book history and offers an explanation which, I believe, lends support to my argument that Defoe’s second volume, The Farther Adventures, challenges the narrative of Crusoe as a template for British imperialism. In the Victorian era of high imperial prowess, Robinson Crusoe was regarded as an ideal book for boys, presented as a school prize or as a family gift to mark a rite of passage, such as a birthday. Free notes, however, a steep decline in publication of the second volume following World War I. The British Empire had already suffered its first real military defeat in the First Boer War and fin-de-siècle anxieties of ascending rival powers and the waning of the British Empire appeared well-founded, compounded by the homecoming traumas of young soldiers, survivors of the Great War. Omitting the second volume of Crusoe’s adventures would conveniently preclude a rising generation from reading about failures in colonial administration, or bloodthirsty massacres of unarmed natives by British sailors, or the expansion of Chinese power into the Western world or the crude desecration of other people’s temples of worship by a crazed Englishman. On the other hand, of course, the first volume would remain as stand-alone testament to Crusoe’s mastery of his destiny in far-distant lands.

Early on in his enforced stay on the island Crusoe reflects, “had any one in England been to meet such a Man as I was, it must either have frighted them, or rais’d a great deal of Laughter” (168). Defoe depicts Crusoe as perfectly aware of the absurdity of his own image and did not offer him up as an idol for either worship or destruction. 2019 has marked the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Volumes One and Two. At least two new editions of The Farther Adventures are soon to be published. Happy Birthday, Robinson.

Trinity College, Dublin

WORKS CITED

Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World: The Journal of an English Buccaneer, 1697. Hummingbird, 1998.

Defoe, Daniel. An Answer to a Question That No Body Thinks of, viz. But What If the Queen Should Die? London, 1713.

⸺. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Edited by W. R. Owens, Pickering & Chatto, 2008.

⸺. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Edited by W. R. Owens, Pickering & Chatto, 2008.

Downie, J. A. “Defoe, Imperialism, and the Travel Book Reconsidered.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 13, 1983, pp. 66-83.

Free, Melissa. “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century.” Book History, vol. 9, 2006, pp. 89-130.

Joyce, James. “Daniel Defoe.” Translated by Joseph Prescott. Buffalo Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1964, pp. 1-25.

Stephen, Leslie. Hours in a Library. vol. 1, London, 1892. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20459.

West, Richard. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe. Harper Collins, 1997.

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The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe,” edited by John Richetti

J. A. Downie

The title of this volume is of interest: it is indeed a companion to Robinson Crusoe rather than a collection of critical essays on Defoe’s most famous narrative. There is comparatively little discussion of the actual text: Part I, “Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe: The Eighteenth Century” offers information on various contemporary contexts for Defoe’s narrative; Part II considers “Robinson Crusoe in the Wider World;” while Part III surveys “Robinson Crusoe over Three Hundred Years.”

After a short, unsigned Preface (but presumably by the editor) and a Chronology, the collection begins with J. Paul Hunter’s thought-provoking “Genre, Nature, Robinson Crusoe,” in which he “use[s] Defoe to point to some textual practices that cross habitual lines and think across received historical categories.” He goes on to list ten of these “textual traditions” before focussing on two: daily journals and Providence books. Interestingly, while acknowledging the strides that have been made in Defoe studies over recent years, Professor Hunter prefaces his remarks on these pre-existing “definable textual traditions” by confessing to two worries: first, about “using the troubled word ‘genre’ itself”; and second, about the teleological tendency which has developed over recent years to see Defoe as first and foremost a novelist. I am sure that the author of Before Novels is right to remind us that Defoe was an “explorer of narrative forms and methods.” I have independently argued that the challenge to readers’ horizons of expectation posed by Robinson Crusoe is often underestimated. No such compunction about teleology characterises Rivka Swenson’s “Robinson Crusoe and the Form of the new Novel,” in which she insists that the book “is a carefully crafted, formally self-aware narrative that the protagonist explicitly labors to fashion from life’s messy incidents and accidents.” Of course, it’s perfectly possible to interpret Crusoe’s errors and contradictions as “signal evidence” of Defoe’s conscious artistry—an attempt to write “splendid metafiction (a fiction about fiction, in this case a fiction about making and conveying fiction)”—and Professor Swenson writes persuasively about the narrative effect of the multifarious “seeming-errors” and “self-contradictions”—but I remain to be convinced that the majority of them are the consequence of anything other than sloppiness or forgetfulness on Defoe’s part. In this instance, I suggest, it is the ingenious critic who is doing the fiction-writing. There is, however, much to admire in Professor Swenson’s consideration of Defoe’s artistry in Robinson Crusoe, and it is the nearest we get in the collection to detailed literary criticism of the text. She is right to tease out the implications of Defoe’s description of the naked, sleeping Friday, “(a detail often missed),” observing that it treats the reader “to a kind of racist buffet consisting of black hair, tawny skin, white teeth.” As she points out, Coleridge’s famous remark that Crusoe is “the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself” really only applies if one is “English, Protestant, white, male, able-bodied, literate.” At the end of a succinct survey of Defoe’s lengthy writing career undertaken with the evident objective of suggesting that Crusoe “might be viewed as the inevitable result of his interests as a writer,” Maximillian E. Novak also comments on the consciousness of Defoe’s artistry to insist on “his achievements—both intellectual and writerly—during the period preceding the publication of his masterpiece.” In “Robinson Crusoe: Good Housekeeping, Gentility, and Property,” Pat Rogers returns to the theme of Crusoe as homo economicus, as well as revisiting Michael Shinagel’s notion of Defoe and “middle-class gentility.” He is absolutely right to maintain that when Defoe makes Crusoe refer to “the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life,” this does not equate to “the middle class” as we mean it today. In one of the best essays in the collection, G. A Starr considers Robinson Crusoe in relation to its sequels. His treatment of The Farther Adventures emphasises the importance of viewing the continuation as “a legitimate and worthy sequel,” and convincingly compares a number of its narrative concerns with Defoe’s other “so-called novels,” Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack. In all three, for instance, “the hero-narrator tends to be a reluctant or resistant spectator of violence rather than an initiator or supporter of it.” Professor Starr also identifies deliberative rhetoric as one of the distinctive characteristics of Defoe’s fiction, maintaining that the “productive tension” between storytelling and persuasion, which he argues is present throughout his writings of the 1720s, is seen in Serious Reflections in “undiluted form.” In the final essay in Part I, Rebecca Bullard argues that Robinson Crusoe engages the political philosophy of Filmer, Hobbes, and Locke.

It is not only the consideration of space which leads me to comment more briefly on the other essays. As the titles of Part II and Part III indicate, many of them consider Crusoe in relation to other texts. Thus after explaining the origins of the genre in “Innovation and Imitation in the Robinsonade,” Carl Fisher, without noticeably breaking new ground, considers representative examples of Anglo-American, French and German adaptations before concluding with five paragraphs on “Crusoe’s continuing afterlife.” Similarly, Helen Thompson’s treatment of philosophical and psychological implications of “The Crusoe Story” examines “Crusoe’s recombination of inductive and deductive forms of knowledge” in the context of treatises of the previous century such as Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning and An Essay concerning Humane Understanding. In “Robinson Crusoe and Travel Writing: The Transatlantic World,” on the other hand, Eve Tavor Bannet examines the relationship between Defoe’s narrative and eighteenth-century abridgments, beginning with the two earliest epitomes published in 1719 and 1722, respectively, to put forward the interesting argument that they “succeeded in turning Defoe’s narrative into a travel story full of information about the Atlantic world and the peoples in it,” by curtailing the long island section “to expand on Robinson’s encounters with, and survival of, the dangers presented by the larger Atlantic world.” This turns on its head Pat Rogers’s earlier observation in his 1982 “Classics and Chapbooks” essay (not cited) that it’s the shipwreck and the early part of Crusoe’s life of the island “that is never sacrificed, however abbreviated the text.” The final essay in Part II, Dennis Todd’s “Robinson Crusoe and Colonialism,” correctly notes that, despite what earlier commentators have argued, Defoe’s narrative fails to offer “a straightforward and unalloyed defense of his country’s colonial ventures.” He is right to point out that Defoe does not address commerce and trade in Robinson Crusoe itself, but that is patently not the case in The Farther Adventures which, as is the case with Professor Starr’s essay, once again raises the question whether interpretations of The Strange Surprizing Adventures should also take the sequel into account. After all, Crusoe revisits his island in The Farther Adventures before embarking on a lucrative trading voyage to China with the merchant he encounters in Bengal.

Part III opens with the late David Blewett’s valedictory essay on the subject he made his own, illustrations of Robinson Crusoe. Given his persuasive argument that the “compelling power of Clark and Pine’s drawing owes much to the fact that we see Crusoe, not in real time but rather as a timeless figure—the castaway,” I cannot help but wonder whether the ship in the frontispiece engraving is not meant to represent the shipwreck rather than, as Professor Blewett argues, the ship which finally delivers Crusoe from the island. Jill Campbell suggests that “the greatest ongoing impact” of Defoe’s “most famous novel” has been in the form of literature for children and young adults before proceeding to consider Robinsonades “aimed at a young readership, from the late eighteenth century to the present,” beginning with Campe’s Robinson Der Jüngere (1779-80) and Wyss’s Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812), through Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) to Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and O’Dell’s The Island of the Blue Dophins (1960), which introduced “one of the few girl-characters in [this] literary lineage.” In “Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century,” Anne Marie Fallon also pushes off from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Robinsonades before listing numerous examples from the second half of the twentieth century in which “alternative and antagonistic Robinson Crusoe, and a few Fridays, abound.” Selection is clearly an issue here. It is not surprising that Coetzee’s Foe puts in an appearance but, perhaps understandably given the brief, a lot of her treatment of the novel is in the form of plot summary—a formula which is repeated in the discussions of Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975), Julieta Campos’s The Fear of Losing Eurydice (1979), and Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter (1985). Similar issues present themselves in the concluding essay, Robert Mayer’s “Robinson Crusoe in the Screen Age,” which offers a useful survey of screen versions of Defoe’s tale from the earliest silent films to the twenty-first century, but returns time and again to Crusoe on Mars (1964) and the classic serialized version by Jean Sacha broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s.

Taken together, the essays in Part III, and some those in Part II, bring into play the implications of the observation with which I began this review: in what sense is this a “companion” to Robinson Crusoe; and what is the target audience? The blurb concludes by claiming that “By considering Defoe’s seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.” I’m not sure it does. I’m particularly concerned by the phrase, “a variety of critical perspectives,” because the reader is sold short on what I would regard as literary criticism of the text of Robinson Crusoe. What we are offered instead is a variety of contextual perspectives from the moment of the original publication of Defoe’s narrative right through to the twenty-first century. But that is not the same thing.

J. A. Downie

Goldsmiths, University of London

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Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Jason Farr

Kathleen Lubey

What is fiction in the Georgian era to do with deformity, impairment, corpulence, injury—with bodies that don’t promise normative reproductive futures? Jason Farr finds that eighteenth-century authors were less perplexed by this question than we might think. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature shows that disabled figures advanced live, open-ended debates about education, moral reform, degeneracy, gender, and sexuality. Farr’s purpose is to center such characters and show us varied conversations at work about how their bodies signify alternate social and sexual formations to normative structures. “Variably-embodied people” stand outside the boundaries of institutions that would privatize the body, and they display physical and epistemological differences that resist assimilation to conventional Enlightenment subjectivity. Written with enviable clarity and purpose, Novel Bodies makes central and transformative the pervasive presence of disabled figures in the literary and social spheres of Georgian Britain, as well as the queer, reformist attention they elicit. I left the book newly attuned to how differently-abled characters—a capacious category including injured soldiers, impoverished servants, nonhearing prophets, transgender people, enslaved laborers, and women of learning—sustain, across eighteenth-century fiction, a conversation about the capacity of a society to care for all its members, even to reinvent social categories the better to recognize and accommodate variable forms of subjectivity and desire.

I will praise many aspects of Novel Bodies in this review, but I want to begin with Farr’s innovation of the critical terrain for eighteenth-century studies. His capacious definition of disability, referring broadly to variably-embodied people and those who are perceived as such, includes a vast range of figures, and this range calls for theories of identity and political subjectivity that exceed those of our period. Disability, capacious and diverse, does not draw hard edges, but links to practices of inequity we’ve long found problematic in the Enlightenment: enslavement, gender, heteronormativity, social hierarchy, the privatization of property. These worldly factors, Farr shows, contribute to the variegation of bodies. Rather than explain these convergences within an insulated context of eighteenth-century studies (and even as he draws judiciously on its great resources), Farr energizes critical conversations between our field and feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and critical race theory. The introduction merges the specificity of eighteenth-century variable embodiment with critical rooting in scholarship by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Alison Kafer, and Robert McRuer to demonstrate how disability is understood as a politicized aspect of identity with queer affiliations; later in the book Sara Ahmed helps to explain queer object choice. What Farr wants to show us about eighteenth-century disability’s queerness—that it “indicate[s] a change of direction for British society”—cannot be explained fully by our field and its historicism. Farr provides an exemplary model of how eighteenth-century studies, and particularly work on non-normative identities and disenfranchised groups, can be fruitfully indebted to scholarship advancing social justice in contemporary contexts. Delivering on its promise “to crip the literature of the Georgian period,” Novel Bodies scaffolds a critical framework that models, I hope, future directions for our field. Farr’s prose also models how to write with transparency and care about disability in historical contexts. Writing this review, I realized how regularly I turn to ableist verbs and metaphors to describe literary response, a default I’ll now work to correct.

Farr joins this fresh critical environment to a literary landscape that is familiar without being overdetermined, placing some greatest hits (Pamela, Belinda) alongside lesser-studied fiction (Sarah Scott’s novels, the Duncan Campbell narratives), drawing on educational and medical writing along the way. A smart introduction confronts the Enlightenment-era equation of impairment with “non-subjecthood,” where unsoundness of body is equated with an incapacity for freedom. Novels contest this social hierarchy by “writ[ing] disabled people into subjectivity,” and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto exemplifies their resistance to the “narrow demands of primogeniture” and the normative masculinity it promulgates. Chapter One explores auditory impairment as a flexible form in narratives about deaf seer Duncan Campbell, where his nonhearing generates group practices of empirical perception, uniting bodies in queer communities. Chapter Two situates corporeality within labor, class, and moral fiction. Where Richardson ultimately excludes Mrs. Jewkes’s “deformity” from his plot, Scott creates a “body-oriented feminism” that seeks inclusive reform, even as it concedes that class and labor limit the degree to which variably-embodied people thrive. Disability and medicine overlap in Chapter Three. Smollett’s picaresque Humphrey Clinker surveys a “wide spectrum of embodiment” in its discourse on health, recognizing the possibility of non-reproductive futurity within an overarching alignment of health, marriage, and pastoral retreat. Chapter Four locates in Burney’s Camilla and Edgeworth’s Belinda highly visible expressions of unconventional gender that “undermin[e] binary thinking” and expose the limitations of the nuclear family. A brief coda clarifies the breadth of eighteenth-century disability’s queer affiliations. The “joint appearance” of queerness and disability “often signals an authorial impulse to write social reform into narrative,” a project that exceeds full narrative containment in any given work. By book’s end, I agreed entirely with Farr on “how absolutely interconnected disability and sexuality are” in our period.

As Novel Bodies demonstrates across sensational, domestic, picaresque, and Revolutionary-era fictions, authors are never able to integrate entirely—which is to say they are not able to erase or resolve—the social possibilities raised by variably-embodied people, leading authors to imagine queer desires within and around them. The convergence of disability and sexuality is foundational and dialectical: both discourses assess bodies quizzically, invasively, and unwaveringly, attempting to account for non-normative (which is to say, non-heteromasculine) sensation, experience, knowledge, and pleasure. Women, gender non-conformers, people with variable physicality, behaviors, and senses—all embody alterity, and therefore attract and evade regulation, prompting authors to create narrative space and social alternatives. If I found some local instances of Farr’s readings overly optimistic about texts’ engagement with reform (as I did with Scott and Smollett), it’s because he has committed so fully to exploring disability’s impact on the futures imagined by novels. He has begun an incisive, transformative conversation about the impact of variable embodiment on novels’ invention of new social roles and institutions.

Much more often than skepticism, I felt surprise and appreciation for the porous boundaries Farr illuminates between disability and other forms of eighteenth-century alterity, such as transgressive sexuality, race, and gender. Farr devises an inclusive methodology for identifying variable embodiment, and I’d like to demonstrate its impact by providing examples of how I saw disability converging upon these companion discourses. First, in Chapter Two, Farr documents Mrs. Jewkes’ sexual transgression—her queer desire—as part of the corruption that impinges on Pamela’s project of moral reform. Her gritty viscerality—rendered in unusual detail, as Farr recognizes, for an author focused on characters’ minds and morals—shades into the language of impairment and corporeal contagion, posing an insistent sexual threat to Pamela. This threat is resolved into disembodied moral subjectivity later in the novel, under Mr. B’s reformed influence. This expulsion of embodied corruption clarifies, I find, materiality elsewhere in Richardson’s oeuvre, such as Mrs. Sinclair’s deathbed morbidity in Clarissa. In a novel famously attuned to ethics and interiors, the bawd’s “huge tongue hideously rolling” and “bellows-shaped and variously-coloured breasts ascending by turns to her chin” stand out as grotesquerie, but in the context of Farr’s analysis, I perceive this unruly bodily material as Richardson’s ground zero of the corrupt, voracious, and infectious subculture that hosts the heroine’s assault.[1] Richardsonian corporeality—a rarity—is newly understood as a locus of transgression (here, sexual commerce) that must be disciplined.

Second, Farr demonstrates the connectivity of disability with debates on the slave trade. Farr finds in Scott’s Sir George Ellison an ameliorative discourse that refuses to recognize Black injury, imagining enslaved people as “free of physical impairment” despite their inhumane treatment (96). This insight prompted my thinking in two directions regarding literatures of enslavement. His reading, on the one hand, signals the importance of Marisa Fuentes’s work on the “mutilated historicity” legible on the bodies of enslaved people.[2] It also throws into relief the eighteenth-century awareness more broadly that enslaved people would inevitably incur injury. Exactly contemporary with Ellison, James Grainger’s apologist poem The Sugar-Cane robustly acknowledges ailment and impairment in enslaved populations, meticulously outlining a plan to maintain their health and, therefore, their productivity. Implicit in these instructions is Grainger’s awareness of widespread injury caused by the Middle Passage, slave markets, plantation labor, and torture. Grainger writes for the purposes of labor management, of course, but, adjoined to Scott’s deletion of harm, we can recognize that slavery’s debaters understood the immediacy and ubiquity of bodily impairment, but deployed or suppressed that understanding to instrumental rather than reparative ends.

Third, and most central to Farr’s project, disability’s foregrounding of the body is central, I am convinced, to any consideration of gender in the period. Experiences or attributes that make bodies visible (like Eugenia Tyrold’s smallpox “disfigurements” in turn impact how people live (unbeautiful, Eugenia spends her adolescence with books, indifferent to courtship rituals). Such combination of experience and embodiment makes her a peculiar subject, in some measure unfit for the standard practices of the eighteenth-century marriage market. Such pointed display of variable embodiment and its social vectors also manifests in the “public transgender subjectivity” of Belinda’s Harriet Freke. Harriet’s bonds with Lady Delacour manifest in a “visible queer eroticism” that affiliates the markers of their variable bodies (Harriet’s men’s clothing, Lady Delacour’s injured breast). Historians of gender and sexuality are still working out how and whether to attribute transgender to historical subjects.[3] Farr makes a persuasive case for the usefulness of the anachronism, counting transgender subjectivity alongside anti-domestic femininity and women’s learning as instances of gender’s functioning as disability—as, that is, standing staunchly outside and against the normative contours that facilitate assimilation to heteronormativity.

Farr centers his book on disability and sexuality, but his analysis demonstrates again and again the impossibility of cutting these categories off from a broad social arena that hierarchizes people and identities. Farr understands, as eighteenth-century authors did, that the literary was one realm for experimenting with alternate futures. Histories of gender and private life—by Lawrence Stone and Anthony Fletcher, for instance—have elided variably embodied subjects in their depictions of normative domesticity. Farr shows such sanctified realms to be under constant disturbance by figures who do not, will not, cannot conform, and whose resistance signals alternate realities to the ones novels try to sustain.

Kathleen Lubey

St. John’s University

1. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Penguin, 1985), 1388.

2. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (U of Pennsylvania P, 2016), 16.

3. For contrasting approaches to this question, see Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge UP, 2020) and Sal Nicolazzo, “Henry Fielding’s Female Husband and the Sexuality of Vagrancy” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.4 (2014): 335-353.

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Some Problems in De-Ascribing Works Previously Ascribed to Daniel Defoe

Maximillian E. Novak

AFTER THE DEATH of Queen Anne on 1 August 1714, there was considerable speculation about the fate of the former ministers and those who supported them by their writings. Bolingbroke fled to France. Harley stayed but was sent to prison. Jonathan Swift returned to Ireland amid much mockery.[1] And Daniel Defoe was listed with Swift in some works among those toward whom revenge would be directed.[2] For those who want Defoe to have placed his name on his writings as evidence of authorship, there is the obvious evidence that his name had become toxic at this point in history. If he was to continue writing, as indeed he did, he had to assume a persona. This did not prevent his getting into trouble—even into prison—and only his agreement to work for the Whig government saved him (Novak 2001, 457-471). John Robert Moore ascribed a variety of pamphlets to Defoe during the period of 1715-1718. F. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens found many such ascriptions doubtful and removed them in their Defoe De-Attributions (1994). These included a number of works that I had included in my Defoe bibliography in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1971).[3] In browsing through their Defoe De-Attribution by way of seeing their treatment of some tracts written in the form of an oration by a Quaker, I could not help but notice how subjective some of their explanations for de-attribution were. This led me to examine what seems to me a contradiction in their de-attributing two works whose relationship to two other works that they accepted into the canon seems to me undeniable.[4]

The works with somewhat shortened titles are, in chronological order: Some Account of the Two Nights Court at Greenwich (London: J. Baker, 1716); Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S[omerset] House (London: J. More, 1717); Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager at the Court of England during the Close of the Last Reign (London: S. Baker, 1717); Memoirs of Publick Transactions in the Life and Ministry of his Grace the D. of Shrewsbury (London: Thomas Warner, 1718). Furbank and Owens de-attributed the first and last titles. Their rationale for de-attribution of the first item was as follows. They admit that everyone writing on the Defoe canon had ascribed the work to Defoe. It had originally been ascribed to Defoe by Abel Boyer in 1717, in his list of works by Defoe. Although Boyer claimed to have known the authorship of some fourteen works by Defoe’s style, it is clear that as the publisher of the contemporary monthly The Political State of Great Britain he possessed considerable knowledge of the printing and publishing of contemporary pamphlets, and would have had an opportunity to know something about their authorship. This list was accompanied by a lengthy condemnation of Defoe as a forger who assumed many roles (627-32). Although Furbank and Owens accept Boyer’s listing as providing some evidence for Defoe’s authorship, in this particular case, they write of this supposed meeting at Greenwich, “This is an example of how a work, once attributed, can remain in an author’s canon by sheer inertia” (Defoe De-Attributions 86-87). They then argue, without evidence, that every bibliographer included it in the canon without any thought. They describe it as a “feeble piece” in which the debates among the Tory politicians “are all conducted in platitudes and generalities.” They remark on a parallel passage from Defoe’s poem, The Mock Mourners (1702), but find this bit of evidence was insufficient to “persuade one” that it is by Defoe (86). This is an example of the sleight of hand that impressed Harold Love—a kind of chutzpah—offering a small piece of evidence as the only evidence and then dismissing it as insufficient evidence for an attribution (Love 215-16).

Of course the “inertia” of the bibliographers involved has nothing to do with the matter. They all had their reasons for including this work in their published and unpublished bibliographies.[5] The “platitudes” of the Tories in the dialogues are deliberate enough, and their inability to decide how to act toward George I as his procession leaves Greenwich is sufficiently comic. In their Bibliography, Furbank and Owens remark that a Dublin reprint in 1717 viewed Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S[omerest] House as the “Sequel” to Some Account of Two Nights Court at Greenwich (167). This suggests that some other contemporary besides Boyer connected the two works. And the characterization of the various lords, especially the Duke of Shrewsbury, with his reluctance to do anything that might endanger his status, is well done. Defoe’s authorship is also suggested by a quotation from the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who was one of Defoe’s favorites, as well as by a number of verbal ticks (for example “turn’d quick upon him” [26]; “felo de se” [27]). And the publisher, John Baker, was Defoe’s most common outlet for his writings at the time. The rejection of this work from the Defoe canon seems one of the more eccentric gestures made by Furbank and Owens.

The next work, Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S[omerset] House, is listed as number 185 in Furbank’s and Owens’s Bibliography. It is a work very much in the manner of the previous one—a meeting of Tory politicians to consider how they should proceed, this time after the failure of the rebellion of 1715. It was attributed to Defoe by Abel Boyer, and here, Boyer is not accused of inspiring the “inertia” of subsequent bibliographers. It is a witty piece of propaganda against the Tories. Monoculus (Shrewsbury) and Nigroque (Nottingham) agree to hold a conference to discuss the future behavior of the Tories. When Shrewsbury tells his Italian Duchess, she laughs, and indeed, despite the fierce utterings of Oracle (Bishop Atterbury), Shrewsbury urges caution and operating through the House of Commons and House of Lords. Almost every bibliographer has agreed about Defoe’s authorship of this piece, and there is little to discuss, except their grounding their decision on the treatment of Harley as believing he could manage the High Church and discovering he was managed by the members of that body. After all Defoe, while a loyal supporter of Harley after 1714, had his own way of showing that support in a variety of pamphlets, newspapers, and memoirs. That his politics lined up exactly with Harley’s seems extremely doubtful to me. In spite of this, Furbank and Owens ask scholars to accept their particular interpretation of Defoe’s politics in considering their efforts at de-attribution. This is a dangerous game, not very different from that of John Robert Moore, who believed everyone should trust his opinion of Defoe’s politics as the basis for ascription.

The third work I want to consider is Minutes of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager. It was supposed to be written by a private French envoy from Louis XIV to engage Queen Anne in peace talks. It had the political end of clearing Harley of any complicity in bringing over the son of James II. Harley is shown as a firm supporter of the Hanoverian succession. This work incensed Abel Boyer, a lover of the French language. He spent a number of paragraphs showing how terrible the French was and damning it as a forgery. Furbank and Owens follow John Robert Moore in recording the announcement of a second edition as “Done out of French by Rowland Wynche Gent.” with a preface supposedly attacking Abel Boyer and its genuineness asserted. Such an edition has never been found. What is interesting is Defoe’s playfulness in mocking Boyer’s indignation. And within the work, Mesnager writes of trying unsuccessfully to enlist a writer, obviously Defoe, on his side. Furbank and Owens give several unnecessary pages over to this work. It is obviously by Defoe. His Frenchman bears some resemblance to the later author of a similar work (also by Defoe) by a supposed Frenchman, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724). Aside from creating a mythical narrative that managed to clear both himself and Harley of any intentions of favoring the Jacobite’s position, by seeing British politics from the standpoint of a character loyal to Louis XIV, Defoe succeeded in turning his own politics inside out. Basing any arguments for Defoe’s purported political stance, as Furbank and Owens sometimes do, was becoming complicated by the fictional focalizations of the following years. Not every opinion offered by one of his personas—a Turk, a Quaker, a Frenchman—ought to be ascribed to Defoe with perfect certainty. The De-Ascription volume will frequently dismiss a work on the basis of its political opinions, suggesting, for example, that if a work is critical in any way of Harley, it cannot be by Defoe. I have argued elsewhere that their reliance upon the one letter in Mist’s Weekly Journal that seemed to show Defoe’s authorship by the certainty of a trial may not have been as entirely by Defoe as they seem to have thought (“Defoe’s Role in the Weekly Journal” 702-703). Mesnager is a fervent Jacobite, fights to persuade the English of his cause, and attempts to win his readers to his point of view. If we are somehow to distrust his viewpoint, why give full trust to some of Defoe’s other opinionated narrators?

The rejection of Memoirs of Publick Transactions in the Life and Ministry of his Grace the D. of Shrewsbury (London: Thomas Warner, 1718) was one of the bolder moves of Furbank and Owens. It had been accepted as part of the Defoe canon from the time of William Lee, not only by every bibliographic student of Defoe but also by his biographers. After noting citations to Defoe’s Essay upon Publick Credit (1710), Some Account of the Two Nights Court at Greenwich (1716), Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S[omerset] House (1717), and Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager (1718), Furbank and Owens engage in a strange enough puzzling over why Lee might have ascribed it to Defoe. They conclude that “possibly he was merely influenced by the various quotations from and references to works by, or ascribed to, Defoe” (Defoe De-Attributions 115) Such an account is entirely disingenuous. The work picks up on the characterization of Shrewsbury in three of the previous works as an extremely cautious statesman, unwilling to jeopardize his position and expands upon it somewhat. The quotations from Defoe’s writings and discussion of others occupy many pages of this work, and by using such a device, the author needed to fill in very little to compose the 139 pages of the main part of the text. And there is considerable playfulness by the supposed author, who admits that he did not actually have much first-hand knowledge about Shrewsbury despite having been deeply engaged in the events of the time. In speaking of Defoe’s An Essay upon Publick Credit (1712), the author states that although it was attributed to Harley, it might have been written by Shrewsbury “or by somebody by his Direction.” Furbank and Owens report this as if it had some historical significance, but we know from Defoe’s letters to Harley that he was amused by a general assumption at the time that it was indeed written by Harley rather than by himself and pleased by the manner in which the authorship was concealed (Defoe, Letters 277, 317).[6] In short, this has all the appearance of another private joke. It is difficult to see who but Defoe would have appreciated it. In dealing with Memoirs of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager, the author, in addition to the lengthy quoting of pages 127-131, treats this as a genuine work proving that Shrewsbury was not willing to take an active role in Jacobite schemes beyond listening to them.

The author treats the material from Some Account of the Two Nights Court at Greenwich as if it amounted to information that they believed not to be known to many. The author states that they came upon it in their research and praises it as “the most distinct Account” they have discovered (126). The unwillingness to vouch for “all the Particulars of it” only strengthens the author’s seeming impartiality and credentials as a student of Shrewsbury’s career (126). And the author, without naming it as if it had a title as a printed pamphlet, speaks of it as “handed about in private” (127). The quotation that follows (127-132) is intended to buttress the character of Shrewsbury as a person unwilling to risk too much. There is no such lengthy quotation from the pamphlet on the supposed meeting at Somerset House. Indeed, he refuses to judge whether this work is “real History, or a feign’d,” noting that nothing in the pamphlet changes in any way the view of Shrewsbury’s personality that had been presented previously (133). If the presentation of the account of the meeting at Greenwich amounts to a mere deception, this playful account of the authenticity of the conference at Somerset House once more falls into the area of the private joke—Defoe mocking his own fictions as possibly inauthentic history.

John Robert Moore once told me in private conversation that his reason for not appending lengthy historical explanations to the works listed in his Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1960) was that if he had followed that practice, “no one would read it.” What kind of reader he expected for his bibliography I could not fathom. Indeed, when I first met him in 1955, he carried about with him a typescript volume of his bibliography with considerable notes. Although he believed he had an intuitive grasp of what Defoe had written (a confidence that led him into numerous errors), he also had a good historical grasp of Defoe and his times. And I should say that “inertia” was not the main reason that scholars such as Paul Dottin, William P. Trent, and me included works in their bibliographies. In the matter of the four pamphlets discussed above, it is clear to me that, given the near certainty of ascribing Memoirs of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager to Defoe, all four must be included in the Defoe canon. One of Moore’s major problems involved anchoring a series of works on the basis of one “certain” work, which would turn out to be doubtful or by another author. I have to plead guilty to anchoring my discussion on the certainty of Defoe’s authorship of Minutes of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager. And absurd as it might seem to me, I am willing to admit the possibility that Memoirs of Publick Transactions…Shrewsbury might have been composed by someone other than Defoe whose entire information about Shrewsbury’s life and times was almost wholly dependent upon unacknowledged writings by Defoe. As I have done in the past, I am writing as someone who considers the Defoe canon as still open to scholarly discussion.[7]

Note: the original version of this essay mistakenly named Nathaniel Lee rather than William Lee as a notable Defoe scholar. It also misdated the publication of the Essay upon Publick Credit. These errors have been corrected in this version.

WORKS CITED

Boyer, Abel. The Political State of Great Britain, vol. 13, 1717.

Defoe, Daniel. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, edited by George Healey, Clarendon Press, 1955.

⸺. Memoirs of Publick Transactions in the Life and Ministry of his Grace the D. of Shrewsbury. London, 1718.

⸺. Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager at the Court of England during the Close of the Last Reign. London, 1717.

⸺. Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S[omerset] House. London, 1717.

⸺. Some Account of the Two Nights Court at Greenwich. London, 1716.

Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, vol. 1: Mr. Swift and His Contemporaries, Harvard University Press, 1983.

Furbank, P. N. and W. R. Owens. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. Pickering and Chatto, 1998.

⸺. Defoe De-Attributions. Hambledon Press, 1994.

Love, Harold. Attributing Authorship: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Marshall, Ashley. “Beyond Furbank and Owens: A New Consideration of the Evidence for the Defoe Canon.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 59, no. 1, 2015, pp. 131-190.

Novak, Maximillian. “Daniel Defoe.” The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, edited by George Watson, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1971, cols. 880-917.

⸺. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford University Press, 2001.

⸺. “Defoe’s Role in the Weekly Journal: Gesture and Rhetoric, Archive and Canon, and the Uses of Literary History in Attribution.” Studies in Philology, vol. 113, no. 3, 2016, pp. 694-711

⸺. “Did Defoe Write The King of Pirates?” Philological Quarterly, vol. 96, no. 4, 2017, pp. 475-488.

Political merriment: or, truths told to some tune. Faithfully translated from the original French of R.H.S.H.H.S.F.A. G.G. A.M. M.P. and Messieurs Brinsden and Collier, the state oculist, and crooked attorney, Li Proveditori delli Curtisani. By a lover of his country. London, 1715 [for 1714].

Seager, Nicholas. “Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe’s Politics at the Hanoverian Succession.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2017, pp. 47-69.

Trent, William P. Marginalia in Memoirs of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager. Beinecke Library, Trent Collection, Ms. 2, 950-66.

NOTES

1. In his biography of Swift, Irvin Ehrenpreis depicts Swift as an almost tragic figure leaving England in 1714, but as with Defoe the public press treated him as an object of derision as a departing criminal with a “hue and cry” after him (756-63).

2. Swift and Defoe were listed together in Political Merriment, a satiric collection of songs, as among those who might be subjected to revenge after the death of Queen Anne (Part 1, 35).

3. I include my contribution mainly because Furbank and Owens listed it in their Defoe De-Attributions. My main intention was to sustain the listings of Defoe’s works as John Robert Moore had made in the 1960 version of his Checklist at a time when the work of a variety of scholars had revealed some of his mistakes. I dropped a few items entirely and established a level of judging that went from “perhaps by Defoe,” “probably by Defoe,” to the most doubtful category, “ascribed to Defoe by John Robert Moore.” I was hoping that in the near future a committee might be formed to offer some judgments that avoided the individual prejudices that had governed earlier listings. It was to take into account, as a scholarly ideal, all the writings claimed for Defoe before and after the publication of Moore’s Checklist. The work of such a committee, tentatively to be headed by Geoffrey Sill, was made partly redundant and brought to a halt by that of Furbank and Owens, who declined to participate, and whose work, limited to a consideration of the works in Moore’s Checklist, was already far advanced.

4. Of course the two works accepted by Furbank and Owens were judged by Ashley Marshall as being among items involving insufficient evidence to be considered “certainly” by Defoe. I would be willing to accept the notion that all these works are as certainly by Defoe as the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe, which were indeed never acknowledged by Defoe (Marshall 131-90).

5. See for example William P. Trent’s notes on Memoirs of the Negotiations of Mons. Mesnager, Beinecke Library, Trent Collection, Ms. 2, 950-66.

6. Committed to reducing the number of canonical items put forward by John Robert Moore, Furbank and Owens appear to have been willing to remove works on aesthetic and intellectual grounds. In the Critical Bibliography they describe Some Accounts of the Two Nights as “in fact a pretty feeble piece” (86-87) and remark of Memoirs of Publick Transactions, “It is hard to make sense of certain details of this tract” (114-15). Neither work shows Defoe at his best, but that is not a legitimate reason for eliminating them from the canon.

7. See for example my “Did Defoe Write The King of Pirates?”. For a recent discussion of attribution, see Seager.

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Empiricist Devotions: Science Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England, by Courtney Weiss Smith

Laura Miller

The discipline of eighteenth-century studies has seen exciting recent publications focusing on the intersections of science and literature. What has been done less frequently has been to relate science and literature by way of poetry. Courtney Weiss Smith’s Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England uses the genre of poetry to evaluate the intersections of religion and the New Science in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Smith’s masterful readings and deep exploration of religion, science, and poetics make this book a powerful addition to eighteenth-century science studies.

Smith’s first chapter, “Occasional Meditation, an Empirical-Devotional Mode,” explores the occasional meditation, an empiricist mode that revealed how writers’ understanding of the natural world and theology could work in internal conversation. In contrast to a formal, lengthy meditation such as Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), an occasional meditation was more extemporaneous and more suited to analysis of particular circumstances. Analogy, Smith shows, was central to both devotional writing and empiricist writing, as she addresses the similar writing style in Robert Boyle’s science and his theology. These writings were linked and were meant to be seen as compatible. Occasional meditations helped writers learn how to write about nature and understand it. These texts compose a current that connected Boyle to early eighteenth-century writers who followed his lead; Boyle’s work helped to structure the way these writers thought—and how they thought about writing. Smith argues persuasively that Boyle’s meditations and Hooke’s experiments have literary merit and deserve more attention in eighteenth-century scholarship beyond science studies.

After this foundational chapter, Smith focuses more exclusively on imaginative literature and its relation to these occasional meditations. Her second chapter, “Deus in Machina: Popular Newtonianism’s Visions of the Clockwork World,” addresses depictions of a Newtonian worldview in poetry and prose. It has long been established that the Newtonian universe had a religious component, whether in the General Scholium to the Principia or in lectures by William Whiston and others about religion’s place in a worldview that reframes nature, time, and space. Smith links popular poetry about science to other popular works like the Boyle lectures, analyzing the way these texts synthesized a dominant metaphor of the universe as a clockwork mechanism. Coupled with the newly dominant understanding of universal gravitation as a divine phenomenon, the clockwork universe was updated to include the New Science.

Smith then builds outward to consider how a “meditative empiricism” helped writers contemplate changes in economic theory during the eighteenth century. In Chapter Three, “Money, Meaning, and a ‘Foundation in Nature,’” Smith reveals the links between religion, science, and economics in eighteenth-century poetry. This exceptionally innovative chapter calls into question dominant Whiggish narratives of eighteenth-century economics. Far from being a narrative of modernization and a move away from nature, Smith shows how economic writers sought answers in, and adjacent to, natural philosophy. The chapter describes another topic adjacent to popular Newtonianism—the British recoinage crisis of the 1690s when Newton was Warden of the Mint. Smith contextualizes this debate as one of order and nature as well as one of economy, showing that these elements were inseparable from one another. Money was not just an abstract concept in the 1690s, but a scientific and philosophical one, with the need for both literally and metaphorically weighted support. The economy, too, is embedded in natural philosophy and its divine designs, and its theorists, across political lines, used meditative empiricism to engage with the natural world as they sought economic solutions. These narratives are then juxtaposed with it-narratives of coins, in which symbols of economy are brought into constant contact with representatives of the natural world.

The fourth chapter, “Empiricist Subjects, Providential Nature, and Social Contracts,” synthesizes politics, empiricism, and divinity. Scholars have long described the political qualities of empiricist science, especially when there was so much overlap between scientific practitioners and public political figures. Smith’s analysis of empiricist political subjects opens up this conversation to include her convincing integration of empiricism and the social contract.  As in her previous chapter, this chapter excels in breaking down political divides by looking at the commonalities fostered by occasional meditations. Pairings of Pope and Bolingbroke, as well as Defoe and Locke, look closely at different ways writers responded to the contrast between theories of institutions and theories of nature. In the instance of Defoe, Smith examines Jure Divino alongside Locke’s Two Treatises to show how Jure Divino is not just a discussion of divine law, but of how humans use their divine capabilities to help build and construct societies, wherein human reason must be coded as divine in origin, but human and divine knowledge exist in balance. This discussion has clear parallels to natural philosophical writings. Sometimes “science studies” can seem like a standalone part of eighteenth-century studies, but Smith’s excellent work on Defoe’s poetry and Locke here, as well as her cogent analysis of Pope’s Essay on Man, further demonstrate the relevance of the book to its wider field.

The last chapter of Empiricist Devotions returns to “Empirical-Devotional” material through “Georgic Realism, an Empirical-Devotional Poetics.” No discussion of natural philosophy and poetry in the long eighteenth century would be complete without attention to the Georgic, and Smith moves apart from obvious Georgic targets to center the significance of early eighteenth-century works such as John Gay’s Rural Sports and John Philips’s Cyder. Smith persuades readers that early eighteenth-century Georgic represented a departure from a bifurcated seventeenth-century model, and that, as with the other writings she examines in this book, early eighteenth-century Georgic was its own form of empiricist devotional. The Georgic’s integration of rural life with the New Science was not secondary to other rhetorical strategies but was part of its fundamental aims. Her reading of Gay’s work, in particular, uses discussions of particularity often used to write about novels as a means of remapping realist analysis onto a poetic subject. Smith’s chapter shows how important it is to not let theoretical models in which “the prose of the New Science” and “the Rise of the Novel” become a dyad when other early eighteenth-century writers used scientific particularity to reinvigorate poetic representation. For more essential work in this mode, read Smith’s excellent edited collection Eighteenth-Century Poetry and The Rise of the Novel Reconsidered (ed. with Kate Parker, Bucknell UP, 2013).

Empiricist Devotions is masterfully written in its style and clarity of expression. Smith has engaged in thorough, rigorous research while engaging with the history of relevant scholarship in multiple fields. What is especially helpful is her ability to place in dialogue discourses of theology, imaginative literature, and empiricism. Scholars of Defoe will especially benefit from Smith’s examination of his verse and social contract theory, as well as the broader investment in the currents of religious dissent and economics that shaped Defoe’s career. A small criticism would be that the scope and subject of the book mean that women thinkers and writers do not have substantial presence in it; more attention to either masculinity as an underexplored natural philosophical component or more work with the incongruity of women writers next to Smith’s argument might resonate with readers, although Empiricist Devotions cites women scholars and critics whenever possible. Notwithstanding this suggestion, I enthusiastically recommend Smith’s far-ranging and welcome contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

University of West Georgia

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Robinson Crusoe and the Missing Genre: Discovering Contemporary Interpretations of the Book’s Literary Classification and Purpose in Pre-Novel English Society

Jessica Leeper

DANIEL DEFOE’S celebrated work The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, initially published in 1719, has been widely praised as the first English novel. The book became immediately popular in the first year of its publication and remained so in the following two decades, as is evident through the book’s innumerable subsequent editions. Early readers, critics, and booksellers alike were all drawn to the novel, but the modern-day reader may curiously wonder how they would have perceived its literary classification in a time when the novel was not a known or at least an acknowledged style of writing. The word ‘novel’ does not appear in any of the early editions or bookseller/ personal library catalogues that I examined. Although it is hard to think of the book as anything but a classic novel in the twenty-first century, contemporary readers would not have been so accustomed with the term.

Thus, my question is this: how would early readers and booksellers have classified Robinson Crusoe? The early readers initiated the work’s overwhelming success, so in order to understand how and why this work of popular culture was important, it is crucial to return to the first three decades of its publication to examine how readers and booksellers may have perceived the purpose of the story.

Before examining the question further, it is important to state that Defoe himself was unaware of the effect his book would have on the print culture of England in the following decades. Even if he was aware of the novelty of his work, there is no existing evidence, letters, or manuscripts which could lend the modern scholar a clue about his personal intentions in publishing the book (Shinagel 223). Furthermore, the readers and publishers would not have been able to easily tell which literary classification the book belonged to based on Defoe’s oeuvre of over three-hundred publications, since Defoe wrote in a wide variety of genres, including satires, news journalism, family conduct books, and political commentaries. Therefore, to understand the contemporary classification(s) of the novel, it is necessary to expand the use of primary source evidence, to analyze early editions of the text as well as library/ book shop catalogues, and to look for similar hints which can reveal early readers’ understandings of the book’s purpose.

For this task, I have selected fifteen editions of the book (including both Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe), as well as six catalogues to examine. By this method of carefully reading the text and subtext of these various sources, I will endeavor to discover a pattern of similar descriptive details about the book and recurring clues to determine the classification readers and booksellers may have used to categorize it. I will begin by looking at the prefaces of the fifteen selected editions.

Edition Prefaces

Before attempting to address the general readers’ perceptions of the book’s purpose and literary classification, it is necessary to begin by analyzing the preface text of William Taylor’s first edition of Defoe’s The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, printed in April of 1719 (ESTC T072265), the first of six editions Taylor would publish that year. This particular preface is perhaps the most revealing in helping to discover what the book’s literary intention was, for even though it was only two pages in length and in large print, it set the stage for the initial reception of the book’s intended purpose. First, it is worth stressing that the word “Life” on the book’s title page is in a much larger font than the rest of the book’s title, immediately indicating that the work was possibly intended to be read as a biographical account. The preface, however, quickly determines alternative purposes of the book, stating that it was written:

with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apyly them (vz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will. The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it. (Defoe, “Preface,” 1-2)

Thus, Robinson Crusoe may initially have been intended by Defoe (and by extension, his original publisher William Taylor) to have several literary purposes: to inspire a religious outlook on life and its many struggles; to guide readers on how to live a moral and pious life; to show an example of resilience in the face of overwhelming fate; and to present a nonfictional account of a man who embodies all of these ideals. The book was not simply regarded as a story, as novels were often viewed, but as a thematic work with a purpose before a plot. What most likely mattered to the readers of the early editions was the example, the representation of a man exuding patience and stoicism in a string of unwelcome circumstances. Clearly, this was not a mere work of fiction, for nowhere does the preface indicate the plot or the setting.

One of the differences between the first edition and many of the subsequent editions is that the words fable, allegory and metaphor are not used in the first edition preface. The reader seems to have been expected to refer to the book as actual nonfiction, which is emphasized by the absence of Defoe’s name in exchange for Crusoe standing in as the author of his own “autobiography.” Clearly, some early readers were confused by the first-person narrative of a man living in such extraordinary circumstances. Some, including the outspoken journalist Charles Gildon, were quick to interpret the book as Defoe’s own unnamed autobiography, paralleling Defoe’s own early career troubles to that of Crusoe’s misfortunes (Keymer 20). Defoe responded to Gildon’s criticism in the preface to The Farther Adventures by confessing that the book was indeed partly autobiographical, but that it should not be read for that reason.

Most of the following editions I examined began to regard the book less as factual by stressing the spiritual and instructive aspects of the work—a possible sign that the early readers were not so much interested in the book as biography as they were in its admirable religious principles. If the books themselves offer any kind of insight into the readers’ classification of its genre, then these interpretations can best be traced through the textual changes to the preface in subsequent editions, which began to address a growing interest in the book’s use as an instruction for Christian living. The preface of the first edition of Taylor’s The Farther Adventures, printed in August of 1719 (ESTC T072276), makes this point evident by stating:

The intelligent reader may see clearly the End and Design of the whole Work; that it is calculated for, and dedicated to the Improvement and Instruction of Mankind in the Ways of Virtue and Piety, by representing the various circumstances, to which mankind is exposed, and encouraging such as fall into ordinary and extraordinary casualties of life, how to work through difficulties, with unwearied Diligence and Application, and look up to Providence for success. (Defoe, “Preface,” 2).

It seems clear then, that Robinson Crusoe and its second part were being read with a higher purpose in mind, instructing its readers in the ways of pious and moral living. This is not a surprising conclusion, considering Defoe’s own contributions to the Enlightenment ideals of progress and socio-cultural improvement. Defoe wrote numerous early eighteenth-century advice books, such as his widely successful The Family Instructor, published in 1715. Paula R. Backscheider refers to Crusoe as part of a series of religiously-grounded conduct books, which explored the strengths of personality in a dialogue style between characters (Backscheider 10). This was a unique and increasingly fictionalized literary style for children as well as adults, which Defoe had popularized less than five years before the initial publication of Robinson Crusoe.

Added to this was a contemporary interest with travel accounts in a world increasingly more navigable and accessible through advancements in geography and improvements to the English economy and shipbuilding,  which opened up far away travel opportunities to places like the American colonies, which in turn helped fuel expeditionary interest (Rogers 781). This growing internationalism of the eighteenth-century struck the popular imagination and fed readers’ growing obsession with news print and narrative travel accounts (for example, consider the overwhelming success of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726), which, alongside church sermons, were the best-selling literature of the early to mid-eighteenth century (Backscheider 7-8). Defoe was able to combine each of these popular genres into his moral narrative to devise a brand-new category, that of the novel.

Most of the prefaces I examined summarized this point clearly by stating that the book’s purpose was to be “instructive and entertaining,” as the 1719 and 1724 editions suggest (Defoe, “Preface,” 4). At this point, no textual references were being made to suggest that the work was anything beyond this, although subsequent editions would quickly reveal an increasingly allegorical and metaphorical interpretation of the books, which would have helped to alter the reader’s understanding of its genre and classification during the 1720s.

William Taylor’s first edition of Defoe’s Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, printed in August of 1720 (ESTC T072276), offered the longest preface material yet examined on my list. In the preface of this particular book, the story of Robinson Crusoe (referring to all three parts) is called a fable, as though its value was that of a children’s book of positive life maxims. The emphasis on the books’ purpose as a religious and virtuous instruction book is unmistakable, for the preface directly states that “The Fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable (Defoe, “Preface,” 1).”

It is striking how often the word ‘moral’ is used in the various prefaces to describe the text. The term becomes even more significant in light of its early eighteenth-century definition, in which the word ‘moral’ is defined as “an exercise of the four Cardinal Vertues, Fortitude, Prudence, Justice, and Temperance” and “belonging to Manners or Civility” (Cocker 195). This clearly signifies that the work had a definite ethical and religious basis meant to inspire endurance and fortitude in dismal situations, a basis which defined its raison d’être and by extension its success already by 1720. This is also the first edition I examined that forthrightly addressed the work as an allegory, stating:

Here is the just and only good end of all parable or Allegorick History brought to pass; for moral and religious improvement. Here is invincible Patience recommended under the worst of Misery; indefatigable Application and undaunted Resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstances; I say, these are recommended, as the Only Way to work through those miseries, and their success appears sufficient to support the most dead hearted Creature in the World. (Defoe, Serious Reflections, “Preface,” 9)

Thus, before ever beginning the main text of the book, the reader was aware of the fictitious qualities which fell short of the overall instructive purposes of the work. According to this particular preface, like the others before it, Robinson Crusoe was first and foremost a spiritual guidebook before it was an entertaining work of romance. To call it a spiritual guidebook also fittingly correlates well with the contemporary interpretation of the word allegory. Several modern scholars, including J. Paul Hunter, Geoffrey Sill, and Thomas Keymer, have stressed the popularity of “the guide tradition” (Shinagel 246) founded in puritan allegorical books, which were circulating around England prior to the publication of Robinson Crusoe. These books were rooted in Christian theology and were designed to be “representatives of ideologies that reveal … moral truths obscured by appearances and complacent thinking,” a style of religious and cathartic writing which parallels well with the content of Robinson Crusoe (Backscheider).

This type of literature, by focusing on an examination of the individual soul, was able to rise above traditional romances and trivial fiction, by applying a metaphysical analysis of man’s journey to redemption while also presenting an example of how to achieve it. It was exactly the sort of positive approach to Christianity which the English of the early eighteenth-century were craving amidst their penchant for reading theological and allegorical based texts.

The next ten editions which I examined included either the same preface, word for word (since Taylor’s copyright was sold after his death in 1724), or they contain discourses too similar to the prefaces already mentioned to add further insight (Hutchins 70). These include Taylor’s 1722 (ESTC T072274), Bettesworth’s 1722 (ESTC T072299), Bettesworth’s 1724 (ESTC T072300), Bettesworth’s 1726 (ESTC T072301), Mears’s 1726 (ESTC T072277), Bettesworth’s 1733 (ESTC N055140), Duncan’s 1735 (ESTC T205064), Brotherton’s 1735 (ESTC T072302), Woodward’s 1736 (ESTC T072275), and Bettesworth’s 1737 (ESTC T072303).  Although I will not go into detail on each of them, it is still important to stress that they are significant because these various subsequent editions by different publishers all state basically the same preface information, revealing the publishers’ (and perhaps the readers’) unified perspective of the book’s literary and categorical objective. Evidently, the publishers throughout the 1720s and 1730s widely agreed as to what Robinson Crusoe was stylistically, categorically, and thematically.

Edition Advertisement Pages

Contemporary bookshop advertisements at the back of various Crusoe editions were also included in my research, since the genres presented in the titles could lend a patterned clue as to how Crusoe might have been categorized by the bookseller, and by extension, the reader. After all, if the reader enjoyed Robinson Crusoe, then they might also purchase other books with similar content being sold at the same shop.

The first advertisement listing I encountered was at the back of William Taylor’s fourth edition of The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (ESTC T072264), printed in 1719 mere months after the first three editions. The listing includes other books sold by W. Taylor at his shop in Pater-Noster Row, and it includes a variety of titles mostly related to travel, history, and advice books, as well as a fair selection of printed church sermons. This odd mix of books and genres could either be completely uncorrelated with Robinson Crusoe, or it could suggest that the book was considered a miscellaneous genre in the first year of its publication.

W. Taylor’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, printed in 1719 (ESTC T72276), includes a more revealing advertisement list, presenting other books sold by Taylor with titles seemingly related to Robinson Crusoe. This list included history books about countries around the world, as well as historical biographies, such as Memoirs of a Cavalier Who Served a King in Sweden, travel books like The Adventures of Theogines and Chariclia, from the Greek, and several geography books and atlases. Although not specified as so, this list of books does appear to have titles related to the themes within Robinson Crusoe, and can be viewed as a way of deciphering the book’s literary category, which may have given an assurance to readers about what the book’s purpose might have been.

Taylor’s second edition of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, printed in 1719 (ESTC N047837), also includes most of the same titles, although it adds several theological works and Christian advice books, such as Moral Books of the Old Testament and Directions how to Work with God all the Day-Long, the latter of which is strikingly close to the descriptions of Robinson Crusoe found in the preface text of the same edition (Defoe, “Adverstisement,” 2).  This could just be a coincidence, or it could be a valuable sign that the advertisement listing was itself advertising the purpose of the actual book.

The last notable advertisement listing within the editions I examined is from The Wonderful Life, and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, printed for A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch, R. Ware and J. Hodges in 1737 (ESTC T072303). In this list (printed for Bettesworth and Hitch), the titles have a definite theological pattern, much like those found in the edition discussed above. Titles such as The Faith and Duties of Christians, a Treatise in eight Chapters appear listed alongside some newly published Psalms and other books addressing Biblical resurrection (Defoe, “Advertisement,” 1). Again, this appears to suggest a pattern and a correlation to the themes within Robinson Crusoe, as well as an indication of the publishers’ and booksellers’ assumption of its classification and written genre—as a Christian how-to book or a manual for spiritual introspection.

Furthermore, the theological, historical, and biographical emphasis in each of the advertisement listings attests to the conclusion that Defoe was creating not only the first English novel, but also what John Mullan refers to as a “spiritual autobiography,” which was just as evident, if not more so, within the various preface texts (Mullan 268). As already mentioned, Puritan allegorical texts were already popular by the time Robinson Crusoe’s first edition was printed, and it is not an unjust conclusion to say that its earliest readers would have perceived Crusoe as such or at least as a new genre that happened to be quite similar. The advertisement lists only seem to confirm this analysis.

Private Library Catalogues

In addition to the textual clues in the various editions I examined, there were also revealing patterns of classificatory evidence to be drawn from personal and private library catalogues prior to 1740. These sources offer a different and more personalized means of discovering the contemporary views on Robinson Crusoe. Much like the advertisement lists, examining auction catalogues of private libraries not only reveals individual reader’s tastes in books, but they also show how readers and/or catalogue printers categorized Robinson Crusoe in relation to the reader’s other books. If it is listed beside other works of the same genre or of similar literary intentions, then we may infer how the reader interpreted what sort of book it was. Where Robinson Crusoe fits on these lists may conclusively reveal what the reader or printer thought of its contemporary classification.

It should be stressed, however, that individual readers cannot account for all readers, so the following sources necessitate a highly subjective approach. Furthermore, as David Allan points out from his studies on the library of Horace Walpole, the buying of books was not always simply based on personal taste in literature, and it is often impossible to tell whether or not the owner ever read the book or if he/she enjoyed it or even bought it for themselves (Allan 75). However, the reader’s contextual reviews are not necessarily required for an interpretation of a book’s genre, for its place on the listing in relation to the other books may be evidence itself. Because the several catalogues I examined do happen to show similar evidence, it is not completely wrong to draw some general or at least basic conclusions from them.

For this section, I have selected two personal library catalogues for close examination. The first, written by Thomas Corbett, is [A] catalogue of the libraries of Mr. Thomas Newcomb, printer, and a gentleman of furnival’s-Inn, deceased, printed in London in 1720 (ESTC T217371). Mr. Newcomb’s personal library was vastly eclectic, with multiple lists separating the different books he had according to size and classification. For example, one of the lists is headed as just Bibles and theological works. However, Robinson Crusoe only appears on a miscellaneous listing under the vague subheading “English Books, Octavo” (Corbett 10). It is surrounded by books with no particular category, a random mess of theological works, history books, voyage accounts, and English works and maps. Clearly Mr. Newcomb (or Mr. Corbett) was baffled by the book’s classification in 1720, or perhaps he simply regarded it as a usual English text with no overarching significance worthy of one of the more specific lists.

The next catalogue I examined was A Catalogue of the Library of Mr. Shotbolt, of the Inner-Temple, Deceased. Consisting of Choice Collection of Books in Several Sciences, written by Francis Clay in London in 1724 (ESTC N15536). The only books which appear in folio are history and church texts, most of which appear to have been printed in the mid-seventeenth century. Many of the quartos in his collection are writings in science and philosophy, including works by some of the early Royal Society figures such as Robert Hooke and John Locke. Several pages into the catalogue is a listing sub-headed as “histories, memoirs, travel tales and voyage accounts,” which includes a first edition copy of Robinson Crusoe numbered as book 111 in the listing (Clay 10). Numbers 110 and 112 in the listing are nonfictional historical biographies of a war general and a Czar, which could imply that Robinson Crusoe too was regarded by Mr. Shotbolt (or by Clay) to be a true narrative of events and a serious autobiography.

This appears to be all the more exceptional after perusing the list of Mr. Shotbolt’s duodecimos, a listing which includes mostly fables, romances, love ballads, satires, and plays (Clay 24). It is striking that Robinson Crusoe does not appear on this list, where its own preface would suggest it should go. Instead, it seems to have been regarded as a more dignified work of biography. What is even more revealing is that, in the same year of this catalogues’ publication, Edward Cocker defined the word novel in his dictionary simply as “small Romances” (Cocker 204). The fact that Robinson Crusoe is not classified as either a romance or a novel in Mr. Shotbolt’s library indicates that it was most likely prized as a higher work of literature, with qualities setting it apart from the trivial leisure reads of the day, such as Coffee-House Jests.

Bookseller Catalogues

In addition to looking at personal library listings, I also examined a few bookseller catalogues from early eighteenth-century shops, since the catalogues could reveal where Crusoe fit in categorically with the other books on the shop shelves, and therefore reveal how readers would have seen it presented, which may have affected their reasons for purchasing the work.

I examined three catalogues for this section. The first catalogue highlights the books sold for A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch at the Red Lyon in Pater-Noster Row, printed in 1733 (ESTC T121895). The catalogue lists every shop title according to its main genre; for instance, all theology books are listed with other theology books under a specified subheading. Because of this system of organization, it is easy to tell where Robinson Crusoe would have categorically been placed in the shop and, consequently, how it may have been presented to buyers. Interestingly, Crusoe does not appear on either the list headed “Historical Romances” or “School-Books.” Instead, it appears on a list titled “Chapmens-Books” (Bettesworth and Hitch 5, 21, 23).

The other books on the Chapmens list are a random assortment of pleasure reads as well as fables and romances, including Don Quixote and Robin Hood. However, it also includes several Christian advice books, some with titles suspiciously similar to the content of Robinson Crusoe, such as Travels of True Godliness and Young Man’s Guide (Bettesworth and Hitch 23-24). According to Robinson Crusoe’s inclusion on this particular list, it can be concluded that Bettesworth and Hitch regarded the book as both entertaining and religiously instructive, as the preface texts suggested.

Richard Ware’s 1735 Catalogue of books printed for and sold by Richard Ware, bookseller, at the Bible and Sun in Warwick-Lane, Amen Corner, London (ESTC T87055) also places Robinson Crusoe under a listing of Chapmens-Books, alongside many titles exactly the same or similar to those found on Bettesworth and Hitch’s listing. However, Ware’s Chapmens-Books include an even larger variety of Christian conduct books, such as Holy Living and Dying and Smith’s Lives of the Christians (Ware 18). Clearly, once again, Robinson Crusoe was being touted as a religious guidebook, rather than a mere entertaining story.

The third bookshop catalogue I examined was A Catalogue of Books Printed for and Sold by Samuel Birt, Bookseller, at the Bible and Ball in Ave-Mary Lane, London, printed in 1736 (ESTC T122989). Crusoe does appear on the catalogue, but it is oddly titled Robinson Crusoe’s Visions, which could imply that Birt considered the work to be first and foremost an allegory, as the prefaces began suggesting in the 1720s. The other books surrounding it on the long list are almost strictly history, classics, and works of the literary greats of the time, for instance the works of Elizabeth Rowe (Birt 26). Most of the fables, romances and pleasure reads do not appear on the list at all, and those that do are listed under the heading of school books. Clearly, if these three catalogues are at all representative of the general public’s understanding of the book’s purpose and genre, then it can be concluded that Robinson Crusoe was considered a serious, reflective, allegorical, and moral guidebook from its initial publication up to at least 1740. The novel, or its modern definition, is nowhere to be found in these many sources.

Conclusion

Because Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is considered the first English novel, it is difficult to know exactly how the early readers would have interpreted the book in 1719, or how they would have categorized it alongside the other popular works of the day. Between the lack of personal written documentation on the work by Defoe himself, and the fact that the readers were unaware of the monumental transition that the book provided in English print and cultural history, it is necessary to extract evidence from the sources that can be accessed and examined—the early editions of Robinson Crusoe and its two subsequent volumes, and catalogues of personal library and bookshop stocks. From these sources, it appears that Robinson Crusoe would have been interpreted and classified in several interrelated ways, depending on the character and values of the individual reader. It may have been viewed as a religious, or “spiritual” autobiography; as an intriguing travel account; as a Puritan allegory about reaching redemption through virtue and strength of character; or as an instructive manual for acquiring Christian values, for both children and adults.

Perhaps the best conclusion is very simple: that Robinson Crusoe was all of these literary styles and genres, and therefore Defoe had literally created an entirely new literary classification by drawing from a multitude of already existing styles from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In short, because the word ‘novel’ was not attached to the work yet, the contemporary readers would have had free reign to tag any of the above genres to it, and none of them would be wrong in their interpretation. What does seem clear is that the early readers and publishers were confused about its literary category, since there were so many varying interpretations. Even the prefaces indicate different interpretive arguments within the same editions. Clearly, the book was a literary curiosity, sparking new ideas about what fiction could be, and how it could reshape the literary understandings of English culture on several different levels.

University of York

WORKS CITED

Primary Sources

Bettesworth, A., and C. Hitch. Books Printed for A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, at the Red Lyon in Pater-Noster Row, London. London, 1733. ESTC T121895.

Birt, Samuel. A Catalogue of Books Printed for and Sold by Samuel Birt, Bookseller, at the Bible and Ball in Ave-Mary Lane, London. London, 1736. ESTC T122989.

Clay, Francis. A Catalogue of the Library of Mr. Shotbolt, of the Inner-Temple, Deceased. Consisting of Choice Collection of Books in Several Sciences. London, 1724. ESTC N15536.

Cocker, Edward. Cocker’s English Dictionary, Containing an Explanation of the Most Refined and Difficult Words and Terms in Divinity, Philosophy, Law…with other Arts and Sciences. London: T. Norris and A. Bettesworth, 1724. ESTC T30890.

Corbett, Thomas. [A] catalogue of the libraries of Mr. Thomas Newcomb, printer, and a gentleman of furnival’s-Inn, deceased. London, 1720. ESTC T217371.

Davies, Thomas. A Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books, in Most Languages and Faculties. With the Entire Library of Francis Calliault, Esq; Deceased. London, 1738. ESTC T231721.

Defoe, Daniel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Being the Second and Last Part of his Life, and Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. London: W. Taylor, 1719. ESTC T72276.

——.  The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, and of the Strange Surprizing Account of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. London: W. Taylor, 1719. ESTC N047837.

——.  The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, and of the Strange Surprizing Account of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. London: W. Taylor, 1722. ESTC T072274.

——.  The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe : Wherein are Contain’d, Several Strange and Surprizing Accounts of all his Travels, and Most Remarkable Transactions, Both by Sea and Land. Glasgow: James Duncan, 1735. ESTC T205064.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: W. Taylor, 1719. ESTC T072265.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: W. Taylor, 1719. ESTC T072264.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: A. Bettesworth, J. Brotherton, W. Meadows and M. Hotham, 1722. ESTC T072299.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: A. Bettesworth, J. Brotherton, W. Meadows and E. Midwinter, 1724. ESTC T072300.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: A. Bettesworth, J. Brotherton, W. Meadows and E. Midwinter, 1726. ESTC T072301.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: W. Mears and T. Woodward, 1726. ESTC T072277.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch, J. Brotherton, W. Meadows, S. Birt, J. Osborn and J. Hodges, 1733. ESTC N055140.

——.  The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: J. Brotherton, W. Meadows, S. Birt, C. Hitch, L. Hawes, J. Hodges and J. Osborn, 1735. ESTC T072302.

——. The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: T. Woodward, 1736. ESTC T072275.

——.  Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: with his Vision of the Angelick World. London: W. Taylor, 1720. ESTC T072276.

——. The Wonderful Life, and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York; Mariner. London: A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch, R. Ware and J. Hodges, 1737. ESTC T072303.

Ware, Richard. A catalogue of books printed for and sold by Richard Ware, bookseller, at the Bible and Sun in Warwick-Lane, Amen Corner, London. London, 1735. ESTC T87055.

Secondary Sources

Allan, David. “Book Collecting and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 45, 2015, pp. 74-92.

Backscheider, Paula R. “Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. January 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7421.

Hutchins, H. “Two Hitherto Unrecorded Editions of ‘Robinson Crusoe’.” The Library, vol. 8, no. 1, 1927, pp. 58-72.

Keymer, Thomas. “Daniel Defoe.” The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, edited by Adrian Poole, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 14-30.

Mullan, John. “Swift, Defoe, and Narrative Forms.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740, edited by Steven N. Zwicker, Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 250-275.

Rogers, Shef. “Enlarging the Prospects of Happiness: Travel Reading and Travel Writing.” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. V: 1695-1830, edited by Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner, Cambridge UP , 2010, pp. 781-790.

Shinagel, Michael, ed. Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

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The Scots and Scotland in the Novels of Daniel Defoe

Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker

I

N.H. KEEBLE writes that “Scotland figured more largely in the literary career of Daniel Defoe than in that of any other early modern English writer, at least until Samuel Johnson published his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland in 1775” (1). The centrality of Scotland in Defoe’s non-fiction, extending well beyond his role as a spy and propagandist in the years surrounding the Anglo-Scottish Union, is well known. This emphasis may reflect the deep connections he developed with Scotland over a number of years. Paula R. Backscheider points out that Defoe had established friendships with Scots in London prior to visiting Scotland, and he made many contacts and friends from various walks of life during his repeated visits there (205). Defoe also invested financially in Scotland, in such products as wine, horses, and linen (Backscheider 234-35). And, of course, his son, Benjamin, attended the University of Edinburgh for a time.[1]

Defoe engaged with Scottish affairs in his non-fiction well into the 1720s, writing in the Tour, for example:

The North Part of Great Britain, I mean Scotland, is a Country which will afford a great Variety to the Observation … a Kingdom so famous in the World for Great and Gallant Men, as well States-Men as Soldiers, but especially the last, can never leave us barren of Subject, or empty of somewhat to say of her. (3: 4)

In terms of his creative writing, Defoe wrote a few poems in praise of Scotland—“Caledonia: A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation” (1706) and “A Scots Poem” (1707). Yet, despite his fascination with North Britain in his non-fiction and an occasional foray into Scottish subjects in his poetry, most of the novels convincingly attributed to him do not address the Scots or Scotland at any great length, as Juliet Shields has noted.[2] Oddly, some of the novels that have been de-attributed—such as The Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins, a Highland Officer and works on the Scottish seer Duncan Campbell—do focus on the Scots or Scotland, and one wonders if their earlier attribution to Defoe stemmed from a belief that Defoe’s profound interest in Scotland in his non-fiction must extend to his novels. If we judge only by the number of references to Scots or Scotland alone in the works we are fairly certain are his, we are forced to conclude that this is not the case. However, despite the side-lining of Scottish matters in the majority of his novels, where Scotland or Scottish characters do appear, Defoe does a lot with a little, foregrounding the centrality of the north to a strong, moral, and hardy Britain, and perhaps paving the way for Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, in which Scotland seems to be the intellectual and spiritual cure for a corrupt England.[3]

II

Before delving into the treatment of the Scots and Scotland in Defoe’s works of prose fiction, it is helpful to revisit, if only briefly, the dominant English attitude toward their neighbors to the north during or around the time his novels were published. Despite Scottish involvement in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, Defoe’s fiction was not written in a time of rampant cultural Scotophobia, especially of an anti-Highlander nature. It is far easier to find unpleasant accounts of Scots and Scotland before the Union, when, for example, one writer quipped in 1705,

A Modern Scot is so averse to good

His daily Study is Ingratitude.

……………………………………..

Their Countrey is that barren Wilderness

Which Cain did First in banishment possess;

………………………………………

Pimps, Bullies, Traitors, Robbers, (tis all one,

Scotland like wide-jaw’d Hell, refuses none. (“The Character of a Scot” 8, 12)

There was also, of course, a particularly virulent anti-Scottish period well after Defoe’s death, between 1745 and the 1760s, during Lord Bute’s brief and heady moments as first minister.[4] However, even then, the Scots as a people were not necessarily blamed. Paul Langford notes that in England “there seems to have been no attempt to victimise resident Scots” during either rebellion (152). And a review of works published in Britain between 1715 and 1725—shortly before and during the publication of Defoe’s novels—reveal that only a few harshly stereotype the Scots, indicating that Scotophobic sentiment likely fluctuated in the early eighteenth century.

This is not to say that such stereotypes did not circulate in private and/or public after the Union. In 1715, for instance, the diarist Dudley Ryder, while training for the law at the Middle Temple, summarizes a conversation he had in which one Mr. Bowes articulates a rather harsh anti-Scottish perspective:

Thursday, April 26. Went to Westminster Hall. Came home with Mr. Bowes and Leeds. Mr. Bowes upon the mentioning of a Scotchman took occasion to tell us that he hated the name and sight of a Scotchman, for it was the genius and nature of that nation to be tricking cheating rogues that have always a design to deceive and defraud you. I thought he was too general in his invectives, though I think that they have more generally a disposition to play the knave than the English. They have especially the art of dissembling and carry it with the greatest respect and outward deference. They have the art of address and flattery to a great degree of impudence, that they are generally never ashamed or afraid to intrude into company, but push themselves forward wherever they are.[5] (226-27)

In a more jovial vein, John Couper published a broadside, Bag-Pipes no Musick: A Satyre on Scots Poetry in 1720 that relies on contemporary stereotypes of the boorish Scot to mock Scottish pretensions to literary and musical culture in an English context, as some lines readily demonstrate:

Scotch Moggy may go down at Aberdeen

Where Bonnets, Bag-pipers, and Plaids are seen;

But such poor Gear no Harmony can sute,

Much fitter for a Jew’s Trump than a Lute:

Low Bells, not Lyres, the highland Cliffs adorn,

Macklean’s loud halloo, or Mackgreigor’s Horn.

Sooner shall China yield to Earthen Ware,

Sooner shall Abel teach a singing Bear,

Than English Bards let Scots torment their Ear;

Who think their rustic Jargon to explain;

For anes is once, lang long, and two is twain.

Let them to Edinbrough foot it back,

And add their Poetry to fill their pack[.] (1)

Couper insists that no “mumbl[ing]” and jarring Scot (including Allan Ramsay and his disciples) could ever produce the refined “Poetick Sound” of a John Dryden (1).

Nevertheless, despite such residual stereotypes, in the 1710s and 1720s, a counter tradition was slowly emerging. Literary attempts were being made by English as well as Scottish writers to challenge stereotypes of the Scots as immoral, criminal, uneducated, impoverished, and brutish beings by creating morally complex Scottish characters with a proper place in the British nation. A notable example is Susanne Centlivre’s 1714 play The Wonder, which features two Scottish characters, the main character Colonel Britton, “a Scottish rover on his way back to Britain following the … War of the Spanish Succession” (O’Brien 14), and his footman Gibby, who is dressed in Highland clothing because, as Colonel Britton says, “This is our Country Dress you must know, which, for the Honour of Scotland, I make all my Servants wear” (Centlivre 50). While Gibby speaks in some odd Scottish dialect and is the fool of the play, Colonel Britton is well integrated into a newly configured Britain as he speaks in perfect English dialect and his name suggests he represents the recently unified nation. While Centlivre plays with Scottish stereotypes, she also celebrates the anglicised, military Scot. A second example is Eliza Haywood’s 1728 The Agreeable Caledonian, a typical Haywoodian romance, but one that foregrounds a noble Scot: the young, attractive, virile, and enterprising Glencairn.[6] Therefore, English cultural conceptions of Scotland were starting to change and a more sympathetic relationship with North Britains was beginning to develop, one ingrained in a  sense of the “Scots” as “so bold and brave a people,” to borrow a phrase used by Joseph Addison in The Spectator on May 21, 1711 (53).[7]

III

Though Defoe did describe the Scots in negative terms when he was frustrated with them, especially during the Union negotiations, he was one of the formative figures in the emergence of this new “sympathetic Britishness” that Evan Gottleib describes as evolving in the eighteenth century (21).[8] Though the references to the Scots and Scotland in his novels are relatively few, they are carefully placed to foreground the importance of Scots in domestic and foreign affairs, specifically during a time of change. With regard to the actual number of such references to Scotland or the Scots, there appear to be none in Moll Flanders; only one each in Roxana, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Captain Singleton; and two in each of Robinson Crusoe and Serious Reflections. However, as we will note later, several of these have considerable significance. The Scot takes on the most substantial role in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), and Colonel Jack (1722), in which we observe Defoe fashion the embryo of the recuperative narrative of the Scots/Scotland that Tobias Smollett later embraced.[9] In particular, in these works, Defoe shows Scots contributing to moral growth and class mobility in domestic space and to forging a strong military presence and emergent trading empire abroad. He does so by accentuating the martial prowess and business acumen of the Scots as well as the advantages of “law, religion, and education” in Scotland, these three spheres remaining in Scottish hands after the Union (Guibernau 598).

In Serious Reflections, the final work of the Crusoe trilogy, Crusoe, a Yorkshire man by birth, reflects on honesty and regional character, taking into account the Scot in his speech: “[T]hey say, There is a Sort of Honesty in my Country, Yorkshire Honesty, which differs very much from that which is found in these southern Parts about London: Then there is a Sort of Scots Honesty, which they say is a meaner Sort than that of Yorkshire” (33). Despite the naysayers, “Scots Honesty,” Crusoe assures us, is “of a very good Kind” because honesty is always best when it is “sow’d with a Sort of Grain call’d Religion” (34).[10] In having Crusoe favourably compare the honest Scot to the morally upright people in his own shire, Defoe gestures toward Scotland as a place of Protestant spirituality or morality.

Colonel Jack provides the most direct example of Defovian Scottish morality. Juliet Shields has discussed the brief Scottish segment in this novel in terms of Jacobitism and disaffection, adding that Scotland is most significantly understood as a place of impoverishment in the novel, “a region of dearth” in which the Scots often struggle for daily survival (39). Much to Captain Jack’s chagrin, he cannot even practice his pickpocketing skills in Scotland as a result of poverty and, amusingly, impenetrable Scottish plaid:

for as to the Men, they did not seem to have much Money about them; and for the Women, their Dress was such, that had they any Money, or indeed any Pockets, it was impossible to come at them; for wearing large Plads about them, and down to their Knees, they were wrap’d up so close, that there was no coming to make the least attempt of that kind. (147)

However, Scotland is also shown to offer a corrective to the criminal London underground that both Colonel and Captain Jack inhabit. Initially, Scotland is viewed simply by both men as a safe haven, a way to escape English problems. On this subject, Colonel Jack informs the reader, “for we had … been assur’d, that when we came out of England, we should be both Safe, and no Body could Hurt us, tho’ they had known us” (132-33). Justice in Scotland, however, is severe as the young English rogues discover when they have an encounter with two half-naked pickpocketers being whipped through the streets of Edinburgh (148-50). Colonel Jack remarks that the Scots are “the severest People upon Criminals of” his “kind in the World”—suggesting that the brutal arm of the law ensures justice is taken seriously (147).

Defoe suggests in Colonel Jack that the Scottish commitment to punishing crime in the interests of justice may be deeply rooted in its strong religious identity.[11] The country may be economically impoverished, but it is not morally penurious. When in Kelso, Jack pays attention to the Presbyterian Church, which is “very large and throng’d with People,” including the nobility, implying that Caledonian communities are committed to higher moral principles, a commitment that appears to rub off on Jack (147). After all, it is in Edinburgh that Colonel Jack resolves to return the horse that he stole to its rightful English owner, attempting thereby to make amends for his crime: “I had a secret Resolution, if I had gone back to England, to have restor’d him [the stolen horse] to the Owner, at Puckeridge, by Ware; and so I should have wrong’d him of nothing, but of the use of him for so long time” (149).

However, it is more important to the trajectory of the novel that Scotland also offers alternatives to crime, a means to better oneself through education. It is in Scotland that Colonel Jack gains an education that allows him to become far more cultured. In Scotland, a Stabler takes the illiterate Colonel Jack to “an honest, but a poor young Man” who taught him “both to Write and Read” “in a little time … and for a small Expence” (151). While a series of unfortunate events and the influence of Captain Jack prevent him from immediately taking advantage of this newly acquired knowledge, Defoe presents his instruction in Scotland as vital to Colonel Jack’s ultimate success as an honest businessman. When Colonel Jack eventually becomes part of the emergent empire, he can engage with well-respected historical, classical, military, and geographic works, writing,

as I had learn’d to Read, and Write when I was in Scotland; so 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. (200-01)

If his readers fail to pick up on the importance of Scotland to Jack’s intellectual and moral prowess by the middle of the book, Defoe ensures that it is reiterated at its end, where Colonel Jack reaffirms that it is in Scotland that he begins his journey toward a principled and cultured life, gaining a foundation upon which his Bristol Tutor builds. Jack recalls,

I had been bred indeed to nothing of either religious, or moral Knowledge; what I gain’d of either, was first by the little time of civil Life, which I liv’d in Scotland, where my abhorrence of the wickedness of my Captain and Comrade, and some sober religious Company I fell into, first gave me some Knowledge of Good and Evil, and shew’d me the Beauty of a sober religious Life[.] (339)

Therefore, while any apparent association of Scotland with Jacobitism might, as Juliet Shields suggests, make the nation somewhat suspect to Defoe’s readers (39), the greater emphasis on its facilitation of Jack’s education and spiritual health deflects attention toward the moral and cultural potential Scotland offers to its often-combative southern neighbour.

Most references to Scots or Scotland in Defoe’s fiction appear when he writes of Continental military adventures or an emergent empire rather than a domestic space. Memoirs of a Cavalier proves pertinent here as much of the Cavalier’s narrated life is spent in foreign parts rather than in England. In this novel, Defoe carefully crafts beneficial homosocial encounters with Scots abroad in order to offset in the minds of his readers many of the accusations directed at Scots at home. The first half of Memoirs sets out the Cavalier’s role in fighting Continental wars, initially with France, where he has to pass as a Scot in order to avoid French prejudice against the English, and then (more successfully) with the great Swedish leader Gustavus Adolphus, considered the “father of modern war” (Dupuy). Here the Cavalier comes into contact with actual Scots, and he is impressed by their valour. He finds that his father has been acquainted with one of the Scots, Sir John Hepburn, who is irreplaceable to the Swedish monarch, and in whose regiment the English Cavalier asks to serve.

The respect and admiration the Cavalier forms for the Scots abroad makes his later experience of the civil wars at home deeply problematic, allowing Defoe to highlight that even in this depiction of pre-union Britain, the mutual interests the English and Scots have abroad make dissension at home unnatural. Although the Cavalier answers in the affirmative when Charles I asks him whether he is “willing to serve him against the Scots,” throughout his account of the civil wars, the Cavalier highlights the striking military prowess of Scottish soldiers (122). The English regiment in which he finds himself is often “disorderly and shameful” in its encounters with the Scots (124). The Scottish army is described as “bold and ready, commanded by brave Officers,” and the Cavalier later notes that his regiment was “not a Match” for it (126, 130). Elsewhere he writes of a Scots military gentleman who sought to engage in single combat with an English counterpart, and only an “old Lieutenant” was courageous enough to come out to meet him when “no Body would stir” (131). The Scots soldier, we are told, “used” the “stout old [English] Soldier” “very generously” after capturing him: he “treated him in the [Scottish] Camp very courteously, gave him another Horse, and set him at Liberty, gratis” (131).

Defoe’s admiration is somewhat tempered when he turns to Highlanders, who are more curious beings for the Cavalier, less civilized in some respects. Of them he writes, “I confess, the Soldiers made a very uncouth Figure, especially the Highlanders: The Oddness and Barbarity of their Garb and Arms seemed to have something in it remarkable” (133). Yet despite this visible difference, Defoe ultimately describes them as skilled and courageous. He writes that these “generally tall swinging Fellows” are vigorous enough “to endure Hunger, Cold, and Hardships” and that they are “wonderfully swift of Foot,” capable of “keep[ing] Pace with the Horse” (133, 130).

When Defoe does engage with accusations directed at the Scots in relation to the civil wars, he again deflects attention from them in the same moment he acknowledges them. For example, while the Cavalier describes “the Scots” as “headstrong” and “zealous for their own Way of Worship,” he claims in the same sentence that “[a]ll Men blamed Laud for prompting the King to provoke” them into civil war (136). The Cavalier’s father also suggests that unnamed members of Charles I’s inner circle must also be blamed for the civil wars, since “he feared there was some about the King who exasperated him too much against the Scots, and drove things too high” (121). Even in terms of the Scots handing over Charles I to the English in exchange for money, the Cavalier remains relatively uncritical of them. He blames every party in some respect at the end of the novel, so the Scot is presented as neither more nor less errant or guilty than the English. Interestingly, Defoe places some emphasis on the Scottish collusion with the English Parliament to undermine the king’s authority, so the Scots and English are pictured working together against the king. The punishment received by the Scots is attributed to the fact that they “unjustly assisted the [English] Parliament to conquer their lawful Sovereign, contrary to their Oath of Allegiance” (276-77). Charles I is also blamed for not working with the Scots, “grant[ing] … their own Conditions,” which would have allowed him to enter Scotland and remain safe (278). In the Memoirs, therefore, Defoe creates a kind of British union between the Scots and the English Cavalier abroad, so the conflict between the Scots and English armies at home seems dreadful. When he laments that during battles, he is “moved … to Compassion” by hearing someone “cry for Quarter in English,” this likely included some of his Scottish countrymen, and when he notes that “[h]ere I saw my self at the cutting of the Throats of my Friends; and indeed some of my near Relations. My old Comerades and Fellow-soldiers in Germany, were some with us, some against us,” he may be referring to the Scots who were vital allies abroad (165).

Thus far, we have argued that Defoe’s novels present the Scots as a religious and moral people who are devoted to securing justice and facilitating social mobility through education, and who are skilled and courageous soldiers. We have also suggested that his novelistic representations of the Scot create a vision of British solidarity abroad, which points to and encourages the possibility of unity and harmony at home. In so doing, he works to undermine Anglo-Scottish discord. References to travel, however, are not solely directed at recuperating domestic relations, but also at building strong trading relations overseas. And this is particularly important in novels written only decades after the failed Darien venture, in which attempts to build a distinctly Scottish commercial empire had gone sadly awry. Maximillian E. Novak reminds us that Defoe’s “A Scots Poem”—written in 1707 in the voice of a Scot—specifically encourages Scots to join the imperial project:

I’d fearless venture to the Darien Coast;

Strive to retri[e]ve, the former Bl[i]ss we lost,

Yea, I wou’d view Terra incognita.

And climb the Mountains of America. (qtd. in Novak 310)

In Defoe’s novels, Scots seem to have heeded this call as they sometimes appear just in the nick of time to save English protagonists from an unpleasant fate. For example, in the brief, but poignant references in the first and third volumes of the Crusoe trilogy, Scots suddenly appear to facilitate the sailor’s journey. In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe, having managed to “escape out of slavery from the Moors at Sallee” by boat, is unable to persuade sailors in a larger Portuguese vessel to rescue him until “at last a Scots sailor who was on board, call’d to” him and he responded, saying that he “was an Englishman” recently freed from captivity (28). At that point, they instruct Crusoe to “come on board, and very kindly” take him and all of his “goods” onto their ship (28). The Scotsman is an interpreter and translator, mediating between Crusoe and the Continental Europeans, and, as a result, Crusoe is saved.

In The Farther Adventures, Scots take on a more substantial role.[12] The first appearance of Scottish characters occurs when Crusoe is comforted by the fact that the “Company” amongst which he finds himself in China includes five Scotsmen. They are praised in this case for their economic strengths. Crusoe tells his readers that the five “appear’d … to be Men of great Experience in Business, and Men of very good Substance” (309). In the second reference to these Scots merchants, it is evident that some also have great military skill. One advises the group how to deal with, and leads them against, “forty or fifty” Tartars, during which the Scot shows exceedingly great determination and daring against the enemy:

One of the Scots merchants of Muscow happen’d to be amongst us; and as soon as he heard the Horn, he told us in short, that we had nothing to do, but to charge them immediately without loss of Time; and drawing us up in a Line, he ask’d if we were resolv’d, we told him we were ready to follow him; so he rode directly up to them[.] (315)

In the third reference to these characters, one of the Scottish merchants reveals himself to be gifted at recognizing the ‘true’ Christian religion, thereby keeping Crusoe on the narrow path of the Christian faith. When the group arrives at Argun, on the “Frontiers of the Muscovite Dominions” (325), that Scotsman warns Crusoe not to confuse false with true forms of Christianity, and his reading of Muscovite Christianity, according to Crusoe, turns out to be all too accurate:

Now we came, where at least, a Face of the Christian Worship appeared … and it made the very Recesses of my Soul rejoice to see it:  I saluted the brave Scots Merchant … with my first acknowledgment of this; and taking him by the Hand, I said to him, blessed be God, we are once again come among Christians; he smil’d, and answered, do not rejoice too soon Countryman, these Muscovites, are but an odd Sort of Christians … Well, says I, but still ’tis better than Paganism, and worshipping of Devils: Why, I’ll tell you, says he, except the Russian Soldiers in Garrisons, and a few of the Inhabitants of the Cities upon the Road, all the rest of this Country, for above a thousand Miles farther, is inhabited by the worst and most ignorant of Pagans; and so indeed we found it. (325-26)

Given the religious authority assigned to this Scots merchant, it is no surprise that Crusoe turns to him as a companion in the attempt to annihilate idolatry, symbolized by the destroying of the “Idol made of Wood, frightful as the Devil” that they come across in a village in Nortziuskoy (329). The Scots merchant speaks rationally in response to Crusoe’s plan to destroy the idol, discussing its lack of utility. The Scots merchant, however, does not turn his back on Crusoe, later agreeing to go with him in a sign of religious alliance, bringing a big, burly, zealous Scot with him—religious fantasy to be sure. Interestingly, in this section, there is not one single type of Scot: there is one with great zeal who is prone to violence, from which Crusoe distances himself, and one that is moderate and reasonable, to whom Crusoe attaches himself. The moderate Scot, Defoe’s figure of rational religion, works to save the lives of the priests who watch the idol burn, first suggesting tying them up rather than killing them and then waiting until the fire burns out to avoid the priests throwing themselves into it. In the final reference to the Scots in Farther Adventures, the Scots merchant introduces Crusoe to his acquaintance, the governor of Adinskoy, who offers to provide him with “a Guard of fifty Men” if he feels there will be “any Danger” travelling “to the next Station” (345). Once again, a Scot mediates as needed to ensure the safety and well-being of an Englishman.

In the Crusoe trilogy, therefore, when the Englishman finds himself in a foreign land or reflects on his journeys in it, the Scot often plays critical economic, military, and religious roles. United with commercially astute, religiously discerning, and/or martially gifted Scots who help to translate and mediate for the foreigner, Englishmen can survive and even flourish. When the eponymous hero of Defoe’s Captain Singleton finds himself in a bind, he similarly turns to a Scot. When he needs a hardy and loyal sailor to man William’s vessel for him, he declares, “so I put a Scotsman, a bold, enterprizing, gallant Fellow, into her [the sloop], named Gordon,” and they “sailed away for the Cape of Good Hope” (215). The Scot is once again portrayed as an invaluable resource for the Englishman and his ventures abroad.

IV

In representing the Scots and Scotland in his novels, Defoe makes a great effort, albeit indirectly, to promote and uphold the Union, just as he does in his works of non-fiction, especially his political prose. In order to encourage such national cooperation in his English readers, Defoe highlights the moral, military, mercantile, and educational strengths of the Scot. But the novels reveal not only the benefits of Anglo-Scottish partnerships and harmonious relations, but also suggest that Scotland has a remediating rather than a detrimental effect on British identity. Many of the Scots that populate his novels facilitate the ability of his English protagonists to achieve intellectual, spiritual, martial, and commercial success. Just as Moll Flanders needs America to attain her life’s goal to be a gentlewoman, so Colonel Jack, the Royalist Cavalier, and Robinson Crusoe need Scotland to help them reach the high ideals of a newly formed Britain.[13]

NOTES

1.For an extensive background on Defoe and Scotland, see Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, 203-52, and Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas, 289-337.

2. In “What’s British about The British Recluse? The Political Geography of Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Juliet Shields notes, “Despite Scotland’s prominence in Defoe’s writing more generally, it figures explicitly in only one of his novels, Colonel Jack, and there only briefly as the antithesis of London” (39). In this article, we seek to complicate this reading of the Scots and Scotland in Defoe’s novels.

3. Unlike those of Defoe, the political (Tory) commitments of Smollett motivated him to position Scotland as an alternative to an England overly concerned with commercial matters (drowning in luxury and excess). Although it is beyond the purview of our article, Rivka Swenson, in Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature,1603-1832, has pointed out that even works by Defoe that do not seem to engage directly with Scotland, such as Robinson Crusoe, can be seen as contributing to discussions of the Anglo-Scottish Union. On this subject, she remarks, “the Union, and unionism, is the source for the Crusoe story, formally as well as substantively” (52).

4. We should keep in mind, as Linda Colley notes in Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837, that what appears to be anti-Scot invective may simply be anti-Highlander (and by extension anti-Jacobite) sentiment in the eighteenth century, since the Highlanders were, for good reason at the time, associated with the Jacobites. It was not uncommon, especially after the Jacobite Rebellions, to view Scottish Lowlanders and Highlanders as two distinct groups.

5. Ryder later served as an MP first for St Germans and later for Tiverton. Knighted in 1740, Ryder served in a variety of roles during his career, including solicitor-general, attorney-general, and eventually chief justice of the king’s bench (Lemmings).

6. For a brief, but helpful review of this rarely discussed work, see Susan Paterson Glover, Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 150-51.

7. Richard Steele also wrote very highly of the Scots in a letter dated November 15, 1717 to his wife regarding his reception in Edinburgh: “You cannot imagine the civilities and honours I had done me there, and never lay better, ate or drank better, or conversed with men of better sense than there” (1: 211-12). The Scottish writer John Arbuthnot also renovated inherited stereotypes in the John Bull Pamphlets (1712). John Bull’s sister Peg may be impoverished and shrivelled but she is also energetic, intelligent, feisty, and somewhat agreeable. The Scots likewise picked up on negative representations of themselves and sought to transform them.

8. For example, Defoe refers to the Scots as “surly,” “haughty” and “recalcitrant” (qtd. in Backscheider 227, 251).

9. Though in Smollett’s case, he presented a Tory point of view.

10. Later in Serious Reflections, Crusoe warns against the dangers of division, reminding his readers of the violence that has occurred in Scotland and Ireland because of religious division, leading to the “Flame of War” which is “always quench’d with Blood” (253).

11. On the subject of Defoe’s appreciation for and advocacy of the Scottish Presbyterian Church or Kirk, see Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker’s “Daniel Defoe and the Scottish Church.”

12. See Chapter 1 of Swenson’s Essential Scots for a more extensive discussion of the Farther Adventures, particularly as it relates to Union fantasies.

13. We would like to thank our research assistant Clayton Andres for his excellent work on this project. We are also grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article.

WORKS CITED

Addison, Joseph. Selections from “The Spectator, edited by J.H. Lobban, Cambridge UP, 1952.

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Centlivre, Susanna. The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, edited by John O’Brien, Broadview, 2004.

“The Character of a Scot.” A Trip Lately to Scotland. With a True Character of the Country and People. London, 1705.

Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. Yale UP, 1992.

Couper, John. Bag-pipes no Musick: A Satyre on Scots Poetry. Oxford, 1720.

Defoe, Daniel. Colonel Jack, edited by Gabriel Cervantes and Geoffrey Sill, Broadview, 2016.

———. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1719.

———. The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, edited by Manushag N. Powell, Broadview, 2019.

———. Memoirs of a Cavalier, edited by James T. Boulton, Oxford UP, 1991.

———. Robinson Crusoe, edited by John Richetti, Penguin, 2001.

———. A Scots Poem. Edinburgh, 1707.

———. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1720.

———. A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. 3. London, 1727.

Dupuy, Trevor N. The Military Life of Gustavus Adolphus: Father of Modern War. Watts, 1969.

Glover, Susan Paterson. Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Bucknell UP, 2006.

Gottleib, Evan. Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing 1707-1832. Bucknell UP, 2007.

Guibernau, Montserrat. “Nationalism without States.” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuilly, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 592-614.

Haywood, Eliza. The Agreeable Caledonian. London, 1728.

Keeble, N.H. Introduction. Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, edited by N.H. Keeble, Pickering & Chatto, 2002.

Langford, Paul. “South Britons’ Reception of North Britons, 1707-1820.” Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603-1690, edited by T.C. Smout, Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 143-69.

Lemmings, David. “Ryder, Sir Dudley [1691-1756], judge.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford UP, 2004, doi-org.ezproxy.whitman.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 24394.

Nelson, Holly Faith, and Sharon Alker. “Daniel Defoe and the Scottish Church.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, vol. 5, no. 1, Fall 2013, pp. 1-19.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. Oxford UP, 2001.

O’Brien, John. Introduction. The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, by Susanne Centlivre, edited by John O’Brien, Broadview, 2004.

Ryder, Dudley. The Diary of Dudley Ryder 17151716, edited and translated by William Matthews, Methuen & Co., 1939.

Shields, Juliet. “What’s British about The British Recluse? The Political Geography of Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction.” Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660-1830: From Local to Global, edited by Evan Gottleib and Juliet Shields, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 31-46.

Steele, Richard. The Epistolary Correspondence of Sir Richard Steele. London, 1787. 2 vols.

Swenson, Rivka. Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature,1603-1832. Bucknell UP, 2016.

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Harley, Political Narratives, and Deceit in Defoe’s Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff

Alice Monter

BORN OUT of the necessity to contain and counter the polemics generated by his defense of Harley, in the first two volumes of the Secret History of the White-Staff (September-October 1714), Defoe seemingly decided to act upon his detractors’ accusations and, indeed, “to raise a Dust that he may be lost in the Cloud” (Defoe 5).[1] As a result, there is a constant, and engineered, confusion at play within the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff (January 1715). The whole piece functions as a meta-narrative of the White-Staff series, a parallel universe in which “Daniel De Foe” and “Lord Oxford,” as characters, are enabled to deny their implication in the series (10). This is mainly done through the intermediary of a mysterious Quaker and his enquiring friend, for the benefit of the narrator, a “Person of Honour”, who functions as a one-way intermediary between the reader and all the parties involved (title page). But if this is essentially Defoe’s objective as regards to his safety, and Harley’s, it is not the objective communicated to the readers. From the very beginning, the White-Staff series is revealed to have been a hoax, and the readers are enjoined to follow the narrator of the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff in his quest for truth and denunciation of manipulation and slander. Deceit and revelation are the two faces of the coin Defoe constantly spins in this pamphlet. It is therefore vital to keep in mind Defoe’s objective as not only a political writer, but also a story-teller, to understand the subversion of the political commentary he elaborates in this pamphlet.

When trying to characterize Defoe’s Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff, several images might come to mind: Chinese boxes, halls of mirrors, or maybe even a Möbius strip. There is a story within the story structure that makes for cascading narratives: the narrator’s chance encounter with the Quaker opens the door to the Oxford and De Foe digression, which itself allows for and substantiates the revelation that the White-Staff series is a hoax, which in turns brings about the case study of William Pittis’ answer, leading to the narrator’s reflection on slander. All these stories are absolutely interdependent—were you to remove one, the whole edifice would crumble—and self-confirmatory. They are constantly looping on one another, in a succession of enquiries that promises an “Eclaircis[s]ement”—quite literally an enlightenment, a clearing up—but never really deliver on this promise (35). The hoax story is a case in point: it is first revealed to the reader at the beginning of the pamphlet—by whom, we are not exactly sure, as the first-person narration starts five pages later. The readers are told that

the First and Second Part of the Secret History of the White Staff […] have made Foolish Noise in the World [though] there has been no Substance, or Foundation in the Matters of Fact for them, [having been] prepar’d either on Purpose to get a Penny […], or to Deceive the People, or both. (4)

The same story resurfaces ten pages later when revealed by the Quaker, but this time it is experienced through the eyes of the first-person narrator, presumably the “Person of Honour” referenced on the title-page. He confesses that “[he] was surpriz’d with [the Quaker’s] Account […] altho’ it was nothing, but what [he] had always believ’d” (14). When, a couple of pages later, the story is put to the judgement of “Daniel De Foe,” the character, the latter “answer[s that], He did verily believe it was so” (17), and so on till, eventually, the only conclusion given to the readers is that “no Man may question the Truth of what is here affirm’d” (22). This is reminiscent of the Quaker’s precedent justification. When pressed to prove his point by his inquisitive neighbor at the beginning of the pamphlet, the Quaker answered: “let it […] suffice thee, that I know what I have said to be Truth, the which is more than saying, I believe it” (12). The characters constantly bounce back on each other but actually add very little, apart from an artificial sense of validation for the readers. This sense of validation amongst the confusion is, however, key as it is its knocking down that constitutes Defoe’s greatest coup in the pamphlet.

In the first few pages of the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff, we are told of an “Ignis Fatuus”, a great delusion that justifies the very writing of the pamphlet (4). The White-Staff series, and the pamphlets answering it, are revealed to have been a money-making venture, the mind-child of overtly-pragmatic booksellers and publishers, known

to employ one Man or Sett of Men to write a Book upon this or that Subject […] without any other Design [than] the vending or selling [of] their Books; […] and if that Book succeeded, that is to say, if it Sold well, then [they] employ[ed] others, or perhaps the same Hands to write Answers to the same Book. (19-20)

The hoax sold to the general public, this fake secret history of Harley’s conduct and the public debate it generated, is thus presented to the readers as a solely commercial venture. But this cheekily, and disturbingly, implies that, if the whole scheme is ruled by the laws of supply and demand, then the readers are the very artisans of their own deception. It is their very own obsession with secret histories that therefore justifies the commercial viability of such “bubbles” or “Romances” (6). More than this, it is the readers’ gullibility, and their wishful thinking, their “Folly,” which “g[i]ve[s] Weight to [the pamphlets], when they had not any in themselves” (21). Defoe—the writer—argues that the only truth and weight carried by the written word is that which is inferred by the person who reads and interprets it. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, faith is in the mind of the believer, he seems to say, and the hacks of Grub Street are crushed by the weight of their readers’ beliefs. If the writers supply secret histories to meet the reader’s demand for scandal, it is the reader’s own responsibility not to inflate weightless pieces of fiction by elevating them to the rank of facts. This is purely sophistic on Defoe’s part—and it is extremely ironic as it completely overlooks the fact that he, himself, owed part of his living to the production of such pieces. But it is brilliant for two reasons: first, it articulates a defense frequently invoked by satirists and propagandists: it is a logic that shifts the onus of responsibility—of say, seditious thoughts—not onto the writer who pens the words but the reader who infers meaning, and who chooses to give credit to this inference. Delarivier Manley invoked something similar when she pleaded “invention” to wriggle herself out of the scandal generated by her treatment of the Marlboroughs in the New Atalantis: she argued that, as her portraits of a degenerated aristocracy were only fictional, whoever chose to recognize specific individuals would be more guilty than herself. The second reason is that it adds another layer to the mind game Defoe plays with his readers. It functions as a warning, a nudge to pause and reflect on the very nature of what it is that they are reading, and why is it that they are reading it. It playfully raises the possibility that they themselves may well be guilty of doing precisely what the readers of Grub Street pamphlets are accused of doing: to give far too much weight and credence to a further bubble, the tale of a tale of a tale. If the readers of the Secret History of the White-Staff have been imposed upon, what prevents the very same readers, now being catered for with the tale of the Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, to be further deceived, or bubbled, by the same scheme? This smokescreen leaves the readers dazed and confused while Defoe’s pointed insistence at the ideologically-devoid, financial motivations of the booksellers and publishers allows him, paradoxically, to criticize party politics and partisanship.

Defoe’s clever snare is fueled by the realization that readers are willing to believe any story as long as it fits into their pre-existing views about the world. The readers, even once alerted to the fictional nature of the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff, are alienated by their own incapacity to disengage with the story. In this respect, they mirror a behavior anticipated in the pamphlet itself. The readers were previously told that “the few Friends of the Staff […] were very soon drawn into the Snare” and that the element which “bore no small Share in their Credulity” was the writers’ treatment of the Staff’s enemies in the series, the Friends of the Staff “being very willing that all imaginable Indignities should be offer’d to those who had been so successful in their Opposition to the Staff” (6-7).[2] Similarly,

the Enemies of the Staff […] could not let slip so fair an Opportunity […] to load [the Staff] with farther Infamy; and tho’ at first View they found themselves capable to detect the Falsity and Sophistry of the Books themselves […] they could not avoid the Snare of taking the Books for Genuine. (7-8)

Here, factionalism is explicitly set as a contributing factor to the reception of the pieces, though ideology is not part of the writers’ intent, Defoe claims. Similarly, Defoe suggests, it is the readers’ pre-conditioning by their factionalist beliefs that make them liable to the “Writers of the Books” ploy (8). These are left to contemplate the success of their endeavor “and to see with what eagerness the Party Writers on every Side carried on the Paper War which [the Writers of the Books] had rais’d; […] causing the deceiv’d People to Dance in the Circles of their drawing” (8). This forced passage through a hall of mirrors constitutes the core argument of Defoe’s Harleyite propaganda in this piece. If the variation on deceit satisfied the writer’s creativity and protected the satirist, it is the denunciation of alienation that fed into the political commentator’s urge. Harley’s demise confronted Defoe with much more than the loss of a patron. In addition to a very real, and pragmatic, fear of retaliation for years of service as one of Harley’s apologists—as demonstrated by the defensive positioning he took in the Appeal to Honour and Justice (February 1715) and all that wriggling about he set in the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff—Defoe was moved by his commitment to a Williamite, and Harleyite, model of governance that saw the preservation of an equilibrium between parties as the sole means to guarantee the monarch’s independence from the dictate of partisan dogmatism. The preservation of moderate principles is the common thread that runs throughout all of Defoe’s writing in defense of Harley. By forcing the readers of the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff to reflect on the extent of their own fascination for the scandal surrounding public personae, and their participation in a society that had become obsessed with marketability, Defoe urged them to exercise caution and restraint. But he also tried to argue that the world of politics had become so polarized, and was charged with so much affect, heat, and passion, that it had effectively become a valid vector for “Romances,” and as such had been debased to the point of being commodified by unprincipled mercenary writers who switched the positions they defended according to the laws of demand and supply.

The Secret History of the Secret History is, in many ways, symptomatic of Defoe’s powerlessness in his various endeavors to defend Harley, after the fall of the Minister. Paula Backscheider has emphasized the personal nature of the task, arguing that “the idea of lingering in the hope of serving his superior or of regaining influence made sense” for Defoe (Backscheider 354, 356). This proved an extremely solitary and thankless task. If Defoe’s pro-ministerial work had largely been performed anonymously before, it rested on the relative protection of the ministry, the financial and moral encouragements of Harley, and on the assurance of addressing a large echo chamber. At this juncture, none of these previous warranties were at Defoe’s disposal, and the writer was bound to a series of careful stances that attempted to clarify and reconcile, but mostly failed to convince. Backscheider’s assessment that “[t]hese pamphlets serve more to provide an explanation than to defend successfully” rings true on many occasions, and if the rebound of genial creativity that represented the Secret History of the Secret History has to be commended for the audacity of its arguments, and the modernism of its meta and experimental structure, it essentially provided a further explanation, and a further denial, but hardly a convincing defense of what, by 1715, had become indefensible (Backscheider 354).

Harley—worried of his association with these texts or, as surmised by the Quaker, shocked at the idea that he may have publicly attempted to justify a conduct he deemed righteous, and at the baseness of both the act and the result—sought to publicly and privately disassociate himself with Defoe’s efforts. A week before he was sent to the Tower, Harley arranged for an advertisement in the London Gazette for 5-9 July 1715, in which he publicly disowned several of Defoe’s pieces, arguing 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 prejudice, and that the last of the said pamphlets is published at this juncture to that end.[3]

The part of this statement relating to Harley’s ignorance of the White-Staff series is manifestly false, as demonstrated by Defoe and Harley’s correspondence during August 1714, but hardly surprising in a public notice.[4] The fact that in his private correspondence Harley had previously written that the project was designed “to vent […] malice and spite” seems, however, to translate a genuine feeling of resentment.[5] Alan Downie’s assessment that Harley “was being unduly critical of Defoe’s unbidden effort [as, though] they may not have had the desired effect […], they display at the very last a willingness to help an old patron” has to be mitigated by the fact that, indeed, the effect and the scale of Defoe’s project had become overwhelmingly detrimental to Harley’s cause, and that the Earl had seemingly never felt comfortable with justifications of his conduct, as corroborated by Swift and Defoe’s own portrayal of Harley (Downie, Harley and the Press 188, Defoe 15, Swift 74). It is possible that Harley had grown to feel betrayed by Defoe’s pamphlets, or that he wished to maintain professions of ignorance inside his personal circle. But Harley’s professed outrage—whether genuine or not—was probably only temporary as Downie marks him as the source behind all of Defoe’s insider’s knowledge displayed in the White-Staff series, but also, later, in An Account of the Conduct of Robert Earl of Oxford (July 1715) and the Memoirs of Mesnager (June 1717) (Downie, PEW 402). In other words, Harley seems to have carried on feeding into Defoe’s defense frenzy up to the point of his arrest in July 1715, and possibly later, even though, to current knowledge, no existing correspondence between both men past these points have survived.

Looking back at Defoe’s characterization of Oxford in the Secret History of the Secret History, we are given a vision of Harley that naturally strengthens the denial of authorship—a depiction of Harley as a gentleman who thought that “Vindications were useless Things, and injurious to the Persons, they would pretend to serve [and who] knew nothing he had done that needed any Vindication” (15). This is also very similar to what Swift wrote in the Four Last Years, describing Harley as having “an Easiness and Indifference under any imputation, although he be ever so Innocent; and, although the strongest Probabilities and Appearance are against him” (Swift 74). To Swift, this was held as a fault, something reinforcing the general public’s received opinion of “Robin the Trickster,” and he lamented that his patron was “not only very retentive of Secrets, but appeared to be so too” (74). This very same association between Harley and secrecy is something Defoe constantly plays with, and utilizes, in the White-Staff series. He mostly tries to justify and normalize this paranoid tendency to neutralize Whig criticism, and yet, what Defoe depicts as the amoral practices of Grub Street is strikingly close to Harley’s very own secretive manipulations of writers, be it Defoe, Swift, Manley, Prior, or others, during his mandate. If the core motives were this time ideological, and not financial, the similarities are too obvious to be missed. Surely there was ground for Harley to take offense, but one wonders to what extent the Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff was not also part of a joke between both men, or whether there could be yet another ironic and self-reflective mirror play contained within it, but this time centered around Harley and Defoe themselves. Or, if Harley felt genuinely let down by Defoe’s delivery in the first two volumes of the White-Staff series, then to what extent the Secret History of the Secret History pamphlet was actually bravado on Defoe’s part, trying to woo Harley and convince him that, as a political writer, he was still very much on top of his mystifying propagandistic game. Or was it, more prosaically, yet another example of Harley’s own doctoring of his public image, once more portrayed, as in the Guiscard crisis, as a gentleman in control of his passions, always above the fray of partisan frenzy?

University of Liverpool / Université de Paris

WORKS CITED

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Defoe, Daniel. The Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff, Purse and Mitre. London: S. Keimer, 1715.

Downie, J. A. Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe. Cambridge UP, 1979.

——,  editor. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, Volume 2: Party Politics, edited by W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, Pickering & Chatto, 2000.

Healey, George Harris, editor. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Clarendon Press, 1955.

Oldmixon, John. Considerations on the History of the Mitre and Purse. Shewing, that the design of the three late managers, the Staff, Mitre and Purse, in setting their historians to work, was only to raise a little dust that they might escape in the cloud. London: J. Roberts, 1714.

Pittis, William. The History of the Mitre and Purse, in which the First and Second Parts of the Secret History of the White Staff are fully considered, and the

Hypocrisy and Villanies of the Staff himself are laid open and Detected. London: J. Morphew, 1714.

Swift, Jonathan. The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, edited by Herbert Davis, Basil Blackwell, 1951.

NOTES

1. The reference is to William Pittis’ statement that “[Defoe had] been hired to raise a Dust in order to blind People’s Eyes from seeing clearly into the White Staff true Character” (Pittis 3), and to John Oldmixon’s subsequent reprise that “a parcel of Scriblers [were hired] to raise a little Dust bout them [so that] they should escape in the Cloud” (Oldmixon 2).

2. Throughout the White-Staff series the “Staff”, referring to the thin white rod emblematic of the Lord High Treasurer’s position, metonymically stands for Harley.

3. The advertisement refers to the Secret History of the White-Staff and the Conduct of Robert Earl of Oxford. Quoted in Downie, Harley and the Press, 188.

4. Defoe shared his intentions with Harley on two occasions. See Healey, 443-445.

5. Harley to Dr. William Stratford (Edward Harley’s tutor), 22 March 1715. Quoted in Downie, Harley and the Press, 187.

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The Death of Friday: A Precursor to Crusoe’s Failure of Enlightenment in Defoe’s Farther Adventures

Judith Stuchiner

CRITICS HAVE COMMENTED on Crusoe’s tolerance of the “French Ecclesiastic” in Defoe’s Farther Adventures. Though Crusoe prefaces his tolerant remarks with some factual truths—“first … he was a Papist; secondly, a popish Priest; and thirdly, a French popish Priest”—he concludes on an eminently rational note: “But Justice demands of me, to give him a due Character; and I must say, he was … an exemplar in almost everything he did” (83). John C. Traver argues that Farther Adventures “undermines the habitual identification of Crusoe’s religious experience with Protestant spirituality” (544). Travers attributes the discontinuity between Crusoe’s religious identification in Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequel to a change in Europe’s religious environment. He writes:

Defoe’s positive portrayal of Catholicism in the delineation of the French priest becomes explicable in its broader European religious context … The French Catholic clergy’s support of Jansenism suggested to many Protestants the possibility of a broader Christian unity that could include both Protestants and Catholics and end denominational hostilities.… In undermining the habitual identification of Crusoe with Protestant spirituality, Farther Adventures simultaneously explores the contradictory impulses toward charity and hostility at a time of special historical relevance to the British nation. (546)

Maximillian Novak also sees Farther Adventures as an example of growing religious tolerance. He argues that Crusoe’s tolerant attitude toward the French priest is symptomatic of the “‘Sincerity Crisis’ of his Time,” and he points out that “Defoe’s fiction is contemporary with the Salter’s Hall Controversy—a controversy that arose when a number of Dissenting congregations demanded that their ministers express a sincere belief in the Trinity” (118). Novak concludes, “Is it any wonder that Crusoe alone on his island, puts his emphasis on sincerity of belief rather than on doctrinal considerations?” (118).

Neither of these historical arguments address the quite different portrayals of Crusoe’s attitude toward Catholicism in these two volumes, written within four months of each other, both in the wake of the Jansenist and the Salters controversies. Also, these explanations do not make sense of Crusoe’s increasingly antisocial and intolerant behavior in the second half of Farther Adventures. From the moment he leaves his island, Crusoe is a lone traveler, frequently on the run, who surrounds himself with strangers rather than family members. He forms a sketchy partnership with a Scot, purchases a ship in a haphazard way, destroys the idol of the Tartars, jeopardizes the lives of his fellow travelers by keeping this guilty secret to himself, demonstrates blatant intolerance of other people’s form of worship, and basically lives an unspiritual life that mirrors the barren environment of his journey. Why would Defoe establish the religious tolerance and sincere faith of his hero at the outset of the novel, only to topple it later?

I propose that Farther Adventures begins with an imperfect human being who is experiencing what Christopher Flint describes as a “crisis of faith,” not with a hero who is evolving in his spirituality (402). I argue that Crusoe’s willingness to leave the conversion of the “savages” to a French priest is part of Defoe’s agenda to portray Crusoe as a lapsed Protestant who shirks his duties, and not as a tolerant Protestant who practices an “inclusive” version of Christianity. I suggest that Crusoe presents himself as tolerant of the French priest in order to justify his willingness to squander an opportunity to do the kind of work for which Defoe has consistently shown passion and respect—the molding of young minds, through education, in the principles of Protestantism.[1] Rather than an argument for finding a middle ground, in which “doctrinal considerations” are deferred in order to accommodate “sincerity of belief,” Farther Adventures is an uncompromising argument for the inextricable linkage between adherence to doctrine—whether it be Protestant or Catholic—and “sincerity of belief.”

My argument is indebted to Alpen Razi’s recent dissertation Narratives of Amelioration. Defoe’s Family Instructor, Razi argues, is exemplary of these “narratives of amelioration”:

According to Defoe, Dissenters have been overcome by their worldly and corrupt passions, embracing a form of mental slavery that Defoe aims to ameliorate by guiding them through the process of converting their enslavement into servitude to the Protestant cause and by transforming their fractured communities into a Protestant utopia. (40)

Thus, true servitude to God results in reform and in freedom from the slavery of the Catholic Church. Further, the need for enlightenment in the principles of Protestantism had not diminished; on the contrary, it was more pressing than ever. Just as religious instruction was a critical component in the accomplishment of the Protestant Reformation in England, it was crucial in the religious environment in which Defoe lived. Defoe addresses parents in his Family Instructor and makes the case that without their willingness to instruct their children in the tenets of Protestantism, the teachings of the Reformation would not be maintained.

Crusoe’s island, Razi might argue, was an “allegory for impending social disintegration in England” (13). While Razi’s arguments primarily concern the Family Instructor, they can be applied to Defoe’s fiction. I propose that Defoe uses Farther Adventures to argue that Crusoe’s neglect in the conversion of the heathens to Protestantism on his Caribbean island mirrors Protestant parents’ neglect in the religious education of their children, in England.

Initially, it appears that the situation that greets Crusoe upon his return to the island is one of relative calm. The “Savage Gentry” consist of three “lusty comely Fellows” and five women “well favour’d agreeable Persons, both in Shape and Features”; this group has been well-integrated into the island (52-3). The men have “prov’d very faithful” (66) as slaves and the women have become the “temporary Wives” of the “five English Men” (55), one of whom is Will Atkins. With regard to the additional thirty-seven “savages,” it was agreed that they would receive

a Part of the Island to live in, provided they would give Satisfaction that they would keep in their own Bounds … The poor Wretches thoroughly humbled … clos’d with the Proposal at the first offer, and begg’d to have some Food given them. (72)

“There they liv’d when I came to the Island,” writes Crusoe, “the most subjected innocent Creatures that ever were heard of” (72-3). He continues:

One thing was very remarkable, (viz.) that [Our Men] taught the Savages to make Wicker-work, or Baskets; but they soon out-did their Masters; for they made abundance of most ingenious Things in Wicker-work; particularly, all Sorts of Baskets, Sieves, Bird-Cages, Cup-boards . . They look’d at a distance as if they liv’d all, like Bees in a Hive. (73)

Still, notwithstanding this industry—both of the colonizers and the colonized—the slave colony, in Defoe’s view, is a metaphor for the “unfinished reformation” (Razi iii). As Crusoe himself concedes, “One Thing, however, cannot be omitted, (viz.) that as for Religion, I don’t know that there was any thing of that kind among them” (75).

The logical person to effect a reformation on the island is its king: Crusoe. While Crusoe is interested in self-justification, the French priest seeks justification by faith and works. First, he points out to Crusoe: “You have here four English men, who have fetched Women from among the Savages, and have taken them as their Wives … These men, who at present are your Subjects, under your absolute Government and Dominion, are allow’d by you to live in open Adultery” (87). Crusoe’s immediate response is one of rationalization rather than concern—“I thought to have gotten off with my young Priest, by telling him, that all that Part was done when I was not here, and they had liv’d so many Years with them now, that if it was an Adultery, it was past Remedy, they could do nothing in it now” (88). But as we can see from his unambiguous warning, the pious priest is not convinced: “Flatter not your self, that you are not therefore under an Obligation to do your utmost now … How can you think, but that … all the Guilt for the future, will lie entirely upon you?” (88). I suggest that Crusoe’s eventual acquiescence to the priest’s offer to perform the marriage ceremony does not reflect tolerance for Catholicism, but the desire to alleviate his “Obligation” and “Guilt.”

Though Crusoe has no shortage of sincere words, his lack of follow through, in the form of actions, reveals his actual insincerity of belief. With regard to the priest’s “second complaint … that the Devil’s Servants and the Subjects of his Kingdom … might at least hear of God … a Redeemer … the Resurrection, and … a future State,” Crusoe responds with “an Excess of Passion”: “How far, said I to him, have I been from understanding the most essential Part of a Christian! (viz.) to love the Interest of the Christian Church, and the good of other Mens Souls?” (89)

Yet in response to the priest’s “third Article”—“Now Sir, you have such an Opportunity here, to have six or seven and thirty poor Savages brought over from Idolatry to the Knowledge of God their Maker and Redeemer, that I wonder how you can pass such an Occasion of doing Good, which is really worth the Expence of a Man’s whole Life,” Crusoe literally has no words: “I was now struck dumb indeed, and had not one Word to say” (90). In truth, Crusoe is more interested in saving money than in saving souls: “You know, Sir, said I, what Circumstances I am in, I am bound to the East-Indies in a Ship freighted by Merchants, and to whom it would be an unsufferable Piece of Injustice to detain their Ship here, the Men lying all this while at Victuals and Wages upon the Owners Account.” (90). Crusoe speaks feebly of “Circumstances” and claims he is acting in the best interest of the “Merchants,” the “Men” and the “Owner,” who, by the way is Crusoe, when he is really motivated by self-interest. His seeming agreement with the priest—“Why Sir, it is a valuable Thing indeed to be an Instrument in God’s Hand to convert seven and thirty Heathens to the Knowledge of Christ”—rings hollow, since he is clearly happy to leave all the work to the priest. He says, “But as you are an Ecclesiastic, and are given over to the Work, so that it seems so naturally to fall into the Way of your Profession; how is it, that you do not rather offer your self to undertake it, than press me to it?” (91). In short, Crusoe’s willingness to leave the conversion of the “savages” to the priest stems neither from sincerity of belief, nor from religious conviction, but from a paucity of faith.

Crusoe’s “crisis of faith” may be productively viewed within the context of Defoe’s Schism Act Explain’d (1719). In this work, Defoe defends the Schism Act (1714) both on its legal power and on its legal powerlessness. As it has been amended, Defoe argues, the Act ensures the “security of the Church against Popery and all Erroneous Principles of Religion” (25); however, Defoe continues, the Act cannot prevent Dissenters from discharging their duties since “Family Schooling … is not at all forbidden or constrained by this Law” (32). Defoe urges Dissenters to see the small window of potential with which the Act permits them to take responsibility:

I conclude with a serious Exhortation to the Dissenters … Masters of Families and Fathers of Children, that they would consider their immediate Duty … that they would revive that lost practice of Family Instruction … [while Protestant children] must be sent to Grammar Schools among the Church-bred Youth, they may be secure’d against the Infection of that Levity … What Evil they get by day you will pray it out of them, perswade it out of them, and instruct it out of them again at Night … [Consider] how you can answer to it yourselves to neglect that which you know is your indispensable duty as Parents. (36 – 9)

In contrast to the interaction between Dissenting parents and their children that Defoe describes above, we see, in the interaction between Will Atkins and his “savage” wife, whom Atkins often addresses as “Child,” the educational process at its best. The wife’s questions activate Atkins’s conscience and force him to acknowledge his hypocrisy (104-5). Like Atkins, Crusoe feels he is a hypocrite; however, unlike Atkins, Crusoe is not ready for true enlightenment.

In Before Novels, Hunter argues that exemplarity and self-examination are central to Protestantism (283-7). As is evidenced by his offer to stay on the island and teach Christianity, the French priest’s zeal is exemplary; furthermore, as is evidenced by his receptivity to his wife’s questions, Atkins capacity for self-examination and repentance is also exemplary. Thus, Crusoe has no shortage of examples; however, he seems to have lost the capacity for self-examination. As G. A. Starr forcefully argues in his Spiritual Autobiography, attentiveness to the design of Providence was central to Defoe’s understanding of Protestantism (31). Crusoe does not listen to the inner promptings of his soul; as a result, things go very badly for him.

Crusoe’s voyage to the East begins with the tragic death of his loyal servant and surrogate son, Friday. Rather than allow Friday to remain with the French priest, who politely reminds Crusoe that Friday’s knowledge of the language would be immeasurably helpful in the conversion of the heathens, Crusoe refuses: “As I had bred Friday up to be a Protestant, and it would quite confound him to embrace another Profession” (92). In the face of his willingness to hand the thirty-seven “savages” over to the French priest, Crusoe’s unwillingness to subject Friday to the teachings of the Catholic priest is somewhat insincere, at best, and hypocritical, at worst. Also, the advent of Friday’s death, coincident with Crusoe and Friday’s departure, demonstrates that Crusoe’s reasoning lacks prescience. It can even be argued that Crusoe is implicated in Friday’s death, since he not only insists upon wandering, but also compels Friday to wander with him.

Fordham University

 WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Edited by W. R. Owens, Pickering & Chatto, 2008.

Flint, Christopher. “Orphaning the Family: The Role of Kinship in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH, vol. 55, no. 2, 1988, pp. 381-419.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Novak, Maximillian E. “Sincerity, Delusion, and Character in the Fiction of Defoe and the ‘Sincerity Crisis’ of His Time.” Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis, eds. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan. University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 1985.

Razi, Alpen. Narratives of Amelioration: Mental Slavery and the New World Slave Society in the Eighteenth-Century Didactic Imagination. 2016. University of Toronto, PhD Dissertation.

Starr, G. A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. London: Gordian, 1971.

Traver, John C. “Defoe, Ungenitus, and the ‘Catholic’ Crusoe,” SEL, vol. 51, no. 3, 2011, pp. 545-563.

1. For more about Defoe’s staunch Protestantism, see Hunter and Starr.

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Solitude and Collecting: Robinson’s Curiosities

Barbara M. Benedict

Originally presented as the keynote address at the Sixth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society, July 2019.

DEFOE’S PROTAGONISTS—that is, the protagonists of those novels we attribute to Defoe—tend to be curious in several ways. To conventional members of society, they represent the danger of transgression: they are rebels, outcasts, or criminals, violators of mores, morals, property, family, fate, and God: thieves, pirates and adventurers like Moll Flanders, the pickpocket, Roxana, the whore, and even H.F., the merchant narrator of The Journal of the Plague Year, who riskily ventures from mere curiosity into the stricken parts of the city. At the same time, they exhibit curiosity: the wanderlust and restless urge to investigate that marks their rejection of their place in the sphere into which they were born; their drive to rewrite their designated roles or characters. Indeed, novels featuring protagonists with extreme desires or in dramatic situations resulting from their inquisitive natures were popular at the time: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, for example, with its concupiscent heroine ravening on lust, was published the same year as Defoe’s book and was immensely successful with readers intrigued by the forbidden. All of these characters are thus both curious about the world beyond their experience and are themselves curiosities: people whose transgressions propel them beyond the norm into the realm of the outlandish, transforming them for the reader—and, in Robinson’s case, for himself—into subjects of inquiry.

Crusoe’s dilemma segregates him from his historical, geographical, and social identity, casting him as nearly non-human, an ontological transgression: a human exiled from humanity (Benedict, Curiosity, 1-23).[1] Although the eighteenth century was the age of conversation, his is the “sad Tale of a silent life.” He longs for his dog to talk; he tames a “sociable” parrot just to hear a voice cawing his nominal identity; searching for any sort of companionable presence, he domesticates a cat and a goat to comfort him. In a period that celebrated sociability as virtue, he has no human companion at all for many, many years before the arrival of Friday (Defoe 47, 87, 104). Moreover, as  man’s control over the material world and nature was reaching fresh heights, Robinson can contrive only the most basic tools, clothes and shelter from primitive materials, and fails to manufacture the commodity designed for communication, ink. And at a time when art, especially printed literature, was becoming the center of culture, he has only the Bible to read and is forced to scratch out his Journal with his wasting ink supply. In this period of intensifying commodification, commercialism, and a love of things, Robinson lands on the Island of Despair stripped and dependent on collecting things from the ship and land.[2] Bereft of companions, communication, and comforts, reduced to a bare, forked thing, his greatest resource is his curiosity: his investigation and accumulation of the world about him.

Because of their transgressiveness—whether it be cause or consequence—Defoe’s characters are also essentially, often terribly, alone. Indeed, their aloneness makes them especially curious. Robinson Crusoe is Defoe’s most extreme example of an exile, isolated from mankind, and thus also his most extreme example of a curiosity. His very identity is isolation: as Irene Basey Beesemyer says, “to be the Crusoe, he must be the shipwrecked, island-bound isolato, the man of perpetual solitude,” and many other critics have discussed his loneliness and its relationship to his spiritual development (Beesemeyer 81). However, equally significant is the connection between his isolation and his curiosity: his inquiries, and his status as an anomaly. In this novel, solitude and curiosity, loneliness and inquiry, exist in a powerful relationship: the pain of being alone spurs the search for a cause and hence a solution, and investigation into the natural world in turn peoples it with phenomena made newly and emotionally important. The term “curiosity” has etymological and cultural roots associated with collecting; the “habit of curiosity,” in the Renaissance, was the activity of accumulating works of cura or careful workmanship. This second meaning also informs the curiousness of many of Defoe’s characters, notably Moll Flanders and Roxana, both obsessed with piling up money and precious objects. Robinson’s curiosity also possesses this feature: his solution to aloneness is a particular form of collection that reinvents his isolation as acquisition. This essay examines the way Robinson’s curiosity about his world and his status as a curiosity inform one another and define his identity. 

Curious Isolation

Robinson’s solitude occupies several registers of significance. His aloneness enacts the aloneness of man without God; it also rehearses the aloneness of the explorer in strange lands, and it dramatizes the aloneness of human consciousness in a world of dumb material. It makes the material world seem hostile and seems to set his soul—his desires, his feelings—apart from or subject to his body. Several literary genres had already addressed this issue of the relationship of man to an often hostile, often unknowable nature. Foremost amongst them is the georgic. Virgil’s rediscovered Georgics were enjoying great popularity in the early eighteenth century, and like Defoe’s novel, they constitute more than merely instructions on raising crops. They also serve as treatises on the ambiguous power of nature, “which nurtures and tortures while it tracks the cycle of seasons,” as Adam Budd observes, thus purifying the spirit as well as feeding the body (Budd 3). The retirement poem, another revived classical genre popular at the time, also sings the delights of a private life in the countryside: the imagined idyll of a self-contained existence where the person needs and wants nothing.

Both of these genres inform Robinson Crusoe. The book constitutes a kind of prose georgic: a literary how-to manual deigned to improve spiritual strength through focused productive labor on the land, but it also functions as a marvelous tale (Kareem 74-104). If Robinson Crusoe mingles religious adjuration with careful accounts of experiments, like building boats and huts, raising goats, and growing corn, and Robinson periodically praises his self-sufficiency, he also exemplifies the anomaly of a fundamentally social animal without society. Indeed, the tension between Robinson as Everyman and Robinson as the Only Man runs throughout the novel.

Loneliness is the marker of Robinson’s extraordinariness. In the eighteenth century, it was associated with melancholia, a humoral and increasingly medicalized, psychological disorder. Robinson describes his narrative as “a melancholy Relation of a Scene of silent Life” (Defoe 47), and melancholia assails him throughout his ordeal. Thinking of how he might have been surprised and destroyed by the cannibals, he records, “after seriously thinking of these Things, I should be very Melancholy; and sometimes it would last a great while,” even though such a fate can no longer happen. He calls his Island a “Prison” (71), and himself a “Captive,” (100) and he reports that before he learns to recognize God’s grace,

as I walk’d about, either on my Hunting, or for viewing the Country; the Anguish of my Soul at my Condition, would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very Heart would [sink, thinking on how I] was a Prisoner, lock’d up with the Eternal Bars and Bolts of the Ocean, in an uninhabited Wilderness, without Redemption: In the midst of the greatest Composures of my Mind, this would break out upon me like a Storm, and make me wring my Hands, and weep like a Child: Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my Work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the Ground for an Hour or two together; and this was still worse for me; for if I could burst out into Tears, or vent my self by Words, it would go off, and the Grief having exhausted it self would abate. (100).

This description evokes Albrecht Durer’s portrait of Melancholy, seated on the ground, holding her head and staring down. Indeed, Robinson’s imagined fears, his metaphors and responses here reflect the contemporary understanding of melancholia: the experience of utter desolation, one of the kinds of madness that accorded eighteenth-century tourists of such asylums as Bedlam spectacular delight (Foucault).[3]

Melancholia has a robust history in early English medicine and is frequently characterized by aloneness. Burton’s 1631 Anatomy of Melancholy, a comprehensive and popular compendium of seventeenth-century thought on the matter, calls it a “spirituall Disease,” and finds that “Folly, melancholy and madness and but one disease, delirium is a common name to all” (Burton Part. 1. Sect. 2. Memb. 1. p. 173; Sect. 5. Memb. 4. p. 341; Sect.1, p. 29).[4] He finds many causes, among them the “Losse of Liberty” and “Imprisonment” that Robinson endures, and the primary, original cause: the “fear and sorrow” that derive from the sin of disobedience to God, and lead to another key cause of melancholy: despair, despair, which is the ultimate sin against God because it denies his grace. This is one of the most important threats to Robinson on the Island, the Island he in fact calls “the Island of Despair” (Defoe 52). Burton finds, “The impulsive cause of…miseries in man [is] this privation or destruction of Gods image, [which] the sinne of our first parent Adam in eating the forbidden fruit” (Burton Part. 1, Sect. 1, Memb. 1, Subs., 122). Robinson too finds the root cause of his suffering in his disobedience to his Father.

This realization enables Robinson to collect his experiences and characterize his exile as an object of contemplation itself. John Locke uses “to collect” to mean “to understand,” and the verb “to recollect” signifies both to collect again or anew—that is, to gather together freshly—and to re-understand (Jager 324, 323). Robinson exercises this re-collection when he learns to prioritize his own internal experiences over the documentation of the Island’s riches: he records that, when he begins to run out of ink, he “contented my self to use it more sparingly, and to write down only the most remarkable Events of my Life, without continuing a daily Memorandum of other Things” (Defoe 76). This process turns the chaos of daily experience into narrative. He confesses, “I have been in all my Circumstances a Memento to those who are touched with the general Plague of Mankind…that of not being satisfy’d with the Station wherein God and Nature had plac’d them;” when he relates his experiences to the abandoned Spaniards, he represents them as a “Collection of Wonders,” a marvelous tale, and “a Chain of Wonders” (140-1, 186, 197). His written account likewise serves to shape experiences that seem meaninglessly repetitive, or endless and fruitless, into a comprehensible whole.

Eighteenth-century philosophers and physicians commonly identified three other causes of melancholy: solitude, idleness and obsession, all of which they considered intensified by imagination. Robert Burton reiterates this point in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and so too does the physician John Armstrong in his poetic treatise The Art of Preserving Health (1744). Armstrong observes,

‘Tis the great art of life to manage well

The restless mind. For ever on pursuit

Of knowledge bent, it starves the grosser powers:

Quite unemploy’d, against its own repose

It turns its fatal edge, and sharper pangs

Than what the body knows embitter life.

Chiefly where Solitude, sad nurse of Care,

To sickly musing gives the pensive mind.

There Madness enters; and the dim-eye’d Fiend,

Sour Melancholy, night and day provokes

Her own eternal wound. The sun grows pale;

A mournful visionary light o’erspreads

The cheerful face of nature: earth becomes

A dreary desart, and heaven frowns above.

Then various shapes of curs’d illusion rise:

Whate’er the wretched fears, creating Fear

Forms out of nothing; and with monsters teems

Unknown in hell… (IV, 84-101)

Robinson is notoriously restless: indeed, learning resignation to God’s will is his mental project on the Island. His imprisonment there forces him to “confine” his “Desires,” and to manage his “restless mind” (Defoe 141). He is also tormented by fear: of cannibals, or animals, or the unknown. As he discovers, “Fear of Danger is ten thousand Times more terrifying than Danger it self, when apparent to the Eyes” (116), and from experience, he learns to pull his imagination into his reason, to pull himself together: to collect himself.

This self-collection is propelled by Robinson’s search for a reason for his exile, a logic to his suffering: an external cause for what, at first, he finds pointless punishment. This re-envisioning entails seeing his experiences as a collection, rather than an assemblage of events. When he discovers that the cannibals had been visiting the Island all the while he was there, unaware, he reports:

It is as impossible, as needless, to set down the innumerable Crowd of Thoughts that whirl’d through that great throrow-fare of the Brain, the Memory, in this Night’s time: I ran over the whole History of My Life in Miniature, or by Abridgement, as I may call it, to my coming to this Island. (142)

This reflection leads him both to thankfulness that he remained ignorant of the cannibals and to a renewed desire to leave: the contradictory gratitude to God and the resurgent restlessness and discontent that marks his character. Robinson figures his process of distilling the road-trip of his memories as both a literary genre, the newly popular abridgement, and a painterly one, the miniature, again shows him organizing his experiences not only as a narrative but as a coherence: something grasped quickly and as a whole, just as a collection constitutes both an assemblage of separate items and a unity. Moreover, Robinson’s account not only constitutes an increasingly selective collection of incidents, but also a history of the circumstances that make Robinson a curiosity himself. In recording his accumulated marvelous episodes as a “collection,” Robinson documents this collecting: his understanding and his accumulation of the Island’s riches in the fashion of a spiritual autobiography. As George Starr shows, this procedure resembles that of spiritual autobiographies designed to systematize personal reflection and improvement through regular self-examination and recording (Starr).

However, if Providence provides the plot, Robinson constitutes the subject. People—foreign and racially-different people—constitute another typical curiosity that Robinson encounters both before and after his long exile on the Island. As several critics have noted, they constitute a form of collectible, some physically acquired by Robinson, and some captured in his narrative and memory. Robinson is a slave-trader, and accordingly, he trades his “Boy Xury,” despite the lad’s loyalty, and accumulates the indigenous Friday (Defoe 27). Although these people fit the conventional European category of a curiosity because of their perceived racial difference from Europeans and their foreign customs, neither this foreign-ness nor Robinson’s normativity remains stable; in fact, Robinson himself becomes de- or re-racinated as a native—a feature of the novel’s appeal exploited by editors in frontispieces illustrating Robinson in his outlandish gear. This corresponds to the manner in which Robinson describes himself emphasizes his curiousness: both his scientific perspective and his status as a man half-European, half-native—as a categorical transgression. He is a vehicle of collected artifacts:

I had on a broad Belt of Goat’s-Skin, dry’d, which I drew together with two Thongs of the same, instead of Buckles, and in a kind of a Frog on either Side of this. Instead of a Sword and a Dagger, hung a little Saw and a Hatchet, one on the other. I had another Belt not so broad, and fasten’d in the same Manner, which hung over my Shoulder; and at the End of it, under my left Arm, hung two Pouches, both made of Goat’s-Skin too; in one of which hung my Powder, in the other my Shot….As for my Face, the Colour of it was really not so Moletta like as one might expect from a Man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten Degrees of the Equinox…I had trimm’d [my beard] into a large Pair of Mahometan Whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks, who I saw at Sallee; for the Moors did not wear such…of these Muschatoes or Whiskers, I will not say they were long enough to hang my Hat upon them, but they were of a Length and Shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would have passed as frightful. (109)

Rather than describing his apparel in the active voice, as the result of his choices—“I hung my Saw and Hatchet,” for example—most of this description presents Robinson as a costumed indigenous oddity. Robinson paints a meticulous empirical portrait of the way he would look to an observer. This defamiliarizing technique echoes those used by, for example, Aphra Behn’s narrator in Oroonoko in describing the native of Surinam, and similar early-modern ethnographical accounts by travelers to the Indies and Africa. Exiled from humanity and adrift from Europe, Robinson is both the subject and the object of his own curiosity.

Collecting the Island: Natural Curiosities

Self-collecting entails exercising power over rambunctious or rebellious feelings, and this is Robinson’s project on the Island. Self-collecting resembles collecting itself as an exercise over the material world and a proclamation of identity. Since the Renaissance, collecting, the “habit of curiosity,” had been a means of control and display: in cabinets of curiosities ranging from rooms to cupboards, European royalty and aristocracy and clergy exhibited their collections of precious objects and natural rarities to select audiences to dramatize their power, and churches contained repositories of precious relics, secreted in dedicated, semi-private rooms, to induce wonder and humility in their congregations (Impey and MacGregror, Hudson, MacGregor).[5] By the later seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, repositories of naturalia had become similar theatres for scientific study and collecting a national passion: the Royal Society for the Advancement of Learning contained an extensive  repository, as did other scientific societies (Delbourgo, Benedict, “Collecting Trouble”). Seen through the lens of the collector, the world appeared stuffed with collectibles, and all objects during this period, be they natural, cultural, or artistic, came to hold a particular charge as emblems of civilization, material memories of past ages, vessels of cultural alienation, markers of human survival, exhibits of artistic transcendence.[6] Collecting them, especially in quantity, correspondingly became a means of control over a world expanding geographically and culturally and a way of positioning oneself in that world (Appadurai, Stewart).

Objects on the Island function this way for Robinson in his role as a collector. Before the arrival of Friday, Robinson follows the practices of contemporary scientific explorers and natural philosophers both in his investigation of the Island and in his accumulation of it: the domestication of the land itself and the conversion of its materials into goods (Watt, McKeon, Hunter). He explores the Island methodically, collecting information about its natural features as recommended by the Royal Society, and records them, as Jason Pearl has shown, in the fashion of its members, like Lawrence Rooke, Robert Boyle, and Henry Oldenburg, “using a plain style of commentary devoid of self-aggrandizement and romantic embellishment” (Hayden 18). The fellow Royal Society member, John Woodward, specified directions for the recording of information in his 1696 pamphlet entitled Brief Instructions For making Observations in all Parts of the World: as also For Collecting, Preserving, and Sending over Natural Things, Being an Attempt to settle an Universal Correspondence for the Advancement of Knowledge [sic] both Natural and Civil.[7] This treatise recommends keeping strict records of the winds, tides, water salination, and so forth, and in factual language, carefully differentiates subcategories and variations. These become lists or inventories of natural phenomena. His types of “Weather,” for example, includes, “Heat and Cold, Fogs, Mists, Snow, Hail, Rain, Spouts or Trombs, vast Discharges of Water from the Clouds,” and numerous other particularities of climate [Max Novak observes that Defoe knew the methods of the Royal Society and studied the causes of winds] (Novak 220).

Robinson follows Woodward’s formula. His accounts of his voyages aboard ships and the tidal pulses and movements of the sea, of the lay of the Island, its coves and groves, caves and shores, exhibit a similar process: observation and documentation based on experience as the experience is unfolding. Robinson’s observational specifications on the sea and winds indeed follow Woodward’s recommendations: they inventory and map the land and document its riches: Woodward specifies, “Springs, Grottoes, and Mountains, Trees, Earthquakes. Plants and Animals” (Defoe 2-3). Robinson also documents the natural phenomena he encounters, including a bird, which “I took to be a Kind of Hawk, its Colour and Beak resembling it, but had no Talons or Claws more than common, its Flesh was Carrion and fit for nothing” (40). (It is typical of Robinson immediately to evaluate his scientific information in terms of its practical use: he is a pragmatic not a speculative scientist. He does not document nature for its own sake at this point in the narrative, although later he learns to value the Island’s beauty.) (Tobin 1-31).

One example of Robinson’s scientific observation occurs after Robinson has left the Island. It is when Robinson, his Guide, and Friday travelling through the Spanish mountains encounter the Bear. Robinson reports,

As the Bear is a heavy, clumsey Creature, and does not gallop as the Wolf does, who is swift and light; so he has two particular Qualities, which generally are the Rule of his Actions; first, As to Men, who are not his proper Prey; because tho’ I cannot say what excessive Hunger might do, which was now their Case, the Ground being all cover’d with Snow; but as to Men, he does not usually attempt them, unless they first attack him: On the contrary, if you meet him in the Woods, if you don’t meddle with him, he won’t meddle with you; but then you must take Care to be very Civil to him, and give him the Road; for he is a very nice Gentleman, he won’t go a Step out of his Way for a Prince; nay, if you are really afraid, your best way is to look another Way, and keep going on; for sometimes if you stop, and stand still, and look steadily at him, he takes it for an Affront; but if you throw or toss any Thing at him, he takes it for an Affront, and sets all his other Business aside to pursue his Revenge; for he will have Satisfaction in Point of Honour; that is his first Quality. The next is, That if he be once affronted, he will never leave you, Night or Day, till he has his Revenge; but follows at a good round rate, till he overtakes you. (211)

This remarkably accurate description familiarizes the unfamiliar by humor and social satire, combining pragmatic advice with the natural observation of the animal’s behavior and responses. The ensuing account of Friday teasing the creature for Robinson’s amusement dramatizes the control over nature enabled by subduing it for personal pleasure that characterizes collecting.

Another way in which Robinson follows the practices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists is by collecting and organizing the materials he finds in language and writing. This is his way of making sense of a chaotic experience. When he deconstructs the ship, his finds “a great many Things…which would be useful to me” (Defoe 40). Amongst them are:

two or three Bags of Nails and Spikes, a great Skrew-Jack [for lifting heavy objects], a Dozen or two of Hatchets, and above all, that most useful Thing call’d a Grindstone…two or three Iron Crows…two Barrels of Musquet Bullets, seven Musquets, and another fowling Piece…(41)

In addition, he accumulates powder, small shot, sheet lead, mens’ clothes, a hammock, bedding, canvas, ropes, rigging, the sails, planks, bolts, casks, chests, bread, rum, sugar, flour, cables, razors, scissors, knives, forks, and, of course, thirty-six pounds in gold and silver coins (40-43). He also retrieves “three very good Bibles,” the plurality of which indicates their status as collectibles rather than reading material (48). This cornucopia of objects marshalled into a litany is mesmerizing: these constitute relics from the distant world that once was his own. Moreover, Robinson organizes the things he has retrieved from the ship in a traditional style. He groups his finds into loose categories reflecting their function but does not arrange them in a hierarchy, instead using a rough chronology that records when and where he found them. This method mimics that used by such collectors as John Tradescant, Elias Ashmole, Sir Hans Sloane, and Ralph Thoresby in their catalogues of their curiosity-cabinets and early museums (Wall).

Like these collectors, too, Robinson includes collectibles: objects made into curiosities by virtue of being detached from their meaning and place, and thus purposeless even while they remain provocative and stimulate inquiry and wonder. These are the silver and gold coins. Coins were a prominent part of most early museums and a subject of great interest amongst collectors, especially ancient coins (Addison wrote a treatise on them, and Pope a poem), but they were valued for their memorial not their monetary function (Benedict, “Collecting Trouble”). Robinson has both European and South American coins, and although originally intended for currency, they too now work as oddities: exotic, possibly intrinsically valuable, but functionally useless on the Island, now that they have been removed from their social and cultural context and exchange value. They do, nonetheless, still stimulate philosophical speculation. In the famous passage, Robinson exclaims, “Oh Drug!…What art thou good for?”, and moralizes on the coins’ worthlessness, like Pope in his poem “To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals,” written in 1713 and revised in 1719, the year of Robinson Crusoe’s publication (43). Robinson sees in the coins only, as Pope puts it, “the wild Waste of all-devouring years!” (Pope 215). These gold and silver curiosities metaphorically point to how Robinson himself is a curiosity on the Island: a man severed from his context, his culture, his usefulness, and history itself. Indeed, in the same way, the white Spaniards on the mainland are themselves curiosities to the indigenous people.

The Island of Despair, which seems at first a desert, actually bursts with objects to collect and subjects of inquiry: natural and artful curiosities: goats, cats, caves, hills, gold and strange birds, and eventually, cannibals, Spaniards, and, of course, Friday. Robinson also makes his own “curious”—that is artfully-made and also exotic—objects: canoes, clothing, baskets, pots (Walmsley). Indeed, by the time he leaves the Island, he possesses his own, selective collection of things that constitute material memories. When the charitable Portuguese Captain rescues him from his early adventure and transports him to Brazil, he refuses to rob Robinson of his goods. Robinson “immediately offered all I had to the Captain of the Ship, as a Return for my Deliverance,” but the Captain replies, “’if I should take from you what you have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that Life I have given”’ (Defoe 26). Accordingly, ”he ordered the Seamen that none should offer to touch any thing I had; then he took every thing into his own Possession, and gave me back an exact Inventory of them, that I might have the even so much as my three Earthen Jars” (26).

Robinson’s solitude drives his curiosity and invests curious phenomena with meaning. Curious objects function as markers of the ambiguous borders between superstition, science, and religion. The dying goat that Robinson encounters in the cave exemplifies the way his empirical imperialism domesticates the threatening unknown into a reflection of himself, so that he becomes the Island and the Island becomes him. The description opens with an empirical explanation of the cause for the shining stars within the cave:

I perceiv’d  that… there was a kind of hollow Place; I was curious to look into it, and…I found it was pretty large; that is to say, sufficient for me to stand upright in it, and perhaps another with me; but I must confess to you, I made more hast out of than I did in, when looking farther into the Place, and which was perfectly dark, I saw two broad shining Eyes of some Creature, whether Devil or Man I knew not, which twinkl’d like two Stars, the dim light from the Cave’s Mouth shining directly in and making the Reflection. (128)

The star-light of the goat’s eyes turns the cave upside down: looking inward becomes looking upward to the heavens. By echoing Plato’s description of the cave in which the unenlightened rely on empirical perception for truth, the passage suggests an allegorical meaning reinforced by the religious theme in this novel, as in Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It hints that Robinson’s redemption lies in erasing the borders of Self and Other. While both God and Friday represent this Other in important ways, so too does the source of his unhappiness: the Island’s ominous solitude.  By making himself the ominous Other, Robinson begins not merely to own the Island, but to incorporate it as part of himself.

Significantly, in the subsequent passage, Robinson extends his understanding of his own curiousness by recognizing it to himself. When he speaks to his “self” as to an Other, he realizes that he has permitted part of himself to operate beneath reason, to become an alien force of fear:

after some Pause, I recover’d my self, and began to call my self a thousand Fools, and tell my self, that he that was afraid to see the Devil, was not fit to live twenty Years in an Island all alone; and that I durst believe there was nothing in this Cave that was more frightful than my self. (Defoe 128)

Here, Robinson recovers his “self” that had been dazed by terror, and identifies the source of his fear as the very recognition of this self. This recognition is compelled by solitude: living “all alone” on the Island appears equivalent to seeing the Devil.

While Robinson’s self-recognition forms part of his religious redemption, it also serves to clear the way for his ownership of the Island. By associating the Island itself with his solitude, he recognizes that his loneliness is the source of the “frightfulness” of the Island. The goat both empirically and allegorically represents the misperception of seeing the Island as the enemy, and both empiricism and piety enable Robinson to revise this perception. As Robinson approaches, he hears the goat ominously “Sigh, like that of a Man in some Pain…follow’d by a broken Noise, as if of Words hale express’d, and then a deep Sigh again” (Defoe 129). These sounds cement the mirroring of the goat and Robinson, both alone suffering in the dark. However, once Robinson “encourages my self…with considering the Power and Presence of God…to protect me,” he rushes forward and perceives, illuminated by a flaming firebrand, “a most monstrous frightful old He-goat,” a phenomenon of natural not supernatural monstrosity.

This escape from superstition to empiricism enables Robinson to explore the Island as his if it were his own territory. This, his ensuing exploration of the cave reveals a treasure trove. Once he returns the following day and penetrates deep within the cave, crawling through a narrow passage, he perceives a treasure trove: a heaven within the Island (as within the Island of himself).

When I got through the Strait, I found the Roof rose higher up, I believe near twenty Foot; but never was such a  glorious Sight seen in the Island, I dare say, as it was, to look around the Sides and Roof of this Vault, or Cave; the Walls reflected 100 thousand Lights to me from my two Candles; what it was in the Roc, whether Diamonds of any other precious Stones or Gold, which I rather suppos’d it to be, I know not. (129)

The cave becomes his “Grotto,” his cabinet of natural curiosities, a place of rarity and wonder equivalent in the natural sphere to the artful repositories of princes. Robinson’s curiosity invests the Island of Despair with significance: both natural and supernatural, emblematic and literal, it prompts Robinson to realize that he is, himself, the most terrifying phenomenon on the Island, and that his solitude is his safety. Having lost the fear of aloneness, Robinson reaps the rewards of the Island, no longer a prison but a storehouse.

Conclusion

Collecting serves Defoe as a secular practice to make the material world part of the spiritual one. In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson practices it to give his life meaning, to escape melancholia and fear and to transform episodic experience into narrative. When Robinson leaves the Island, he carries with him a memorial collection (although he must abandon the giant canoe):

for Reliques, the great Goat’s-Skin Cap I had made, my Umbrella, and my Parrot; also I forgot not to take the Money I formerly mention’d, which had lain by me so long useless, that it was grown rusty, or tarnish’d, and could hardly pass for Silver, till it had been a little rubb’d, and handled; as also the Money I found in the Wreck of the Spanish Ship. (200)

This little curiosity collection fuses money and memento, memory and material: his collections and recollections. However, as well as the contents of the Ship, Robinson collects the products of his own labor: goat-skins, baskets he has made, corn and other foodstuffs. He surrounds himself with hand-made curiosities: artifacts of his own manufacture people his lonely world. Scientific practices of observation, collecting and cataloguing enable Robinson to make sense of the Island’s resources and survive physically on it.  His physical, imaginative, and spiritual survival intertwine. Solitude, as much as survival, turns Robinson into a curiosity. It enables him to define his life, his adventures, and himself as marvelous. As Virginia Birdsall explains, “Just as he tames outward nature by cultivating more and more land, so he tames inner energies by…[the] conquest of inner space” (Birdsall, 37-38; qtd. in Beesemyer 84). He familiarizes the strange physical world to transform it into home. His collections extend from the Ship’s contents to the island’s plentiful natural goods.

Collecting is an imaginative exercise designed to personalize the material world, to make things into meanings, to control and counter the solitude and isolation of the human condition. The apparent division between these two realities, between the internal and external worlds, appears as the duality of loneliness and hard physical labor in Robinson Crusoe, a duality many critics have found reflected in his life (Swados 36; Pearl 140; Backscheider). Sir Walter Scott identified this process in Defoe’s story as Robinson grows from “a brawling dissolute seaman” into “a grave, sober, reflective man,” and Beesemyer explains that, for Defoe, “true solitude—comprehension and appreciation of one’s solitariness that give rise to a singular perception of personal integrity—can only arise out of and follow an externally imposed isolation experience; this alone permits the individual both to access and to hold conversation with the community of the inner self” (Scott 77; qtd. in Beesemyer 83). But the essential corollary to this self-recognition is the imaginative possession and absorption of the surrounding material world, not simply as a mercantilist but as an imaginist.[8] The “large earthenware Pot” that Virginia Woolf famously found herself staring into, instead of into Robinson’s soul, in fact, represents not the banality of the narrative but the essential connection between Robinson’s physical and psychic survival (Woolf 45). Correspondingly, the mental project of forging a self from memory makes past and present coherent. Robinson’s curiousness and his curiosity become one.

Trinity College

NOTES

1. I define “curiosity” as an “ontological transgression empirically registered”: that is, as a violation of categories of being that is perceived through the senses.

2. Particularly recently, studies of the literary uses of objects has burgeoned following the seminal 1985 study of commodification of eighteenth-century British culture, The Birth of a Consumer Society.

3. See also Plate #8, “Scene in Bedlam,” of William Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” (1735), which depicts a melancholic figure as one of the types of the mad in an asylum.

4. See also Reid.

5. See especially MacGregor 1-30.

6. For studies of objects and material culture in eighteenth-century literary studies, see Berg and Clifford, Blackwell, Lamb, McCracken, Brown, Pearce, Festa, especially 67-132, and Benedict, “Saying Things.”

7. For the critical appraisal of Crusoe as a representation of the economic or commercial man, see Backscheider, Ambition and Innovation, 235; Koch, 35-36; and Svilpis.

8. Initially, Woolf complains that “there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing, but a large earthenware pot.” However, she concludes that, “Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands and the solidity of the human soul” (Woolf 48). See also Kraft, 38.
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——.  Daniel Defoe: His Life. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

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Benedict, Barbara M. “Collecting Trouble: Sir Hans Sloane’s Literary Reputation in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 36, no. 2, Spring 2012, pp. 111-142.

——. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early-Modern Inquiry. Chicago UP, 2001.

——. “The Moral in the Material: Numismatics and Identity in Evelyn, Addison and Pope.” Arts in the Age of Queen Anne, edited by O.M. Brack and Cedric Reverand II, Bucknell University UP, pp. 65-83.

——. “Saying Things: Collecting Conflicts in Eighteenth-Century Objects Literatures.” Literature Compass, vol. 3/4, 2006, pp. 689-719.

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Defoe’s Storm Forms

Annette Hulbert

IN THE MIDST of a storm off the coast of eastern England, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) struggles to describe his experience. He alludes to the later storms he will encounter, downplaying the present storm as “nothing like I have seen many times since; no, nor like what I saw a few days after” (10). Retrospective narration is crucial to Crusoe’s storytelling, both as a means of signaling how risk escalates in successive storms and situating storms as significant events in the novel. After the storm subsides, Crusoe’s more seasoned shipmate ridicules him as a “fresh-water sailor,” unable to recognize a real storm, and offers him enough punch to “drown all [his] repentance” (RC 10). Only in retrospect will Crusoe read the storm as an instance of special providence, as God’s direct intervention in his life.3

In this scene, and in many others in his literary fiction, Defoe draws explicitly on the terminology of atmospheric disturbances he first established in The Storm: Or, a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which Happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest Both by Sea and Land (1704). Defoe assembled a collection of eyewitness accounts to commemorate the Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, a storm that racked up an estimated death toll of eight thousand in Southern England and Wales (Golinski 42). In The Storm, Defoe includes a chart comparing sailors’ nicknames for varying degrees of storms with laymen’s terms for distinguishing a gust of wind from a full-blown tempest, suggesting that exaggerated accounts of storms dating from “the terrible Tempest that scattered Julius Caesar’s Fleet” might be reexamined in light of sailors’ “Ignorance” about what a storm entails (24). The inexperienced Robinson Crusoe might indeed be the “South Country Sailor” described in The Storm who cowers at a gale of wind. Defoe dedicates much of his literary career to the task of discerning not only what can be defined as a storm, but how to interpret storms as objects, at once literary, natural historical, and providential. This essay explores numerous storm forms that swirl together as representational issues in Defoe’s work, combining to form the basis for a method of assemblage that Defoe developed early in his writing career as the centerpiece of The Storm and then integrated into two of his major novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724). I argue that Defoe’s compilation of eyewitness accounts allows him to articulate an empiricist theory of how a novel might be assembled in the same way that a weather system is reported, proceeding from multiple points of view to forms or patterns. To see the storm as a sign or token of disaster—to apprehend extreme weather as laden with meaning—reveals how analogical interpretation operates together with the new science in Defoe’s novelistic representation of atmospheric tumult.

As a text that aspires to be political tract, sermon, and scientific study, the most noteworthy aspect of The Storm is the multiplicity of voices found in its pages. In compiling reports of the Great Storm, Defoe believed himself to be participating in the construction of an observational method for the eighteenth century. Defoe suggests:

Tis impossible to describe the general Calamity, and the most we can do, is to lead our reader to supply by his Imagination what we omit; and to believe, that as the Head of the particulars is thus collected, an infinite Variety at the same time happened in every place, which cannot be expected to be found in this Relation. (Storm 109)

Ilse Vickers notes that Defoe frequently includes accounts that explicitly stress truthfulness, or else introduces accounts himself from persons whose authority will not be questioned and then supplements these accounts with excerpts from the Royal Society’s scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions (Vickers 65).2 Following the Royal Society’s empiricist tradition, Defoe stresses his commitment to a distributed model of truth: “I cannot be so ignorant of my own Intentions, as not to know, that in many Cases I shall act the Divine, and draw necessary practical Inferences from the extraordinary Remarkables of this book” (Storm 4). To “act the Divine,” in this case, is not only to act as arbiter of truth, but to consider which fictional structures are most appropriate for relaying “extraordinary Remarkables.” Lennard Davis suggests that Defoe justified the interpretive liberties he took by placing his work in the realm of parable and allegory (157). Similarly, Wolfram Schmidgen writes that Defoe’s “goal to represent the heterogeneity and multiplicity of experience itself” counters the idea that the novel form privileges the individual and its single focalizing perspective (96). By examining the assemblage of perspectives present in The Storm, we might locate the origins for a more capacious idea of narrative form.

Defoe’s ability to survey the intricate interconnectedness of the storm is partially a product of his own varied background. Defoe’s biographers assert that he seriously thought about becoming a clergyman in 1681, only to turn enthusiastically towards business and land speculation. By 1703, Defoe was a notorious political pamphleteer, imprisoned for his seditious parody of High Church Tories, The Shortest Way with Dissenters. Only days after Defoe emerged from prison, the storm swept through. The Storm is committed to documenting local details that would have been relevant to Defoe’s neighbors: the numbers of trees uprooted, chimney stacks blown down, the ships wrecked on the Thames. Defoe, who had lost his profitable tile business while he was imprisoned, darkly documents “the sudden Rise of the Price of Tiles” after the storm (Storm 57-58). Robert Markley suggests that The Storm’s interest in local conditions reflects how “eighteenth-century philosophers were working within causal frameworks that were still overwhelmingly local” (113). Yet The Storm also demonstrates Defoe’s broader epistemological concerns via the creation of data: Markley argues that Defoe’s recognition that representation will always be inadequate in conveying exact particulars led to his innovative use of statistics to model the causes and effects of the storm (105). As Defoe’s narrative instincts developed, so did his forward-leaning views of weather as a system.

The broader transition in meteorological theories taking place at the beginning of the eighteenth century provides parallels to Defoe’s own interest and involvement in weather studies. Meteorological phenomena often inform experimental literary forms in the early eighteenth century. In our current age of anxieties about extreme weather and an unsettled atmosphere, a number of historians have begun identifying this long-standing, deep connection between weather and literary forms. Arden Reed, writing about Romanticism, documents how the eighteenth-century obsession with “meteors” seeps into religion, poetics, and language, only to vanish once the Enlightenment emphasis on “the light of reason” takes hold (38). Jesse Oak Taylor applies a similar argument to the Victorian novel, attending to the “literal and literary sense” of atmosphere “inhering in the air shared by the world, the text, and the critic” (7). Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, linking eighteenth-century meteorological events to Defoe’s work, argues that “uniquely reflexive forms of knowledge” accompany atmospheric anomalies (98). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was widely held that human time and the age of the earth could be deciphered by reading the prophetic books of the Bible (Jacob 35). Vladimir Janković holds that, over the course of the eighteenth century, the practice of reporting unusual weather events—what he terms meteoric reportage—regularly incorporated both divine and naturalistic discourses (5). The tradition of occasional meditation, first popular among Puritans and seventeenth-century diarists, gives some insight into how Defoe integrated this brand of empiricism into his work. Occasional meditations allowed those with even a little familiarity with biblical tropes to find meaning in everyday experiences with the natural world. J. Paul Hunter argues that this reading practice generates an excess of meaning, and he uses extreme weather as an example: “A storm could mean that the Whigs were wrong or the Tories, that Sabbath breaking had to stop or reformers of manners had gone too far, that the stage was corrupt or the theater of politics debased” (207).3 In other words, the religious themes in Defoe’s stories overlap with the naturalistic models central to the new science and its associated economic logic.”4 Defoe’s understanding of weather as a system, in line with the traditions of meteoric reportage and occasional meditation, knits together religious and secular discourses by juxtaposing different responses to the same events. This is the narrative technique I call an assemblage.

The term “assemblage” has been used recently in eighteenth-century and ecocritical scholarship alike, though the precise way that it has been employed varies according to context. My reading here is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage as updated by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things: a feedback loop between climate and human enterprises that cannot be untangled. Bennett offers the example of an electrical power grid as an assemblage, a “material cluster of charged parts that have [become] affiliated,” even as “energies and factions…fly out from it and disturb it from within (24). In the same sense, Bennett writes, a hurricane can be classified as an assemblage. Sean Silver’s recent article explores how early eighteenth-century media forms, most notably the newspaper, gather up individual, fragmentary accounts of the Great Storm and churn them into an “emergent whole” (503). Silver, characterizing Defoe himself as “part of [a] weather-writing assemblage” ushering in the new science, notes that The Storm’s signature method of balancing the “universality of the tempest’s destruction” with specific eyewitness accounts proved vastly popular with his public audience (506). These arguments, taken together, suggest that the relationship between weather systems and literary form might productively be summed up as a kind of assemblage. For Defoe, certainly, describing the multiplicity of the Great Storm from a first-person perspective allowed him to conceptualize how a novel might operate in the same way.

Robinson Crusoe’s Storm Theory

Thus far, I have been suggesting that Defoe’s early experience of the storm form, as a site and source of narrative tension, shaped his choices as a writer of narrative fiction. From his retrospective position as the narrator of his life, Crusoe is in a position to assess the significance of and impose structure on his “individual experiences,” or the various storms he encounters. Crusoe readily accepts his shipmate’s dismissal of the storm because interpreting the weather as a necessary risk inherent to commercial activity—in naturalistic rather than providential terms—allows him to justify going back to sea. But even as Crusoe likens the sea’s returned “smoothness of surface” to his own vanished “fears and apprehensions,” he confesses to the reader that the threat of the storm as providential punishment roils in his mind (RC 10).

A model of climate that stresses special providence, with its emphasis on the unpredictability of God’s wrath, thwarts the modern adventure capitalist who sees storms as the unavoidable risks of plying overseas trade routes. Storms evoke an Old Testament God: the voice in the whirlwind addressing Job, the impetus for the whale swallowing Jonah. Despite his predisposition towards the providential, Crusoe must frame the storm as a risk in his speculative ventures in order to resume his mercantile voyages. He achieves this framing through retrospection, imposing a naturalistic reading of events over the initial providential interpretation. As a result, we find that Crusoe’s appeals to God, his promises to repent and return to his father’s middle-class home, dissipate “as the sea was returned to its smoothness of surface and settled calmness by the abatement of the storm (RC 9-10). Crusoe’s “apprehensions of being swallow’d up by the sea” forgotten and the “current of [his] former desires return’d,” he rejects his resolution to return home as a “true repenting Prodigal.” A naturalistic interpretation of storms is here linked to the logic of capitalism. In minimizing the storm as a gust of wind, Crusoe justifies his desire to return to sea and rise above the “middle station of life” (RC 6). Defoe’s belief that the knowledge of reality sufficient for economic success is developed through an assemblage of first-person perspectives, a conviction developed in response to storm reportage, sparks in Crusoe a desire to repeatedly test providence.5

Crusoe’s retrospective analysis of the storm introduces a different mode of assemblage: a collection of Crusoe’s evolving perspectives on the storm from divergent temporalities, most significantly featuring his anticipation of the storm to come. “For if I would not take this as a deliverance,” Crusoe muses, “the next was to be such a one as the worst and most harden’d wretch among us would confess both the danger and mercy” (RC 10). Crusoe cannot recognize the role of providence in a single storm, but looking back, he can see that a cluster of storms amount to a series of trials. The reader will not be permitted to leisurely arrive at the same conclusion. Rather, Defoe introduces the complexity of multiple storms before they actually occur in the narrative, allowing Crusoe to map out the ways he experiences disaster in different time scales: in the midst of a storm; in the aftermath of a storm as safety allows him to reflect on the future; in the far future, as experience allows him to look back. Between the first and second storm, Crusoe both gains the naturalistic knowledge that the “South Country Sailor” in The Storm lacks and develops the interpretive skills to navigate between types of knowledge; that is, he can simultaneously tell the difference between types of gales and interpret their broader significance in his life. By fluctuating between narrative tenses, he gives the impression of being caught in synchronous storms that collectively illustrate a distinctive providential pattern in the novel.

This principle of temporal assemblage operates in a similar manner in the second storm, “a terrible storm indeed” that Crusoe encounters only a few days after returning to sea (RC 11). Terrified by his previous storm experience, Crusoe lies “stupid” in his cabin and “cannot describe” his temper: “I could ill resume the first penitence which I had so apparently trampled upon; and hardened myself against,” he says, contemplating how his late rejection of divine agency makes his repentance inauthentic. The shipmaster, by contrast, has no such qualms, simultaneously “vigilant to the business of preserving the ship” and softly praying for God’s mercy. Though the rest of the crew unwittingly shifts between naturalistic and providential models, cutting the mast and engaging in fervent prayer, Crusoe finds these modes to be irreconcilable. No wonder that when Crusoe dramatically swoons in the midst of pumping water from the ship, a fellow sailor kicks him aside with his foot and takes up the task. Meditating on the feasibility of authentic storm repentance in the midst of a storm makes Crusoe an excellent philosopher and—as his shipmates make clear—a poor sailor.

Crusoe’s need to make sense of his past actions is often in tension with the patterns he perceives. Indeed, in contrast to a mode of assemblage that features a collection of eyewitness accounts, Crusoe’s retrospective perspectives can be revised to impose a pattern on otherwise unconnected events. Storms indisputably factor centrally in the story of Crusoe’s life, specifically, in the way he connects disparate moments into a coherent narrative. By recording storms, he can track a series of overlapping patterns that give his life special significance and then retrospectively assemble these patterns, carefully considering how time and wisdom have changed his perspective. This is not to say that the future version of Crusoe has all the answers. In one retrospective musing, Crusoe “knows not what to call” his desire to return to ship and sea “nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling decree that hurries us to be the instruments of our own self-destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open” (RC 13). Here, there is a tension between the unknowability of storm and the patterns he attempts to impose on his experience. Shipping out to sea, time after time, Crusoe is unsure whether he returns to face the storm on his own volition or meets with “decreed unavoidable misery,” the inevitable outcome his father warns against (RC 14). In attempting to reconcile his obstinacy with what has been “decreed,” he again speculates that the two can be reconcilable, as long as every action he takes is part of a providential plan.

The shipmaster, as a witness to the storm alongside Crusoe, provides yet another example of Defoe’s assemblage model in action. Crusoe resolves to treat the voyage following the second storm as a sort of experiment, telling his shipmaster “how I had come this voyage only for a trial, in order to go farther abroad” (RC 14). Crusoe’s foolhardiness shocks the shipmaster, who has no desire to be a casualty of Crusoe’s storm study and tells him so: “You ought never to go to sea any more, you ought to take this as a plain and visible token that you are not to be a seafaring man” (RC 14). Simultaneously, in offering Crusoe this interpretive reading, the shipmaster draws on the understanding of extreme weather Janković calls meteoric reportage, or a premodern understanding of weather events as omens (3). Though the shipmaster has encountered his own fair share of stormy weather, he makes a neat distinction between encountering disaster as a matter of course and testing Providence out of perverse curiosity. He speculates that Crusoe is following the disastrous template set by the Biblical character Jonah, whose defiance of God nearly killed an entire ship’s crew.6 If Crusoe persists in exploring the science of Providence, he will be sure to see “a visible hand of Heaven” acting against him (RC 14).

The shipmaster’s biblical interpretation of the storm increasingly vied with naturalistic accounts of extreme weather over the course of the eighteenth century. We might assume that Defoe, who frequently documented the activities of the Royal Society, would subscribe wholesale to a naturalistic interpretation of the weather. But as we have seen, Crusoe’s naturalistic curiosity leads him to test providentialism as a hypothesis, not as a ground of faith. Crusoe’s retrospective analysis of his desire to return to sea, the “over-ruling decree,” is also the reason he gives for tinkering with divine plans. Though he heeds the shipmaster’s warning for some time, taking a land-based route to London, a combination of greed and curiosity causes him to seek out another voyage bound for the coast of Africa. Here, the “over-ruling decree” is named more precisely as Crusoe’s “wild and undigested notion of raising [a] fortune” (RC 15). A ship captain offers Crusoe free passage after hearing him express his desire to see the world, finally making him into “both a sailor and a merchant.” To be a sailor, Crusoe suggests, is to uncritically indulge in the naïve travel lust his father condemns; to be a merchant is to capitalize on the unspoiled locales he visits. This will be the single voyage Crusoe considers a success, though he is careful to remind the reader that the shipmaster’s prophecy remains valid: every journey he attempts is plagued with troubles ranging from heat sickness to pirate attacks. Far from dissuading Crusoe from future voyages, these misfortunes instill in him the near maniacal obsession to “preserve his effects”—a tendency that will allow him to prosper from afar after his shipwreck (RC 16). Crusoe’s financial success forces his admission that he craves the excitement of a voyage, despite its attendant hazards. Crusoe’s habit of confronting risk head-on helps him survive as a trader in Africa, escape slavery in Morocco, and finally reap profits as a planter in Brazil. Crusoe’s success in Brazil forces his admission that he craves the excitement of a voyage, despite its attendant hazards. “Raising [a] fortune” is no longer a concern, but the “overruling decree” remains.

As an experienced sailor, Crusoe instinctively draws on the perspectives of his fellow shipmates. Crusoe’s inevitable return to sea is met with a “violent hurricane or tournado [that] took us quite out of our knowledge,” placing himself among a collective of sailors all unable to diagnose and therefore cope with the storm (RC 34). Initially, it is not clear why this particular storm baffles the crew, particularly since Crusoe casually and clinically documents the storm’s trajectory from southeast to northeast and labels it as a “hurricane or tournado.” But tracing Defoe’s particular fascination with hurricanes and tornadoes back to 1703 makes Crusoe’s point more evident. Indeed, the Great Storm, the center of Defoe’s early storm inquiries, was a hurricane. In The Storm, Defoe speculates that such storms were made up of “A Collection of Materials … from the Continent of America,” providing insight into how hurricanes were perceived as hybrid phenomenon; a “Confluence of Vapours” raised from a series of foreign lakes and seas and assembled by God “till they made a sufficient Army duly proportion’d to the Expedition design’d” (Storm 48). A hurricane defies knowledge precisely because it combines disparate particles and thus violates the “Chain of natural Causes.” It is no coincidence that the formation of a hurricane, described in this way, mimics Defoe’s narrative method of juxtaposing multiple perspectives, or that a second hurricane immediately following the first propels Crusoe’s plot forward: while attempting to steer northwest towards Barbados, the ship is drastically swept off course by a storm that sinks his ship, kills his shipmates, and maroons him on an island.

The retrospective tense described thus far is the vantage from which Crusoe narrates his story. Once on shore, however, Crusoe carefully assembles his storm observations in a journal that contains yet another retrospective vantage point. Containing diligent reports on his stock of provisions, sudden rainstorms, and seasonal changes, Crusoe’s island “journal of every Day’s Employment” illustrates how naturalistic and providential language overlap for the land-bound survivor as well as the experienced sailor (RC 51). Jan Golinski finds that the mundane observations of seasonal patterns recorded in eighteenth-century almanacs emphasized the “overall timeliness of British weather,” in contrast to sudden violent storms that lacked coherent explanations (104). The form of the almanac, read in this sense, de-emphasizes abnormal weather events along with an analogical worldview. Lewis takes this reasoning one step further, proposing that as almanacs were discarded yearly, so their specific worldview was abandoned for a newer model (152). Temporarily abandoning the tendency to view storms as preternatural signs, Crusoe instead turns toward his journal as a means of deciphering meteorological order on the island. Tellingly, Crusoe first narrates the “dreadful Storm” that left him shipwrecked and then claims to “copy” his account into the Journal—and in doing so, leaves out his initial affective experience of the storm. Crusoe cannot assimilate the storm experience into the accounts of regularized weather contained in his journal.

Crusoe’s journal would first seem to align with the naturalistic almanac, but in Crusoe’s hands, it becomes a form for reading special providence. Through retrospective narration, Defoe explores how naturalistic knowledge interacts with Crusoe’s reflections on the patterns of Providence. Crusoe uses the last of his ink to map out a “strange concurrence of days, in the day various Providences which befel me” (RC 106).7 The first of Crusoe’s coincidences appears to be a straightforward consequence for disregarding his father’s prophecy: the same day of the year he ran away to sea is the same day he was captured and made into a slave. The remaining two coincidences correspond more directly to Crusoe’s storm experiences. One year to the day after Crusoe is spared by the storm in Yarmouth Roads, he makes his escape from captivity with Xury. Most significantly, Crusoe reports, he was born on the same day he was shipwrecked on the island, “so that my wicked life and solitary life began both on a day” (RC 106). Some of the strongest evidence that Robinson Crusoe is a novel invested in the principle of assemblage can be located in this section, in which Crusoe interprets a series of natural accidents as collectively illustrating the workings of providence. In deciphering the sign of the storm, Crusoe registers how religious belief is enmeshed with scientific truth.

While Crusoe (as narrator) continues to reexamine his life through a providential microscope, Defoe (as author) appears to call into question his protagonist’s belief in special providence. Before mapping out the marvelous coincidences that make up his life, Crusoe admits that he “did not really know what any of the days were” and “found at the end of my account I had lost a day or two in my reckoning” (RC 83). At the heart of the ideologies that shape Defoe’s fiction is this central contradiction: Crusoe’s life is leading towards a clearly defined resolution, a “concurrence of days,” but his calculations are off. Crusoe’s gall in claiming God’s particularized interference in his life needles Charles Gildon, writer of an indignant “Epistle to Daniel Defoe” (1719), who insists that the “Coining of Providences” in Robinson Crusoe borders on the absurd, particularly “making Providence raise a storm, cast away some ships, and damage many more, meerly to fright him from going to Sea” (8). By calling the dates into question, however, Defoe leaves the reader to determine the import of Crusoe’s coincidences. Defoe’s scrutiny of these overlapping modes reveals the storm to be an inherently literary phenomenon. Analogy remains relevant to interpretations of the storm—and thus to Defoe—because analogy-making is a form of narrative. Prompted by the shipmaster to view himself as a character in a biblical drama, Crusoe spends the rest of the narrative trying with varying degrees of success to read the natural world.

Storm Repentance in Roxana

Whereas Crusoe, from his retrospective position as the narrator of his life, is in a position to ponder the significance of successive storms, the specter of a single storm haunts Roxana long after it occurs, as a sign that providential justice will follow her to the end of her life. The storm occurs as Roxana journeys from France to Rotterdam, attempting to elude a plot to strip her of her wealth. In the midst of the storm, she observes her servant, Amy, fervently praying for salvation. Upon assessing Amy’s repentance as an appropriate reaction to near-certain death and considering that her own sins are more numerous, Roxana makes “an abundance of Resolutions, of what a Life I wou’d live, if it should please God but to spare my Life this one time” (Roxana 129). On one level, Roxana’s repentance is sincere. Looking back on a series of choices to “prostitute myself for Gain,” she believes “it wou’d not be possible that I shou’d be the same Creature again,” imagining the storm as a turning point in a life previously dedicated to material greed. Yet after landing safely on shore, she is equally horrified to acknowledge her repentance as a frantic scrabbling for salvation such “as a Criminal has at the Place of Execution, who is sorry, not that he has committed the Crime, but sorry that he is to be Hang’d for it” (Roxana 129). Though Roxana’s “Storm-Repentance” wears off, she develops a belief that a storm awaits her, the “Clouds thicken[ing]” about her as her lies are exposed (Roxana 296). This is familiar territory for Defoe, who similarly frames the Storm of 1703 with “Two Great Storms; One past, and the Other to come”: the famous flood found in the Scripture and the storm of God’s final judgment (Storm 17). Roxana relies on her knowledge of the storm, a mass of supporting perspectives cobbled together from various versions of her past, present, and future self, to anticipate the punishment she believes will come to pass at the end of her narrative.

Before the storm, Roxana acts on a version of Crusoe’s “overruling decree” to secure wealth for herself. She recounts for the reader how she has risen from the role of abandoned wife, surrounded by starving children, to become a powerful courtesan frequented by the Prince. Midway through the novel, Roxana encounters the first legitimate threat to her financial stability in the form of a jeweler who threatens to expose her identity and take away the jewels she inherited from a previous paramour. She develops a plan to flee France, aided by a Dutch merchant who secures her passage on a ship. Once on board, Roxana gratefully reflects on how her friendship with the merchant has spared her from great trouble, without crediting providential design. The narrator, a future version of Roxana, grimly notes that:

had I any Religion, or any Sence of a Supreme Power managing, directing, and governing in both Causes and Events in this World, such a Case as this wou’d have given any-body room to have been very thankful to the Power who had not only put such a Treasure into my Hand, but given me such an Escape from the Ruin that threaten’d me. (Roxana 121)

Looking back on her lack of comprehension, Roxana suggests that God serves a dual function, not only plucking her from danger but bestowing on her financial rewards in the form of “Treasure.” Roxana’s retrospective reflection that she has been “preserv’d from Destruction” by “second Causes,” or God working through the merchant, sets up her brush with “Storm-Repentance” only a few pages later (Roxana 121). Before the storm, she is unable to discern the invisible hand of Providence steering her towards both fortune and disaster.

Instead, boarding the ship for her journey, Roxana views herself as author of her own fate. Glimpsing her native land while at sea, Roxana impulsively wishes that “a Storm wou’d rise, that might drive the Ship over to the Coast of England” (Roxana 122). Obligingly, a storm appears, though to accomplish different narrative ends. Roxana’s first reaction, rather than fear, is exasperation at “how foolish it was to wish myself out of the Way of my Business” (Roxana 123). However implausible it might appear in a realist novel, Roxana momentarily indulges the thought that she is the author of the storm. This is a natural extension of Crusoe’s belief in special providence, as satirized in the “Epistle to Daniel Defoe.” Not only does Roxana suspect the storm was intended for her, but she suggests that her errant thoughts have created it. Yet Roxana’s fundamental misunderstanding of providence, as she herself has pointed out, leads her to neglect the web of weather patterns and divine circumstances that have led her to this moment. This is Defoe poking fun at a brand of realism that fails to look beyond second causes, a story that traces all agency back to the protagonist. Roxana may begin as this type of character, but the storm alerts her to the disconcerting possibility that her life follows a providential pattern.

If Roxana’s initial reaction to the storm is a narcissistic consideration of her influence on the weather, her second, more considered response is influenced by her longtime companion and servant, Amy. Amy serves a position similar to the ship-master of Robinson Crusoe, another perspective out of which a proper interpretation of the storm can be assembled. “If I am drown’d, I am damn’d!” is Amy’s refrain, accompanied by a recitation of her sins: “I have been a Whore to two Men, and have liv’d a wretched abominable life of Vice and Wickedness for fourteen Years” (Roxana 125). Listening to Amy’s performative repentance, Roxana revises her own reaction. Roxana’s version of repentance is a negotiation, a commitment to “spend a great deal of what I had thus wickedly got, in Acts of Charity, and doing Good,” should God spare her life (Roxana 126). Roxana’s providentialism thus actively attends to an empiricist mode that focuses on the usable application of Christian hermeneutics. And yet Amy goes farther still, resolving to “lead a new Life, if God wou’d spare her but this time,” and falling “flat upon the Ground” to thank Him for “Deliverance from the Sea” (Roxana 127). Juxtaposing Amy’s repentance with Roxana’s more resourceful response serves a twofold purpose. One, Defoe shows Roxana self-consciously amending her account in an attempt to emulate Amy, layering a second perspective onto the first-person reportage. Second, Defoe treats Amy and Roxana’s “exact” and “curious” reactions in the same way that he compiles eyewitness accounts in The Storm, comparing multiple voices that coalesce in a single truth: the language of commercial trade informs a providential understanding of disaster.8

One of Roxana’s chief narrative concerns is to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that her commercial values are closely intertwined with the workings of providence. The retrospective first-person narration framing the storm episode describes Roxana’s blithe lack of concern with “second causes.” That is to say, the pre-storm Roxana fails to understand how God works through human actions or natural occurrences. When the ship manages to make landing in the English harbor of Harwich, Roxana’s fear for her life is replaced with the dull dread that she has no system of belief, and thus no means of understanding the overarching structure of her life. “I had no thorow effectual Repentance; no Sight of my Sins in their proper Shape; no View of a Redeemer, or Hope in him: I had only such a Repentance as a Criminal has at the Place of Execution,” she confides, memorably labeling her false contrition “Storm-Repentance” (128-129). Roxana’s repentance is hollow because she lacks an observational method, a means of assembling her experiences in a meaningful way. Roxana’s naturalistic way of understanding her good fortune is tested when she impulsively turns to providence in the middle of the storm. “Storm-Repentance,” read in this sense, is a pivotal turning point in Roxana’s understanding of how to construct the narrative of her own life.

However, Roxana acknowledges the likelihood that she will never be able to fully convey her experience through “Words,” given the ontological excess produced by the storm. Looking back, she describes how her “Horrour in the time of the Storm” takes the form of “a kind of Stupidity…a silent sullen kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either in Words or Tears” (Roxana 129). Recall that Crusoe makes a similar observation about how a storm leaves him silent and “stupid” in his cabin. Later, describing the storm that leaves him shipwrecked on the island, Crusoe suggests that “It is not easy for any one, who has not been in the like condition, to describe or conceive the consternation of men in such circumstances, we knew nothing where we were, or upon what land it was we were driven” (RC 36). We can trace this language earlier still to Defoe’s initial analysis of the Storm of 1703: “Horror and Confusion seiz’d upon all, whether on Shore or at Sea: No Pen can describe it, no Tongue can express it, no Thought conceive it, unless some of those who were in the Extremity of it” (Storm 53). Defoe insists that the attempt to document the storm, though inherently flawed, is crucial to “transmit the Memory of so signal a Judgment to Posterity” (Storm 64). Roxana’s inability to call up words is the most authentic part of her storm interpretation, the truest thing that a reader can learn about what it is like to live through a storm at sea. Defoe makes the now-characteristic move to “lead our Reader to supply by his Imagination what we omit,” implying that a careful reader will be able to discern a central vector of truth-telling in the midst of half-truths and lies (Storm 109).

This larger project of Defoe’s, the desire to provide a true and exact report of disaster through assemblage, provides insight into why Roxana continually returns to the storm in her narrative. Recounting the incident to the Dutch merchant, Roxana attempts to articulate why the storm made a lasting impression: “Death in any Shape has some Terror in it; but in the frightful figure of a Storm at Sea, and a sinking Ship, it comes with a double, a trebble, and indeed, an inexpressible Horrour…I desire to die in a calm, if I can” (Roxana 137). Defoe closes The Storm with an anecdote that expounds on Roxana’s fears, describing the plight of two men on board a ship homeward bound from the West Indies during the 1703 storm. The two, a ship captain and surgeon, make the decision to kill themselves with their pistols rather than face the uncertainty of dying slowly on the sinking ship. Noting what might be the most spectacular failure of interpretation, Defoe adds that God directed the ship safely into port, just in time for the dying captain to regret his hasty action (Storm 180). The decision to stay put and trust in divine providence, Defoe suggests, requires unbearable epistemological uncertainty that Roxana finds more dreadful than certain death. Defoe’s own experience of the storm suggests that his own faith was tested as his family chose to remain huddled in a collapsing brick house rather than risk being struck by airborne tiles and dangerous debris outside (Storm xii). Defoe soberly documents the collapse of brick chimneys over thirty times in The Storm, exploring how a different outcome might very well have been possible.9

Crusoe’s tendency to regard storms as naturalistic occurrences, necessary to confront in order to gain capital, is subverted by Roxana’s belief that God’s storm will be her final punishment. While Roxana retrospectively addresses how a “Supreme Power” governs her narrow escapes from disaster, she shifts to an anticipatory mode when she admits to the reader that she expects divine judgment to eventually return in the shape of a storm:

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 Scabbard 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. (Roxana 260)

Roxana describes a constant state of disorientation, a paralyzing “stupidity” that compresses time to a moment in which her life was in peril. She links her turmoil to her “cursed ill-gotten wealth” and, specifically, the prospect of growing wealthier still (Roxana 260). Roxana goes to some lengths to spare her husband the “Blast of a just Providence” by separating her income from his estate, envisioning a providential storm enveloping all who touch her tainted effects. Yet she is quick to clarify that her actions stem not from a sincere repentance for her crimes, but “from another and lower kind of Repentance, and rather mov’d by my fears of Vengeance, than from a Sense of being spar’d from being punished, and landed safe after a Storm” (Roxana 261). She contrasts her fear of the storm with her inability to meaningfully repent in order to avoid her fate.

The last line of the book, rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, closes Roxana’s story on an ambiguous note. When Roxana’s long-lost daughter threatens to expose her, she vanishes under suspicious circumstances that point to Amy’s involvement. The punishment does not occur swiftly, but the narrative flattens the years to arrive at the conclusion Roxana paints as inevitable:

Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy Circumstances, 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. (330)

The abrupt end to Roxana’s adventures deprives us of what we have been promised: a detailed account of the “Calamities” that Roxana tells us she deserves. Instead, Roxana closes with the “Blast of Heaven,” the storm she has long expected and the very torment that Defoe imagines countless characters experiencing from the beginning of his career. The providential storm, much like Roxana herself, ultimately escapes the narrative form of the novel.

In providing multiple interpretations of storms in many fictional works, Defoe’s novels parallel the point of collision between unpredictable meteors and a secularized eighteenth-century discourse of the weather. Defoe’s storms do not passively reflect this historical shift, but instead experiment with narrative form through an assemblage of perspectives. Setting out to trace the schism the Storm of 1703 opens up in interpretations of disaster, Defoe expresses interest in “where we find Nature defective in her Discovery, where we see Effects but cannot reach their Causes” (Storm 11). By the time Defoe pens Robinson Crusoe, an exploration of the “Causes” finds Crusoe trying on different readings of the storm, first as a “visible token” of his fate and then as the hollow revision in his “Journal.” In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe is able to entertain both naturalistic and providential interpretations by layering Crusoe’s retrospective thoughts over his initial impressions. Roxana, finally, features a protagonist committed to a naturalistic interpretation of storms who cannot shake her fear of providential retribution. The “Blast of Heaven,” her long-feared punishment, blots out all for the reader but the void after death that cannot be described.

University of California, Davis

1 Vladimir Janković grounds special providence in the doctrine of Divine steering (gubernatio), causally linking natural events like storms and earthquakes to human affairs. General providence, in contrast, refers to God’s governance over creation via secondary causes. See Reading the Skies, 56.

2 The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 to promote scientific research, frequently relied on empirical reports from sailors, tradesmen, and amateur hobbyists in order to approach objective truth.

3 Courtney Weiss Smith has recently updated Hunter’s work on occasional meditation by developing a methodology that accounts for seventeenth-and eighteenth-century empiricism’s understudied interpretive dynamics, marked by overlaps between scientific, devotional, and poetic language. See Empiricist Devotions, 36.

4 Michael McKeon famously argues that Crusoe translates language traditionally attributed to an omnipotent God to describe the motivations behind his economic greed. See Origins of the English Novel, 335.

5 For a consideration of Robinson Crusoe in relation to Defoe’s earlier economic writings, see Schmidgen, “Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration, and the Mercantile Fetish.”

6 For Defoe’s theory of fiction and its indebtedness to biblical hermeneutics, see Robert James Merrett’s Daniel Defoe: Contrarian, 108. Elizabeth Ermarth’s Realism and Consensus in the English Novel argues that providential interpretation provides order in a “radically unstable and fluctuating” life. Crusoe must maintain “vigilant contact with Providence” in order to maintain temporal continuity (107).

7 Crusoe’s emphasis on “various Providences,” as opposed to a singular Providence, suggests that he leans towards the interpretation that God influences every human action. For more on the distinction between special providence and general providence in Robinson Crusoe, see J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim.

8 Writing of cataloguing as an “effective rhetorical device” in Defoe’s The Storm, George Starr notes that “the sheer piling up of data can generate emotional as well as evidentiary weight.” See “Defoe and Disasters” in Dreadful Visitations, 35.

9 A chimney collapse during the 1703 storm often would mean the destruction of the entire house, as in the example Defoe cites of Robert Dowell of Wallingford, whose house collapsed around him as he lay in bed (Storm 96).

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Silver, Sean. “Making Weather: Communication Networks and the Great Storm of 1703.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 4, Summer 2018, pp. 495-518.

Smith, Courtney Weiss. Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Virginia UP, 2016.

———. “Anne Finch’s Descriptive Turn.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 57, no. 2, 2016, pp. 251-265.

Starr, George. “Defoe and Disasters.” Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Alessa Johns, Routledge, 1999.

Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture. Virginia UP, 2016.

Vickers, Ilse. Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge UP, 1996.

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“My Fellow-Servants”: Othering and Identification in Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack

Catherine Fleming

THE EPONYMOUS HERO of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Colonel Jack, brother to Captain Jack and Major Jack, spends much of the book attempting to craft his identity through his relationships to others. Jack’s identity, and particularly the connection between his name and the Union Jack, attracted the attention of early scholars, but current research is most invested in Jack’s intersections with issues of race and colonialism. There are few studies which focus primarily on Colonel Jack, but the novel is increasingly recognized in major scholarly works, such as Dennis Todd’s Defoe’s America, which discuss the racist colonial system of North America during the 16th and 17th centuries. Although usually discussed in the context of Defoe’s other narratives rather than on its own merits, Colonel Jack has much to recommend it to modern scholarship. With a hero that travels throughout the United Kingdom, France, and the Americas, and a plot which evokes parallels between American servitude and stories of Englishmen enslaved in Muslin North Africa, Colonel Jack is particularly interesting for its depiction of international connections and conflicts. Jack’s observations on the Irish, the Scots, the French, the Americans, and the Spanish settlers of South America offer a fascinating study of how perceptions of national and racial difference shape personal identification, the construction of class systems, and the social structures that accompanied the colonial system of coerced labour.

Focusing on Jack’s time in the British colonies and what his interactions reveal about British conceptions of servitude, slavery, and the system of indentured labour, this paper explores how Jack uses both identification and othering to create an identity. Life in the racially-divided colonies of Virginia—or perhaps Maryland, for, as Defoe claims “Maryland is Virginia, speaking of them at a distance” (195)—encourages Jack to utilize racial marks to establish his character, but he becomes quickly tangled in linguistic confusion as he discovers that racial identification fails to give him the status that he desires. Jack’s desire for recognition, status, and release from labour persistently leads him to conflate servants, slaves, and black individuals, who Defoe consistently describes as “negroes.” This verbal confusion troubles Jack’s attempt to distinguish labourers from “gentlemen” and to establish himself as above legal and social rules.

From the beginning of the novel, even before he is kidnapped and forced into service in Virginia, Jack lacks a familial identity or a stable sense of self, and the natal alienation of his forced labor leaves him, unlike the Barbary captives his story echoes, without even the promise of a home and family in England to distinguish himself from the people around him. He cannot define himself by his name, for Jack is given to him as a default rather than chosen as a mark of identity. He has no parentage, no inherited status, no money, and few prospects, but he clings to the idea that his parentage was genteel and his destiny special. Even as a child, Jack reports that he “told my nurse I would be called captain; for … I was a gentleman, and I would be a captain” and claimed precedence over his fellows (62). As evidence that he deserves this status, he offers the fact that the townsfolk among whom he grew up said he had “a pleasant, smiling countenance” and looked like “a gentleman’s son” (Defoe 65, 85). Clinging to this fragile bit of evidence for his destiny, Jack echoes Biblical language as he keeps the memory “laid up” in his “heart,” just as in the Bible Mary keeps evidence of her son Jesus’ heavenly father and special destiny “in her heart” (Defoe 65; Luke 2:19, 51). As he moves from freeman to indentured servant to owner, Jack retains his opening certainty that he is meant for better things and spends much of the novel defining himself in opposition to his legal and social equals. This opposition becomes especially troubling during his time as an indentured servant in Virginia.

Defoe marks Jack as a particularly intelligent and successful criminal. Jack claims that his intelligence and his gentlemanly aspirations give him a special right to gentility and separate him from the criminals that he claims deserve and benefit from forcible indenture and physical labour. This program is marked with contradiction from the first page of his narrative. Jack insists that “My original may be as high as any Bodies, for my Mother kept very good Company,” but he immediately confesses that he does not even know his mother’s name much less those of her companions (61). Worse, although his nurse tells him his name is “John,” she gives him no source for the name, and when she uses the same name for all three of the children under her care the reader is left to wonder whether the name came from her or from elsewhere (61). “John” immediately loses both his individuality and his name, declaring that “As we were all Johns, we were all Jacks” and the three boys become a conglomerate, distinguished by assumed titles but similar enough that our hero Jack finds himself dragged in front of a Justice for a crime committed by another of the Jacks (129).

Defoe highlights Jack’s further loss of identity in America in a footnote. In Virginia, he insists, Jack “was not call’d Col. Jack as at London, but Colonel, and they did not know me by any other name” (169). He has retained the honorific that he fought for, but lost his personal identity, and his first meeting with his “master” and benefactor forces him to confront and combat his lack of identity. Jack’s embarrassment is palpable as he attempt to define himself while knowing “little or nothing of myself, nor what my true Name is … [nor] which is my Christian-Name or which my Sir-Name, or whether I was ever Christen’d, or not” (169). Jack’s confusion over his name is immediately linked to confusion over his “self,” and the repetition of “Christian Name,” “Christian-Name” and “Christen’d” draws attention to Jack’s lack of standing in the Christian community also. While his master knows that “Christian” is both a religious marker and a descriptor that would identify him as part of a community, Jack’s decision to hyphenate “Christian-Name” denotes his ignorant belief that the word “Christian” is important only as it relates to the position of his name, as Defoe’s use of “Sir Name” silently reminds readers of Jack’s unfulfilled desire for a gentlemanly father and personal aspirations to gentility. Like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack follows Defoe’s preferred trajectory by showing its narrator raising himself from penniless subjection to a wealthy gentleman, ultimately rewarding Jack with his desired status. Along the way Defoe revisits the topics of indenture and slavery that he raised in those earlier novels. Like Robinson Crusoe, who has only one successful voyage, before he is captured by “a Turkish Rover” and “made [a] Slave” (61), Jack’s attempt to make an honest living for himself leads to his captivity and enforced labor. But Jack’s progression toward wealth and leisure also reveals the exceptional circumstances necessary for success. Reading Defoe’s transatlantic narratives next to both Barbary captivity narratives and reports of forcible indenture exposes important differences between individuals of different religions, nations, and social groups which Defoe’s narratives elide. By asserting the indistinguishability of persons, places, races, and nations in Colonel Jack, Defoe validates Jack’s entitlement and encourages the exploitation of others by validating Jack’s belief in the qualitative difference between labourers and gentlemen.

Although Jack is recognized for “gentlemanly” qualities from the beginning of his life, it is not until he is captured and taken to America as an indentured “slave” that he finagles the recognition he believes is his due. Here, surrounded by condemned criminals and “Negroes,” Jack uses his one exceptional quality, his “natural talent of talking,” to turn his luck in avoiding the law into loud proclamations of his innocence and unfitness for menial work. His narration also undergoes a more subtle slippage away from a language of commonality toward a language of exceptionalism.

This movement increasingly conflates his fellow indentured servants with “Negroes” as he lumps them both into the category of otherness. The story commonly slips from one category of laborer to another as Defoe begins by describing “the Place where the Servants were usually corrected,” and then adds, “there stood two Negroes” ready for correction (176). Defoe’s narration shows Jack attempting to support his right to both gentility and personhood by drawing a distinction between himself, as not only an Englishman, but an exceptionally intelligent and naturally gentile man, and the black people he describes as natural slaves. By doing so, the narrative promotes the hypocrisy of birth and class distinction which ultimately leads Jack to view both his fellow Europeans and the “Negros” he openly denigrates as natural slaves, confusing race, class, and identity in a hopelessly indistinguishable mass of exploitable people. Jack attempts to distinguish between categories, but in doing so he reveals that the primary category in which he is interested is not racial but social. While George Boulukos argues that Jack deploys a rhetoric of sympathy and similarity in this book, claiming that Defoe “creates the clearest distinction between Africans and Europeans,” I demonstrate how Jack’s rhetorical slippages between the terms “Servant,” “Slave,” and “Negro” echo contemporary views of indentured servitude and encourage identification between these categories even as Jack strives to keep them separated (625).

For Jack, like many of Defoe’s narrators, transportation to the colonies allows him to achieve the wealthy, privileged existence that he feels he deserves while simultaneously offering him a narrative which justifies his oppression and exploitation of others. In Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, Defoe, like many propagandists for the American colonies, claimed that America had exceptional opportunities for advancement beyond the laboring classes for ambitious, intelligent people who would otherwise be overlooked or succumb to a life of crime. Both Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders have often been read as propaganda for emigration, transportation, and the system of indentures, due to the manner in which both titular characters celebrate their forced transportation as a means of gaining money, wealth, status, and freedom (Novak 147, Richetti 82,Downie 83, Chaber 196, and McInelly 210-17). But as Paul Kahn argues of the idealistic image of American exceptionalism, this celebration “lies in the dimension of rhetoric, not logic” (198). Defoe directly benefited from transportation in his capacity as a merchant, and many of his works support England’s colonial venture in America (Backscheider 485-89). As Christopher Flynn argues, Defoe sees the lands that make up North America as peculiarly “bound to Britain,” and wrote both tracts and fictions to support economic and colonial ventures to the Americas (14). Jack Greene demonstrates Defoe’s participation in creating the image of the colonies “as lands of extraordinary opportunities for European immigrants and … as places with exceptional opportunities for individual betterment” (68). Paula Backscheider calls Defoe “a tireless proponent of colonization and the development of new markets and improved trade routes,” a form of exploitation which he saw as vital to both England and the Americas (Backscheider 439).

Defoe’s novels simultaneously praise the colonies as places where nobility is earned rather than inherited and reveal the illegal, immoral, and brutish underpinnings of colonial society. Scholars have consistently questioned the sincerity of Defoe’s narratives of repentance, suggesting that he sees crime as a legitimate money-making venture, but Defoe’s colonial novels may instead show a belief that crime and morality should be redefined within the colonies, or even within the context of merchant practice. Vincenzo Ruggiero has commented on the destruction of the “boundaries between … legitimate and illegitimate economic behaviour” toward other nations, concluding that English merchants displayed a tendency toward business crime (330). Jeremy Wear emphasizes the mercantile nature of crime by comparing the “predatory trade practices” and “ambiguous morality of legal commerce” of legitimate merchants in Defoe’s narratives with Defoe’s celebration of “piratical commerce as a normalizing, civilizing force” and “piratical trade as the ‘necessary violence’ of economic imperialism” (567-70, 596). Thus Defoe’s narratives, in which narrators lament their immoral practices while in Britain but eagerly embrace equally immoral acts in the colonies, falls within an existing tradition of removing colonial trade from the normal sphere of proper behaviour, the process of transportation offers both a way for his characters to redeem themselves and a form of justification.

If Defoe views the colonies as places where traditional laws do not apply, this may help to explain why the crimes that his narrators commit in England are removed, redeemed, or forgiven by means of the passage through and return to Britain. Srinivas Aravamudan and Matthew Mason highlight the importance of the return from America to England in both novels, and indeed Mason claims that Defoe followed the example of anti-colonialist literature of the period which insisted that “only a reverse emigration would complete the redemption” of a transported criminal and cement the exceptional status that Defoe claims is a central part of the colonial experience (Aravamudan 58, Mason 110). Joseph Bartolomeo similarly highlights Defoe’s narratives of coercion and the ways in which Defoe’s plot devices, narrative structure, and form often undercut the propaganda which he attempts to convey (457).

In Colonel Jack, Defoe’s praise of transportation is undercut by Jack’s forcible and illegal (though justly deserved) transportation and indenture and further undercut by Jack’s refusal to free and support his own servants. Despite Jack’s repeated insistence that “if their own Diligence in the time of Service gains them but a good Character … there is not the poorest and most despicable Felon that ever went over but may, after his time is served, begin for himself, and may in time be sure of raising a good Plantation,” Jack refuses to reward diligence with freedom (195-6). His wife is the only servant he frees, and that only to after she demonstrates her obedience and submission and declares “that she would not look any higher than to be [his] Servant, as long as she liv’d” (294). Even his “clever” felon, who teaches him to read, gains his respect, and acquires the position of overseer, which was Jack’s own springboard to freedom, gains his freedom rather in spite of Jack than because of him.

Although Jack claims to have “deliver’d my tutor from his Bondage,” he also declares that he could not give “him his Liberty … till his time was expired, according to the Certificate of his Transportation, which was Register’d; so I made him one of my Overseers” (215). This may have improved the man’s standard of living, but even Jack acknowledges the insufficiency of the gesture, which “was only a present Ease and Deliverance to him from the hard Labour and Fare which he endured as a Servant” (216). When Jack offers his tutor the position of overseer, he mimics the special treatment he had received from his own master, but he does not offer his overseer the monetary help, gift of servants, or loans that he himself received. Nor does what Jack gives his tutor equal his definition of personal liberty, which he defines as “going out of … Service” and gaining his own home and lands (192).

The “bondage” that Jack delivers his servant out of is only that of hard labour, and he leaves the man in the “miserable Condition of a Slave sold for Money” for twenty years while he travels back to the UK to settle (206). His tutor, no fool, takes this opportunity to acquire a plantation of his own, so that Jack finds him “in Circumstances very differing from what I left him in” when he returns. The tutor has taken advantage of “the Countries Allowance of Land,” gaining the prosperity Defoe’s novels promise to hardworking felons in the New World, but Jack’s refusal to participate in the system of generosity from which he benefited problematizes his narrative of beneficial transportation and undercuts his claim, repeated throughout the novel, that he identifies with both indentured servants and slaves (216, 288).

As Boulukos demonstrates, Jack’s reluctance to act on his purported sympathy and his willingness to exploit those who he describes as his fellow servants show that “Jack is not much interested in the implications of slaves’ humanity” and his emotional response ends when it threatens to cut into his profits (634). Jack’s refusal to consider freeing either his servants or his slaves reinforces his self portrayal as exceptional, as does the fact that only the servant who he admits is both better educated and in a stronger moral position than Jack himself is able to follow Jack’s example in gaining freedom. The inability of Jack’s other indentured servants to attain freedom, however, complicates the distinction Boulukos claims to see between black and white, temporary and permanent, and innate and external forms of subjugation in the novel. Counter to both Boulukos’ distinction and Defoe’s own claims, Jack’s progression to wealth and status is not typical of hardworking white servants in the colonies, but is rather dependant on the unusual recognition and help that Jack receives and on his success in presenting himself as extraordinarily deserving.

Jack recognizes that the differences between slave, servant, and free man are external and not internal when he uses a change of clothing to signify his transition from plantation worker to overseer. When offered the opportunity to improve his status he hesitates because he is “in the ordinary habit of a poor half-naked slave,” declaring that he is not dressed for the office. In response, he is offered clothing and told to “go in there a Slave, and come out a Gentleman” (173). Even in Jack’s first encounter with the threat of slavery, when he insists that he and his fellow deserters “were not people to be sold for slaves,” he implicitly recognizes that his status as a free man does not depend on any innate or internal quality. Instead, he bases his claim to be above enslavement on his moneyed status as a man “of substance,” a status whose artificiality is underscored by the fact that Jack’s money comes from repeated theft. Although William McBurney argues that Jack is intended to be an innocent hero and an “honest thief,” Jack’s initial crimes, in the legal and economic framework which this book supports and which Jack several times praises, deserve exactly the “enslavement” that Jack is trying to escape (324). The status which Jack claims is not based on any sense of innocence, but in a view of himself as above the rules that govern others, a viewpoint which is revealed and rewarded when Jack embraces the system of transportation and indenture.

Even as Jack’s job as an overseer clearly separates him from the “slaves and servants” under him, he insists on calling himself a servant until his master and patron dies. This allows him to claim a sympathy with the indentured servants and slaves that, while it discourages him from physical brutality, opens them up to more problematic forms of manipulation. Boulukos has written extensively on the problematic nature of Jack’s so-called “kindness” to his workers, resting as it does upon the continued threat of brutality within the plantation and the idea that slaves should be “obliged” by a “sense of kind Usage” when put to forced labour without the addition of continual whippings (203). But Jack’s combination of sympathetic identification and sharp distinction between laboring and gentlemanly classes also portrays perpetual servitude as a form of external control necessary for both his black and white “fellow-servants.”

Jack’s treatment of his tutor exemplifies the hypocrisy of the colonial system and exposes the falsehood of Jack’s claimed superiority. Jack’s tutor is as hard a worker as Jack, as capable of managing as an overseer, better educated, and equally culpable of theft. But while Jack displays what John O’Brien calls an “almost phobic relation to labor” which is part of his claim to exceptional gentlemanly status (74), when speaking of his tutor, Jack describes ill-treatment and hard labour as necessary for both master and servant. He claims to be “obliged to put [his tutor] to” hard labour, refusing to admit that he has a choice – despite his later treatment of his wife, who he gives a servant of her own to free her from all necessity of physical work. Jack avoids physical labor in every possible case. His greatest complaint against indentured servitude is the labour he must undergo on the plantations, and O’Brian argues that part of his objection to whipping his former fellows is that “the labor of carrying out corporal punishment” involves physical effort (75). In comparison, Defoe makes Jack’s tutor praise “the Life of a Slave in Virginia” because he is “deliver’d from the horrid Necessity of doing such ill things … but am fed, though I am made to earn it by the hard Labour of my Hands” (205). Similarly, the lecture Jack’s master gives a young thief in a similar position describes transportation as a grant of new life where servitude offers no opportunity for crime. The tutor’s willing submission to his position, and Jack’s acceptance of his own mastery over someone he acknowledges echoes “my own Case, and the Condition of the former part of my Life,” demonstrate the problematic basis of Jack’s exceptionalism and its troubling consequence (210).

Boulukos suggests that Jack displays an initial “failure to distinguish between black and white plantation workers” but that he will later “set about making a distinction in no uncertain terms” (616). While Jack does attempt to separate and categorize different forms of black and white laborers, however, he never fully separates indentured servants from slaves. Jack does learn, after he leaves England, to separate free servants from servants working under indenture, but his confusion between racial categories and between slavery and indentured servitude continues throughout the novel.

By the end of the novel, Jack is a confident and self-assured owner of both slaves and indentured servants. He seems very different from the Jack who described an old nurse-maid as a “poor creature [who] worked and was a slave” (174). Once he reaches the Americas, where racial difference creates a visual distinction between free and unfree, and where Jack is a direct participant in the institution of slavery, Jack begins to distinguish between free and unfree servants, but he continues to confuse indentured servitude with slavery throughout the text. In the long and infamous passages in the novel in which he describes “negroes” as inferior to Europeans, Jack portrays Africans as unable to distinguish between cruelty and punishment and easily persuaded into a sense of gratitude to their owners. He also insists on their “brutality and obstinate temper,” (173). But this emphasis on racial difference actually highlights Jack’s confusion over the identity of his fellow servants and slaves.

His first declaration of his new status as an indentured servant, declaring that he and his “Fellow Deserter” were “now Fellow Servants” is immediately followed by a statement that they were “put in among about 50 Servants, as well Negroes as others.” This description elides the distinctions he has just drawn, creating a single category that encompasses servant and slave, black and white, a category which Jack fails to distinguish even after he is himself freed (165). When Jack describes his duties as an overseer and a participant in subjugation, he also demonstrates confusion between different forms of subjugated identity. Part of his job is

to see the Servants and Negroes did their work … and the Horse-whip was given me to correct and lash the Slaves and Servants … This part turned the very blood within my Veins, and I could not think of it with any temper, that I, who was but Yesterday a Servant or Slave like them, and under the Authority of the same Lash, should lift up my Hand to the Cruel Work which was my Terror but the Day before. This, I say, I could not do; insomuch that the Negroes perceived it, and I had soon so much Contempt upon my Authority that we were all in Disorder. (195)

In this passage, Defoe repeatedly distinguishes servile states, separating “Servants and Negroes,” and “Slaves and Servants,” but while the separation between categories creates distinctions between different classes, the redefining of categories in this passage encourages confusion between them. By first defining “Negroes” as separate from servants and then redefining the group as composed of “slaves” and servants, Defoe seems to equate “Negroes” with slaves as a separate category from the white servants. But Jack’s new position as an overseer gives him equal authority over both groups. He has the right to “correct and lash” both slaves and servants, and to force both to work against their will, and the single category of servile figures performing “their work” demonstrates an equality between the two groups who are combined under a single pronoun.

Deepening the confusion between categories, Jack then rejects any instinctive conflation of slavery with blackness by referring to himself as “a Servant or Slave like them,” again reducing both servant and slave, black and white, to a single conglomerate. Immediately, Defoe reiterates the importance of racial distinction, declaring that when Jack hesitated to beat members of the servant-slave conglomerate, “the Negroes perceived it.” Emphasizing the contempt of the black slaves for a master who refuses to inflict pain seems to reinforce Defoe’s claims that black slaves are particularly “barbarous” and “must be ruled with a rod of iron.” (173) Before readers reach the end of the sentence, however, confusion creeps in again as Jack declares that “we were all in disorder,” directing the reader’s gaze back to the peculiarly passive stative that “I had soon so much Contempt upon my Authority that we were all in Disorder.” By switching to passive voice, Jack elides the universality of the contemptuous reaction to his leniency, but the telling word “all” demonstrates the racial confusion of a world where the perception of “the Negroes” leads to rebellion among people of all races. By the end of the passage, the terms “servant” and “slave” have both disappeared and although he is clearly speaking of the integrity of the entire plantation when he declares that “we were all in disorder,” the only category remaining to which readers can ascribe the “Contempt upon my Authority” that he faces is that of the “negro,” thus collapsing “all” of the servants on the plantation under the category of the lowest and most exploited figure.

This movement is repeated cyclically throughout the book. Jack moves from an initial description of the plantation’s “abundance of Servants, as well Negroes as English” in which he conflates the two categories under the heading of “Servants” to a separation of these categories in his declaration that his newly gentlemanly duty is “to look after the Servants and Negroes” and then back to conflation as he admits that he has been “too gentle with the Negroes, as well as with other Servants” (165, 173, 178). This final conflation leads to Jack’s most famous statement of sympathy as he declares it “was impossible for me to … use this Terrible Weapon [the horsewhip] on the naked Flesh of my Fellow Servants, as well as Fellow Creatures,” a declaration that undoes all of his careful separation of “English” from “Negroe” as Jack recognizes his fellowship with both as part of the single category of “Servant” (179).

By splitting his identification into two categories and identifying himself as a “Fellow Servant” and a “Fellow Creature,” Jack might intend to continue the division between black and white servants that the narrative displays elsewhere, but this possibility raises the troubling question of which category describes which group. If Jack’s intent is to classify the European servants as “Fellow Servants” and the black slaves as “Fellow Creatures,” then he must be classing himself as a “Creature” with them. Conversely, if Jack intends to define the Europeans as his “Fellow Creatures,” foregrounding his physical identification with other white men, this only enhances the servant-slave confusion which the narrative displays.

Jack’s use of the word “Creature” furthers the novel’s ambivalence about identity. “Creature” has many potential valences in the eighteenth century, some practical, some religious, and some social. The word may suggest a less-than-human status, especially as this portion of the narrative occurs before Jack is instructed in the Christian religion and can be expected to know the religious meaning of the word. If we follow the religious meaning, however, “Creature” attains an equalizing force, referring to the Christian belief that all things and peoples are created by the same God. Complicating this still further are the generic use of the term “creature” during the eighteenth century to mean both a person and that person’s status and Jack’s habit, throughout the novel, of using “creature” to refer to people of lower status, as he does when describing the nurse-maid as both a “poor creature” and “a slave” (174).

Each of these definitions involves an identification with a group that, in much of novel, Jack attempts to separate himself from. None of them allow Jack to maintain the distinction between himself and both the black and white “Servants” that he desires. The terminological ambiguity of this segment enhances Jack’s confusion between the categories of whiteness, blackness, servitude, and slavery. The one clear thing that emerges from this confusion is that Jack’s claim to sympathy and identification does not extend to raising his “Fellow Creatures” to be his equals. He may not wish to use the whip, but he would rather enforce discipline than lose his command.

The slippage between blackness and slavery that Jack displays in this book is common to late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century writers. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn claimed that the words “Negro and Slave” were “by Custom grown Homogenous and Convertible,” and Francis Grose’s 1785 Dictionary in fact defines a “negroe” as a slave and vice versa, in a move that Janet Sorensen interprets as “dismissing the possibility that a white Briton could ever occupy the same position” (Godwyn 36, Sorensen, 116). In his recent book Slaves and Englishmen Michael Guasco suggests that the fictional identification of enslaved Indians as “cannibal negros” was intended to place them within a category of enslavable persons (187). While the ideas of blackness and servile status were often conflated, however, direct identification of blackness with slavery was not common until the mid eighteenth century, when, as Roxann Wheeler demonstrates, the adage “I’ll be no man’s negroe” began to be used by English servants to complain against a form of ill-usage they associated with slavery (172). By associating blackness, with a form of exacerbated servitude, these servants were engaging with a widespread discussion of slavery in the New World based around a conflation between indentured servitude—status most commonly inflicted upon white or Indian subjects—and slavery.

Conflation between indentured servitude and slavery was also common throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the difference in terminology was further confused by the common practice of using slavery metaphorically to reflect hard labour and bad working conditions. In a time when the Earl of Wilmington could complain that his work as Treasurer to the Prince of Wales was so unrewarding that “If there be a Slave in England, I am the Man,” it must be a difficult task to unravel literal and metaphorical forms of slavery (Spencer Compton Papers). Indentures and apprenticeships, which made people into saleable commodities for a specified length of time, further muddied the distinction between service, servitude, and slavery.

Defoe’s works show several examples of this confusion, as recent examinations of Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Captain Singleton have demonstrated (Swaminathan 57-74). As Dennis Todd argues, both Moll’s first and second trips to America revolve around indentured servitude. Although Moll initially arrives in Virginia as a wealthy wife, “the episode … says next to nothing about the typical life of a free immigrant, chronicling instead Moll’s mother’s career as an indentured servant” and highlighting the opportunities which indentures offered (8). Despite Defoe’s focus on the positive side of indentured servitude in Moll Flanders, this narrative, written in the same year as Colonel Jack, shows evidence of the same slippage between servitude and slavery that plagues Jack. Moll’s mother, in describing the “inhabitants of the colony” insists that “such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants” are “more properly call’d slaves” because the planters “buy them” and force them into labour (112-3). Although Moll, heartened by her mother’s eventual prosperity, submits a “petition for transportation,” declaring that she would “choose any thing rather than death,” her husband insists that “he could much easier submit to be hang’d” than to “being sent over to the plantations as Romans sent condemn’d slaves to work” (232, 233, 299).

When speaking to her husband, Moll resists the conflation of indentures and slavery that Jack continually makes. Instead of identifying herself by creating connections with other indentured servants and even slaves, as Jack does, Moll insists that transportation will not change her identity. She sees transportation as a temporary status that offers the reunited couple a chance for life, wealth, and freedom, but Defoe’s ambivalence about indentures appears only a few pages later, when Moll is actually on her way to America. Although Moll insists that it is only her husband who is “very much dejected and cast down” by their circumstances, she describes their condition as “the despicable quality of transported convicts destin’d to be sold for slaves”(307). She immediately turns to reckoning the money with which she and her husband can buy themselves free and obtain their “certificate of discharge” on arrival (307, 315). Todd sees Defoe’s presentation of transportation as “both mercy and punishment,” but Defoe’s explicit presentation of it seems to more nearly straddle the line between freedom and slavery (Todd 11).

This confusion was a common complaint among would-be promoters of the colonial system. In his Present State of Virginia, Hugh Jones complains that Englishmen “are under such dreadful apprehensions of the imaginary slavery of the plantations” that they refuse to go there to work (131-2). Similarly George Alsop, in his Character of Maryland, declares that the “vulgar in England” see indentured servitude as “slaves” and in his Virginia Impartially Examined, William Bullock also attributes to “the ordinarie sort of people” a belief that “all those servants who are sent to Virginia, are sold as slaves” (Alsop 99, Bullock 13). Modern scholarship agrees with these contemporary reports, and Mason claims that the “line between colonial servitude and slavery” was “a fine distinction that a suspicious public was not disposed to make” (116). Parliament joined the general confusion about the status of indentured servants, describing kidnapped victims as “Cryinge and Mourninge for Redemption from their Slavery” (I.296-7). This terminological confusion had real effects, as revealed by Abbot Smith, who establishes the tendency of English newspapers to refer to victims of the “spirits” who kidnapped young men into colonial indentures as “slaves,” and records the complaints of more scrupulous colonial recruiters that this “ill practice” was hindering emigration (70-2; 61).

Slippage between the languages of imprisonment, servitude, and slavery, which is visible in newspapers and novels throughout the period and which discouraged many would-be colonists, may have been caused in part by the widespread practice of religiously motivated slavery in the form of corsair slaving. Muslim corsair slaving, which was an important feature of European coastal and marine life from the early 1500s into the twentieth century, played a prominent part in shaping European ideas of enslavement and redemption. Studies in the mutual enslavement of Muslims and Christians reveal an upswing in Muslim corsair slaving during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while slavery decreased throughout most of Europe (Gordon 107-9, Bono 191-201, Davis, 9, 28). As European slavery redefined itself, it used narratives of Muslim slavery to shape images of slavery and indenture.

Muslim slaving, of which Robinson Crusoe’s brief experience is a typical example, involved both piracy and inland raids, which were very similar to the trade in kidnapped and forcibly indentured servants (Davis 8). Viewing Jack’s capture and forcible indenture in light of narratives of Muslim captivity helps to explain the violence of Jack’s belated and futile attempt at self-defence when he realizes he has been captured. Daniel Viktus believes that inflated numbers of enemies killed in self-defence offered captives an opportunity to assert their identity against their foreign captors, but the narrative of “Mr. T. S.,” which insists that it would be “an unworthy Act to deliver our selves into the Enemies hands without a stroke” suggests that acts of violence might help kidnapped and enslaved men to avert a form of victim-blaming to which these slaves were uniquely vulnerable (Vitkus 195, T. S. 8-9).

Captives like Thomas Phelps, whose 1685 captivity narrative reveals that he and his men were tricked into submission, nevertheless insist that they “did intend to fight” (2). Defoe’s Colonel Jack places similar emphasis on Jack’s martial courage, insisting that, even though he was tricked onto the slaver’s boat, he was not disarmed “without giving, and receiving some Wounds” (159). Through violence, these captives take the initial step to defining themselves in opposition to their captors. They also create narratives of individual exceptionalism to explain and justify their success in attaining their freedom and their willingness to abandon their fellow captives to continued slavery.

Defoe uses the strategies of Barbary captivity narratives to describe the kidnappings of Jack and Robinson Crusoe, foregrounding their martial prowess in order to justify their special status and excuse their abuse or desertion of their fellows. Untrained in seafaring and unused to hard labour, it is unlikely that Crusoe was more than a hindrance to the sailors who defended their vessel. But he takes his share in the credit, using third person plural to describe his ship’s struggle against the Turkish vessel (61). He emphasizes the inequality of the fight, declaring that ship had only “12 Guns, and the Rogue 18” and insisting that there were “near 200 Men” on the Turkish ship while the loss of only 11 fighters, “three of our Men kill’d, and eight wounded,” left Crusoe’s own ship unable to fight (61).

Crusoe separates himself from his fellows, as was typical in a narrative of Muslim captivity, declaring he was not “carried up the Country to the Emperor’s Court, as the rest of our Men were, but was kept by the Captain of the Rover, as his proper prize” because he was especially “fit for his Business” (61). Crusoe emphasizes his special position and skills, insisting that the Captain “never went without me” (62-3). Although he brags of his position, Crusoe asserts his natural “Liberty” (62). He admits that “The Usage I had there was not so dreadful as at first I apprehended,” but insists that “I meditated nothing but my Escape,” and while he covers his capture in only a paragraph, his description of his ingenuity in escaping the Moors, overawing the “friendly Negroes” on the coast, and turning his forcible capture and enslavement to such profit that he lands on the shore of All-Saints Bay in Brazil with “about 220 Pieces of Eight” takes up several pages (61, 63, 72, 74). By emphasising his personal courage and intelligence at the expense of the communal, the novel glosses over the fate of Crusoe’s fellow captives, exaggerates his own importance, and establishes his right to escape to freedom.

Crusoe’s narrative of forcible capture, pugnacious prowess, and physical separation from his fellows echoes Jack’s story of captivity. While Crusoe emphasizes his youth and physical qualities, Jack insists that it was his gentility and manners which caused the captain of his ship to treat him differently than his foster-brother, “Captain Jack” and which led him to be separated from his fellow captives. But in both cases, the physical separation causes a complete mental separation as each captive appears to forget about their fellow prisoners, and even the servants or slaves with whom they are then placed, in order to focus on attaining individual freedom and prosperity.

The struggle to justify a self-centred desire for individual freedom by claiming a special status played an important part in many Barbary captivity narratives and, like the struggle to maintain individual and national identities, plays a part in rejecting the “natal alienation” and “social death” that Orlando Patterson sees as the defining qualities of slavery (5-6). Joseph Morgan emphasizes both national and religious identities when he compares the “Captive Christians” in the hands of the Muslims to the “Turks and Moors” who suffer the same fate under Christian masters, claiming that “our American Planters … are passable good Algerines” in their cruelty (516-7). Thomas Baker, the British consul in Tripoli during the 1680s, defined the periodic, small-scale raids by Muslim corsairs on coastal villages as “Christian stealing” and described the corsairs as setting out “to Fish for Dutchmen” (120, 124). These contemporary descriptions of nationally and religiously-motivated slavery help to provide a context for Jack’s constant definition of himself and his fellow white servants by their nationality.

Although forcibly indentured servants were brought to the Americas from many countries, and his descriptions of some of his fellow Jacobites make it clear that his “English” servants certainly included “Scotchsmen” and possibly other nationalities also, Jack defines his fellow servants as Englishmen (162). This identification is part of a purposeful creation of identity which Defoe continues in the Atlas Maritimus, written near the end of his life.1 In this book, Defoe ignores both indigenous nations and the presence of other nationalities to claim that “all the Inhabitants are [the king of England’s] Subjects, or the Slaves of his Subjects, none excepted” in a move that conflates slaves and servants, denies the interests of other nations, and cements British authority over North America (325). Defoe’s intentionality here is evident in the fact that only a few hundred pages earlier he had asserted England’s need to expel French settlers in order to establish an ordered civilization, but also in the form of his wider colonial project (282). As Daniel Statt argues, Defoe “was a supporter of schemes to encourage foreigners to settle” in England and in the Americas (295). But while Defoe’s English narrators retain their Englishness throughout the process of colonization, he portrays men from other nations giving up their original identities through the process of emigration, losing their exceptional qualities, and becoming part of the mass of exploitable British subjects.

Following Defoe’s project of rewriting the identities of his subservient subjects, Jack’s attempt to differentiate black from white servants based on their religion is even less successful than his ability to recognize different nationalities, and he only once attempts to compare “the Negroes” to “Christian Servants” (193). Perhaps Defoe is aware of the conscious attempts to deny slaves religious instruction which were prevalent at the time. Denying slaves religious education was decried by both abolitionist reformers and slave-owning preachers. William Fleetwood was one of many popular preachers who denied what he considered to be a pervasive belief that “were their Slaves Christians, they would immediately, upon their Baptism, become free,” insisting that it was perfectly acceptable to enslave Christians, a point of view which Defoe may have heard from his contemporaries (18-20). Perhaps he is only conscious of the irony involved in calling a man like Jack Christian when Jack admits that he had never “had any serious Religious reflections” and who in fact has to be persuaded “to be a Christian” by one of his own servants later in the novel (200, 212). While other writers and novelists set up more or less successful divisions by nationality or religion, Defoe remains bound to a continually slipping division between “Slave,” Servant,” and “Negroe.”

Rarely, despite the general confusion during this time over how to define enslavement, does this slippage include racial cross-identification. Instead, authors insisted on their racial and national distinctions as important facets of their identity. Indeed, Mason shows that for many of the “enslaved” white men the ultimate indignity was their enforced identification with black slaves, and some of the indentured servants whose writings Mason examines “clearly deemed working alongside slaves as much a disgrace as being sold and examined like an animal” (114, 116-7). For men like these, while they might call their situation “slavery,” there is no confusion of identity between themselves and the black slaves they worked with. In Colonel Jack, contrarily, we see continual slippage between categories to the extent that even Defoe’s usual careful accounting suffers from an inability to consistently distinguish between “servant,” “slave,” and “Negroe.”

When Jack’s “master” frees him from his indentures, he gives him not only a plantation but also slaves to work it. Jack accepts “my grateful negro, Mouchat,” as well as “two Servants more, a Man and a Woman,” whose price his former master “put to my Account” (197). These two servants are not explicitly assigned a race when they first appear, but Defoe’s prose later reveals that they are white as, several paragraphs later, he declares that “I got three Servants more, and one Negroe, so that I had five white Servants and two Negroes” (198). Several pages later, after a digression on education in which Jack re-emphasizes his deliverance “from Slavery and the wretched State of a Virginia Sold Servant,” he declares that “a clever Fellow that came over a transported Felon … fell into my Hands for a Servant” at what Jack calls “the Rate of a Slave” (199, 201-2).

Now we readers who have paid attention are aware that at this point Jack owns six white “Servants” and two black slaves. But in the following paragraph, Jack announced that he has “now five Servants” (202). By the end of the year, he has “purchased two Negroes more, so that now,” he claims, “I had seven Servants” (202). Now, this number is clearly incorrect. If we go back through Jack’s purchases, we will see that he currently has six white servants; Mouchat, a black man who is definitely categorized as a slave rather than a servant; and three unnamed “Negroes” who may be either “Slaves” or “Servants” but at least two of which he appears to have classified as servants. Even if Jack has decided, for whatever reason, not to categorize his intelligent felon as a servant, despite his use of him as both tutor and overseer, his numbers register a fundamental uncertainty about how to differentiate status relative to race, slavery, and servitude. Jack’s ownership of these ten human beings is not in question. He has explicitly spent money to purchase each of them, whether slave or servant, and he has the right to command all of them. But Jack’s uncertainty over how many servants he owns, their race, and whether he has the right to include his tutor in their number, forces readers to confront the troubling liminality created by Defoe’s narrative of personal success.

Defoe’s willingness to exempt some characters from the punishments he allots to others and his positive attitude toward theft and piracy when it is directed toward suitable targets, such as Jack’s illegal “trading” endeavors with Spanish South America at the end of Captain Jack, elides the strict boundaries between planters and felons that Jack attempts to define. The relationship between Jack’s tutor, as a condemned and repentant thief who is therefore a willing collaborator in his own subordination and Jack, as an unrepentant but uncaptured thief, demonstrates Jack’s willingness to redraw boundaries between servant, slave, and free when it suits his own interest. Jack’s insistence that “I did not come over to Virginia in the Capacity of a Criminal,” by which he justifies his behaviour to others and manipulates them into agreeing to serve him highlights the hypocrisy of the “reformed” felons and planters that Defoe’s novel celebrates even as the novel appears to accept Jack’s justification (210).

Defoe’s combination of exceptionalism, sympathy, and confused identification in Colonel Jack may conflate coerced workers, both white indentured servants and black slaves, in such a way that readers can easily view them as equals, but it does so only to insist that both blacks and whites are acceptable candidates for exploitation. By sanctioning the desire of the planter to separate himself from the men and women who work on the plantation, Defoe encourages the illusion that “if they can deserve it” the “people who are either transported or otherwise trepanned into those places” will earn their own freedom without the need for intervention from the “kind masters” that Jack praises (195). This then supports the opposing belief that those servants and slaves who are indeed “rendered miserable and undone” are the “sullen, stupid Fellow[s]” who Jack claims are “unavoidable” and unfit for the exceptional—that is, decent—treatment he claims for himself (195, 203).

The research for this paper was partially supported by a generous Clark Library Postdoctoral Fellowship. I want to thank my colleagues at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the University of California, Los Angeles for their help and support during the research process. Any errors that remain are my own.

1 Defoe’s participation in the writing of the Atlas is currently under scholarly debate. There is evidence to support his participation in the project and the text reflects the style and ideas of his other works, but he may have played a primarily editorial role in the production (Edwards, 179).

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“When She’s Forc’t She’s Free”: Mercantilist Rhetoric and the Economics of Caledonia

Aida Ramos

WHAT PAINS has Scotland taken to be poor!” Daniel Defoe proclaims in Caledonia, his poem and pro-Union propaganda piece of 1706 (17). The poem offers the landed gentry of Scotland an analysis of the causes of the country’s poverty and prescriptions to improve its economic fortunes. Although he presents his recommendations as an observer and admirer of Scotland, the poem is part of Defoe’s body of political work, written while he was employed by Robert Harley to sway English and Scottish opinion in favor of the Union. Maximilian Novak observes that although Defoe presents himself during this period as a journalist, “his specialty was a powerful rhetoric in prose and poetry” (Daniel Defoe 26). Given that the subject of the poem is how Scotland can alleviate its poverty through political union with England, despite Defoe’s claims to the contrary, it is important to ask what kind of economic rhetoric Defoe employs to persuade his audience to vote for the Union.

Caledonia has been analyzed from a variety of perspectives: as an expression of Defoe’s realism in depicting Scotland as it actually is (Novak, Transforivmations fn 32, 195), an application of scientific reason to Scotland’s issues (Novak, “Daniel Defoe,” 52-56), a set of political arguments to show that Scotland and England have similar values (Peraldo, pars. 9-14 and 30-31), and as an example of contemporary topographical poetry (Backscheider, Daniel Defoe 38-39), among others. Novak says that Defoe sees his own work as a “literary recreation” of the real world, and that is true in Caledonia insofar as the poem offers observations of Scotland’s resources and condition (Transformations 192). However, what informs Defoe’s view and the way in which he observes those resources is another matter. While Paula Backscheider is correct that Defoe is a practical author who writes economic geographies, I argue that there is a particular worldview that influences what is included in his geography (“Defoe” 7, 19). Given that Defoe’s purpose in composing the poem is to provide an economic argument to convince the gentry to vote for the Union, what is missing from the extant literature, especially from the perspective of the history of economic thought, is a discussion of the economic rhetoric of Caledonia.

Mercantilism was the dominant body of thought in contemporary English economic theory and policy. One of its well-known tenets was the promotion of maintaining a positive balance of trade and granting monopolies to trading companies to accomplish the task of commercial dominance and expansion. While I agree with Srinivas Aravamudan that Defoe is not a strict advocate of monopoly companies, such companies are only one aspect of mercantilist ideology. Defoe’s poem, I argue, is steeped in a mercantilist worldview and methodology in its analysis of and solutions to Scotland’s economic issues. My focus in this article is thus not solely on Defoe’s observations on Scotland’s trade, but also on the underlying mercantilist methods of inventorying of resources and the rhetoric of power present in his examination of Scotland’s resources and his suggestions for aggressive improvement. The mercantilist rhetoric of power justifies the use of violent force to attain national ends, whether these are the extraction of resources, seizure of territory, or commercial and military war.1 These aspects are starkly present throughout the poem.

Laurence Dickey says that in Defoe’s theory of power “a nation’s ‘strength’ lay more in its commercial wealth than in the martial valour of its people” (64, 77-82). I argue that Defoe believes that power is to be found in both, as both are needed to build an empire, but which one a nation focuses on depends on the strength of that country relative to another. National power in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century mercantilist thought is synonymous with any activity that strengthens the nation, whether that be an increase in production, an attainment of bullion, or seizing overseas territories, as Salim Rashid (139-141) and Lars Magnusson (Political Economy, 37-39 and 94-111) have demonstrated. Therefore although Defoe focuses on improvement rather than balances of trade, the way in which he assesses the country’s situation and the language he uses for its improvement reveal deep mercantilist roots. Additionally, in arguing that Scotland should focus its strength initially on internal economic development rather than external trade and national defense, Defoe promotes actions that strongly benefit England’s own mercantilist goals. By encouraging the gentry to look inwards, Scotland is removed as a potential commercial and military threat if the Union does not pass, and, if it does pass, any increase in Scotland’s wealth becomes a boon to England’s economic power in a united state.

Defoe and Economics

Defoe’s economic rhetoric is a relatively understudied aspect of his writing, even amongst economists. Historians of economic thought within economics have recently turned more attention on Defoe’s fiction. However, most of the economics literature treating Defoe focuses on the contributions, both real and imagined, of Robinson Crusoe’s titular self-sufficient hero to the construction of the self-sufficient “economic man” of modern orthodox economic theory, as Grappard, Hewitson, and Watson have noted. While economists have recently begun to turn to Defoe’s insights on trade and globalization, as in Hayashi and Goodwin, the discipline has so far neglected the economic arguments in Defoe’s nonfiction. In particular, scholars in the history of economic thought have yet to study Defoe’s political pamphlets in the context of seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century English mercantilist theory.

Mercantilism itself has been explored in depth in the history of economic thought. Although often conflated with the pursuit of specie, due to subsequent economists’ exclusive focus on this aspect of Adam Smith’s more detailed discussion of mercantilist activity in the Wealth of Nations, modern treatments see mercantilism differently.2 Most historians of economic thought now define mercantilism as a set of theories and policies that sought to maximize state power and expansion of territory, originating from the state-building of the seventeenth century and extending into the empire-building of the eighteenth (Hutchison; Magnusson, Mercantilism 94-111; Backhouse, 66-88; Hont, 51-65 and 186-266). Individual policies differed by nation depending on circumstance and time, but as Joseph Schumpeter notes, “There was no lack of unity about them as to political vision. And this vision was quite comprehensive, embracing all the economic problems of the nation” (197).

The mercantilist economic goals common to each nation-state in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were to strengthen, display, and if necessary deploy the power of the state through military action. All economic activity under a mercantilist policy umbrella was geared towards promoting state power, whether the state chose to use that power or not. In the history of economic thought literature, Eli Hecksher (1935) has shown that mercantilism was a means of increasing state power; Lars Magnusson has further developed this view, seeing mercantilist policy as a means of accumulating and extending state power through both commercial and military means, which often work in tandem (Political Economy; Mercantilism). Maintaining a positive balance of trade, having a large and industrious working population, and producing manufactured goods for export at competitive prices were hallmarks of mercantilist policy, but not the telos of the mercantilist philosophy. The focus on trade balances and accumulation of bullion that Smith identified as defining traits of mercantilism were simply a means to achieve the ends identified by Hecksher and Magnusson.3

A basic assumption of the mercantilist writers of the seventeenth century, such as William Petty, Thomas Mun, and Charles Davenant, was that the amount of resources available in the world, and therefore the wealth of the world, is fixed. Thus an important goal for any one nation-state is to attain more resources and to discover ways to use their resources more efficiently in order to produce and export more than competing nation-states. The resulting influx of bullion from exports is a sign of a nation’s power and a means to deploy its power commercially and militarily. Productive power depended on more access to resources and thus territorial expansion is key to commercial growth; military power aided in both of these pursuits.4

As Aravamudan outlines using examples from both fiction and nonfiction, Defoe’s writing displays a consistency of thought with the majority of basic mercantilist beliefs. Although not a strict bullionist, Defoe likens the imbalance of trade with Asia to Europe lying with its veins cut open and bleeding to death, consistently stresses the need for trade to gain resources, repeatedly represents merchants as experts, and emphasizes that international trade is the best means to bring about economic growth (47-50). Colonization, a mercantilist necessity, also plays a prominent role in Defoe’s fiction in the form of “adventuring.” Such expansion of territory comes with a show of force as these novels of voyaging also contain “Extreme, often unmotivated violence” and the display of “primitive accumulation alongside the massacre of those deemed savage” (47).

Although he may not have been thinking about economic theory systematically, Defoe’s suggestions for economic improvement are strongly informed by such mercantilist economic thought. Caledonia is an expression of a particular view of resources and economic power and the uses to which they are ultimately to be put. I wish to situate Defoe’s poem within a strain of mercantilist thought that promoted English expressions of state power through shows of force, manifested in the building and exertion of military and commercial power. Seen through this lens, the poem demonstrates Defoe’s understanding of mercantilist ideas of power, and argues that the ultimate economic goal of the Union is to direct Scotland’s economic improvement into particular channels that will increase the power of the English state. Although aligned with English mercantilist thought, Defoe’s Caledonia also contains a novel difference that still benefits England: The target of the show of force that Defoe encourages is initially not commercial rivals or resource-rich colonies but Scotland itself.

After a brief overview of the poem, I discuss Defoe’s mercantilist methodology as he catalogues Scotland’s resources in the poem’s analysis of the country’s poverty. I then explore how Defoe’s proposed solutions for improvement both display mercantilist “show of force” ideology and ultimately benefit England’s economic position. Reference to the Union, although not overt, is still present in the poem because the economic promises of the treaty are necessary for Defoe’s proposals to succeed. How and why this is the case are discussed along with concluding thoughts in the essay’s final section.

She’s poor compared to rich and rich compared to poor”: Scotland’s Underdevelopment and Defoe’s Solution

The printed work contains two prefaces addressed to the landed gentry of Scotland. The first is addressed to the Commissioner for Union, the Duke of Queensbury, and the second to the entire Scottish Parliament. In both Defoe says his goal is to praise the good elements of the country. He is more specific in the preface to the Scottish parliament, noting that “The principal design was the climate, nation, seas, trade, lands, improvements, and temper of Scotland and its people.” The point of this inventory, he claims, is not to say how Scotland could be rich but to question rather “Why is she not rich, plentiful, and fruitful?” (np). It is up to the landed men to change the situation. The purpose of the poem, he says, is thus not simply to extol the virtues of Scotland and its people but to present his plan for how it can be improved. He protests at least three times that the poem is not about the Union, concluding that “the Union is noways concern’d in this discourse” (np). However, he declares early in the poem that the wealth of the nation will remain concealed until that “blest hour” when the Union is signed (3). The rest of the preface further exhorts the landed gentlemen, who are also those who will vote on the Act of Union, to undertake the improvement of their lands, as will be discussed below.

Part I of the poem acknowledges the limitations the harsh climate and coastline of the country present for agricultural production, but counterbalances this with a catalogue of Scotland’s bountiful natural resources. Part II discusses the excellent character of the labor force, whose poverty he argues is not their own fault but due to the lack of improvement, and Part III regards the virtues of the landed gentry and the martial valor of the people. Scotland therefore is abundant with natural resources, hard working people, and valiant and learned leaders, and thus no reason in terms of resources to be poor. He concludes by exhorting the country to throw off its poverty by taking advantage of its resources, which can best be done within the framework of the Union. His solution is improved application of labor to land and the development of the fishery, but first he must diagnose the cause of the country’s poverty.

Defoe’s inventorying impulse in this and other works has been noted. Deidre Lynch ascribes it to the burgeoning of consumer culture (84-85). In terms of natural resources, Backscheider sees it as a form of topographical poetry (39). Katherine Penovich attributes it to the Baconian influence of the time. Vickers concurs and credits Defoe’s enthusiasm to “open the Book of Nature” to the education he received at Charles Morton’s academy for Dissenters (32-54, wh73-74). However, Defoe’s inventory of Scotland’s resources throughout the poem is also typical of mercantilist discourse. Chaplin’s observation that seventeenth and eighteenth century projectors saw nature “as a storehouse of information about and supplies for agriculture” applies very well to the mercantilist outlook (134). Mercantilists viewed the world as a warehouse of resources, which were either hidden by God so that men could uncover them and engage in trade or simply existed for extraction and use of the powerful.

An important connection to mercantilist thought arises here. John Morton received training from several members of the Royal Society, one of whose prominent members was William Petty, the creator of political arithmetic. The purpose of political arithmetic was to quantify and categorize the stock of a country’s resources for the use of government administrators to make better decisions on how best to extract and allocate those resources for maximum production and export. Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) and Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672) are early examples of the practice of categorizing human, animal, and material resources as means to the end of mercantilist imperialist expansion. Political arithmetic was created to identify and quantify Ireland’s resources in order to shift their use from underproductive to more productive sectors. The endpoint of Petty’s practice was to make policy suggestions that would not only shift resources from less productive to more productive uses in Ireland, but also shift Irish resources to sectors that would not compete with English production (Several Essays in Political Arithmetic, 228-233).

The methodology of political arithmetic can best be seen in Political Anatomy of Ireland. The chapter headings and subheadings demonstrate that not only the physical but also the social resources of the country are considered to be inputs available for use. Petty begins with a survey “of the lands in Ireland,” the people and their houses and labor, the church, and then the rebellion of 1641. Next he analyzes the “militia and defence of Ireland” and the state of trade in the country, and then presents suggestions for improvement. “A Catalogue of the Peers” appears in chapter XVI, where he also includes subsections on the lords, knights, and burgesses. In chapter V, Petty mentions the rebellions of the Irish, but asserts that they will not rebel again, and also discusses the inconveniences of a lack of full union with Ireland. In Caledonia Defoe performs a similar cataloguing exercise to Petty but in a more creative mode. The sequence Defoe follows in the poem is the same: a survey of physical resources, the human resources, and a note that the church and country have escaped the rebelliousness of other nations, such as Ireland. Special praise is reserved for Scotland’s lack of rebelliousness, which, he argues, has made resources in Scotland more reliably available for productive use. Although he does not then argue explicitly about the inconveniences of a lack of union as in Petty, the implication is apparent, given Defoe’s prescriptions regarding economic improvement, and would have been clear to contemporary readers familiar with Petty’s text.

Through the inventory Defoe demonstrates that, except for the cold climate and large tracts of infertile soil, Scotland’s poverty cannot be due to natural causes (15). Rather, the country is poor due to a lack of production and consumption. In terms of economic development, a cold climate and nutrient-poor soil are no small things and negatively affect a country’s production possibilities in the agricultural sector. However, rather than discussing this real economic challenge, Defoe instead focuses on resources that are present but underutilized. He allows that one cause of the country’s low production is the hunger of the labor force. However, he argues, the issue of hunger could be easily solved through the use of the country’s key natural resource, which is its overlooked abundance of fish. Scotland’s true bounty lies in its deep bays and harbors, an extensive and dangerous coast that keeps invaders away, “the convenience of her harbors, safe roads, and neighborhood both to the German and Atlantick oceans” (6), long days of sunlight, science and art in sailing, and the “treasure of the fishery” (12). Thus he encourages Scotland to develop its fishery industry and to present its results “to every hungry Door” (15). He believes this treasure is “unexhausted” and enough to “subsist the whole Nation” (16, note F). Proper development of the fishing industry will not only make the country prosperous and thus the envy of those abroad, but also the “dread” of those in other seas (16). As such, it is Scotland’s commercial power and efficiency in this industry, rather than any show of military might, that will display its power to other countries.

He continues, “This, and your Valour, would restore your fame; How would your Navies quickly spread the Seas, and guard that wealth they help you to possess?” (18). So far this is not necessarily innovative thought, as it is standard mercantilist practice to identify a key resource for production and specialize in the production of it for overseas export. Defoe concedes that Scotland will need time before it can take advantage of overseas trade in fish, recommending the use of the fish for home consumption first to alleviate hunger. Advocacy of home consumption is unusual for mercantilist thinkers when dealing with colonies and provinces, so it seems that Defoe is moving towards improved quality of life arguments that one finds later in Scottish Enlightenment discourse. However, it is likely that Defoe is willing to counter the traditional export promotion argument because Scotland will soon be, he hopes, one political unit with England, once the Act of Union is passed and ratified. Following the projected chronology of the poem, its implication is that once Scotland is more fully developed and part of the Union, only then will it be able to engage in export promotion and the development of its navy, or utilize the resources of the English navy to protect its overseas trade.5

It is important to recognize that in mercantilist thought people are inventoried just as much as natural resources because they are also a resource, as Petty first demonstrated by quantifying different kinds of population and labor in the Down Survey and subsequent works. Mercantilism also places great stress on having a large population so that the available labor force will be larger. Similarly, parts II and III of Caledonia are an inventory of the potential of the labor force, and a directive as to how the country’s leadership can make that labor force more productive. Given that Scotland has an abundance of natural resources, Defoe seeks in the next portions of the poem to explore why there is little to no manufacturing in the country. The second part of the poem thus analyzes both the people and their practices.

Defoe praises the hardiness and virtue of the industrious poor who obey both their landlords and their religion, and do not entertain the same rebellious notions, he claims, as those in other countries (24-26). He reserves his criticism for those whom he calls the “little chiefs,” or smaller landholders who charge the highest rent they can to their tenants, before those tenants know how much they will harvest or what it will be worth, thus creating a disincentive for the farmers to be more productive (23, notes A and C). The actions of the landlords are counterproductive for both the workers and the landlords themselves because they prevent the improvement of the land of the “little chief,” resulting in lower incomes for both parties. The productivity of the labor force is thus another form of wealth to be “uncovered” if the landlords can be enjoined to enclose their lands and undertake improvements, without initially raising their rents before their tenant farmers can make enough to pay it. Rack-renting the tenants suppresses productivity in the agricultural sectors because it creates a disincentive for farmers to be more productive, in fear their rents will be further raised in proportion to the value of what they can produce. Any surplus made by the farmer must be either given in rent or sold to raise cash for rent. With this erasure of incentives there is little chance for real economic improvement either in the life of the tenants, or, more importantly to Defoe as a mercantilist, in the economic output of the country.

The next portion of the poem seems to be merely an extended paean to the valor of Scottish soldiers who have fought abroad. However, considering its location just after the discussion of the hardworking and virtuous agricultural labor force, the discussion of those in military service is simply an extension of the inventory of the productive powers of the population. Defoe’s point in cataloguing the military activities of the nation on behalf of others is to make two points. The first is to say that this valor is in vain: “But valiant Scots, what business had you here?” he remarks on those who fought in battles for Sweden and others (33). His second major point is that the military skill of the people and resources used by those who hired themselves out to fight for others should be spent only in the defense of their own country and interests. “You had no desperate fortunes there to raise,” he asserts, and thus no real reason to be training others’ soldiers and fighting others’ wars (37).

From a mercantilist standpoint the martial valor of Scottish soldiers abroad is in vain because it neither benefits them economically nor increases the military power of Scotland. Defoe does not deny the glory of the Scots’ past military exploits, but shows that these have been either in the past or on behalf of others. In mercantilist terms if one is using one’s military force to actively secure and defend overseas trade and territories, then it is being used effectively. Otherwise, it represents a misallocation or underutilization of resources. Defoe expresses just this sentiment in the line “Scotland has sons indeed, but none to spare” (37). Population growth rather than emigration is vital from a mercantilist perspective in that the larger the population, the greater the potential labor force of varying skills. Defoe presents the cost of foregone alternatives of continuing on the current path: lost population, lost production, lost hands to contribute to improvement, and thus lost prosperity.

He theorizes that Scotsmen have left to fight for others due to a lack of well-paid employment, or any employment at all, which can be inferred when he presents his solutions. Essentially, Defoe believes that Scotland is in what modern development economics calls a poverty trap, where the conditions that created poverty in the first place will reinforce and make that poverty worse, thus ensuring the people remain in poverty or leave the country, since in mercantilist thought and Defoe’s logic, poverty encourages sloth (Review 46). Scotsmen work as soldiers abroad because to do so is preferable to low wages, but then are not available to work domestically, thus reinforcing a situation of underproduction that causes further unemployment and lack of available jobs. The soldiers will return to work in Scotland only once there is more production and hence more paid employment available. Having demonstrated that the country’s lack of production is due neither to a lack of physical resources nor any lack of will in the labor force, he turns to the sector of society who have the material and political power to undertake an improved mobilization of resources. Hence the next section of the poem assesses his subscribers, the landed gentry.

Part III begins with a recognition of the honor of the landed gentry of Scotland and the benefit they enjoy of freedom from the corruption of the court politics in England. He also takes stock of other characteristics the gentry possess that are useful for a mobilization of production, or as it is referred to in economics, human capital. He praises the “commonwealth of learning” (52), knowledge of sciences and the arts, honesty, and friendship of the people of the great houses (54), many of whom of course also take part in the Union debates and all of whom have a vote. They also make up the majority of his subscribers who are also addressed in the preface. It is this group to whom the whole poem is directed, as he says in the preface that:

the reason of this discourse is to examine who are the objects of this improvement, who the persons must do it… And this, my lords and gentlemen, must be your part; you alone can put your hands to the healing the wounds, time, negligence, unhappy constitutions, civil dissensions, and all the state broils of the nation have put upon your prosperity (np).

Defoe’s inventory of the virtues of the gentry demonstrates that there is no lack of strong qualities in the leadership of the country, and therefore it is up to these to lead the country in economic rather than political advancement. In the preface he encourages them to undertake the improvement that smaller landholders will not and proposes that this is a natural service, akin to military service but one performed on the resources of the land. Therefore there is no loss of service and duty in turning the country’s leaders towards the country’s material improvement and away from military exploits, while also gaining a personal benefit of more profit from their improved lands.

What then are the ultimate causes of Scotland’s poverty? Defoe explains in Part III that sloth is the cause of Scotland’s poverty “but not your major crime” (57). Sloth and poverty are both the cause and effect of each other, as “poverty makes sloth and sloth makes poor” (58). Scotland is thus in a poverty trap where the low level of economic development creates inaction because there is no incentive to industry, which then further exacerbates a lack of production. The low levels of production he attributes simply to “time,” indicating that the economic decline has been part of a gradual but long process of neglect (58).6 How is the labor force to be more productive and bring the soldiers home to bolster industry? “Success alone can quicken industry,” he says. Thus the productivity of the country will have to be jumpstarted by some force outside of the labor force itself in order to generate the initial successes that will cause labor to have incentives to be more productive (59). He concludes that there is “No barrenness but in your industry” (57) and it is up to the landed gentry to initiate the process of economic development through the physical improvement of the land, changing the practices of the “little chiefs” in rack-renting their tenants, and developing the fishing and shipping industries, and of course in voting for the Union.

Outside In: The Use and Transference of Force

Regardless of its actual financial situation, from a mercantilist perspective early eighteenth-century Scotland was poor. Its external trade was largely conducted with Scandinavian countries and was not outwardly focused on building a commercial empire. With the failure of the Darien colony in Panama in 1700, the country not only lost over a quarter of its wealth, but also lost a key mark of mercantilist power, a colony. The subscribers to the Darien colonization scheme, who came from every segment of society, lost substantial portions of their fortunes. Continued economic recession due to the loss of the French trade, as well as ventures by Scottish merchants in England trading to the Americas, resulted in an exodus of people in search of employment (MacInnes, 160, fn 53; Armitage 97-118; Whately 139-183). Lacking an overseas commercial presence and a domestic navy to further such a presence, the country would not have the means, from a mercantilist perspective, to become powerful unless it were to change its focus to the maximization of production for external trade. Defoe’s plan of improvement, utilizing mercantilist thought, provides the means for Scotland to start on a mercantilist growth path centered on the fishing trade. Wealth from the fishery and the expectant increased labor force from the return of soldiers overseas would cause the country to be rich and happy. He exhorts the country to be strong and great, but also, tellingly, “be Europe’s greatest fear” (18). While he is not adamant about a positive balance of trade, instead emphasizing increased production of fish for inland trade in general, Defoe still maintains the mercantilist rhetoric of command of resources and control of the seas and expansion overseas.

Mercantilism promotes the exertion of military strength as a means of both conducting and securing overseas trade. Thus it is not enough for Defoe that the Scots could develop the fishery trade only for their own subsistence; the nation must eventually also develop a navy (or join forces with a post-Union British navy) and “defeat the seas,” besting any trade competitors who may try to take Scotland’s bounty or compete with them in the export of fish. As Aravamudan argues, due to the development of the English navy in the seventeenth century the ocean “becomes a proxy for British power…” (48). In Defoe’s case this extends to control of the resources of the ocean, and the ability to both ship those resources elsewhere and defend them.

The martial goals of mercantilism, in terms of military benefits for England, are present in his plan for Scotland’s economic improvement. In his Essay at Removing National Prejudices Against a Union with Scotland (1706), written to persuade the English, Defoe stresses that a major advantage of the Union is that the Scottish soldiers who now fight for several different countries will return home either to engage in manufactures and agriculture or to increase the armed forces of Great Britain. He says plainly of this potentially surplus population that “This is a Treasure beyond the Indies, and what few people know how to value…” (28, emphasis in text). The martial advantage of power over others transfers to England if the returned soldiers join the future British navy, and regardless of whether they fight for Britain or simply return to engage in agriculture and fishing in Scotland, the longstanding military threat to England from Scotland would decrease. Meanwhile, in Scotland military power is turned into power over oneself, as the nation is to direct its physical force inwardly to the deployment of hands on the land in agriculture and manufacturing.

The show of aggressive and even deadly force to demonstrate national power that is key to mercantilism is not eliminated in Caledonia, but merely transferred. To a mercantilist, national power is shown in any action that increases, protects, or displays the wealth of the nation, and this worldview animates Defoe’s analysis. One of the clearest examples of this is in the violent imagery at the end of the poem, which would be even more jarring out of a mercantilist context for one promoting peace between two hostile neighbors. Here the aggressive physical force that could be used for warfare abroad is instead to be transferred to the extraction and transformation of Scotland’s natural resources:

Natures a virgin, very chast and coy,

To court her’s nonsense, if ye will enjoy,

She must be ravish’t,

When she’s forcd she’s free,

A perfect prostitute to industry;

Freely she opens to the industrious hand,

And pays them all the tribute of the land (59, emphasis in text).

While much could be said about the sexual nature of the violence portrayed in the poem, that is beyond the scope of this article. What I wish to underscore is that the imagery of violent seizure—the rhetoric of force—applied to resources is consonant with the mercantilist worldview. Strength of arms is an expression of state power that can manifest itself commercially or militarily but stems from the same ideology. “Treasures,” whether in specie or resources, exist for the seizure and use of those willing to exert force to take them. Defoe indicates that Scotland lacked the will to do so for itself, and so is not as powerful as England. As implied throughout the poem, and following the standard English mercantilist template of resource extraction, the true sources of Scotland’s wealth are represented as hidden and must be brought forth by forceful means. The resources available “if ye will enjoy” must be turned to whatever purpose those in power wish them to be used.

Conclusion: Caledonia as Mercantilist Thought and Political Propaganda

In this article I have sought to show that in a seemingly innocuous poem on the virtues of Scotland and its populace, Defoe deftly engages in a reasoned mercantilist argument to increase Scotland’s production through means that benefit the English economy. The suggested focus on the fishing industry to generate jobs to attract soldiers back to Scotland removes a military threat to England by transforming potential soldiers into laborers. In a time when the Protestant succession in Scotland after Queen Anne is in question, and indeed considering that many Scottish people had never fully accepted the Glorious Revolution, the discouragement of any northern martial activity could only be a benefit to those who feared future hostility from Scotland and any attempt at a Stuart restoration.7 This is a legitimate fear as the first attempt, albeit unsuccessful, at a Jacobite rising occurs in 1708, shortly after the Act of Union is implemented (MacInnes 316; Whately 346-347).

Suggesting that the Scottish people turn their full attention to the fishing industry requires that they reduce the labor and resources applied to other trades in which they compete with the English, such as the linen, wool, and cattle trades. Although Defoe promotes enclosure and improvement of output on the lands of the landed gentry, the emphasis in his plan is on the production of goods mostly for domestic rather than external trade, again eliminating any potential threat a truly improved Scottish economy might have for competing with English exports. A strong external Scottish fishing trade would not hurt English commercial interests abroad, and would be a boon for the national trade balance if the Union would take place.

Defoe not only offers policy advice that benefits English trade, but also encourages Scottish production in directions that coincide with provisions made in the Treaty of Union. Hence the poem is both economic policy advice and a thinly veiled attempt to shape the ministers’ vote on the treaty. The poem’s promotion of the fishing industry can be read as an argument for the Union. One of the promises made in the treaty negotiations by the English ministers to their Scottish counterparts was to promote “Manufactories and Companies for carrying on the Fishery,” according to the eyewitness account of Scottish Parliamentarian George Lockhart of Carnwath (1714). He continues, “The Communication of Trade was magnified to the Skies, and the East and West India Gold was all to terminate in Scotland…” (212).8 The promise of direct investment from England for infrastructure for trade and shipping, and direct subsidies for the fisheries, were necessary and attractive due to both the underdevelopment of the Scottish economy and the ongoing disruption of Scottish trade due to the union of the crowns, the Navigation Act (1660) and the Act for the Encouragement of Trade (1673), which barred the Scottish from trade in the Plantations, and by more recent English policy. For instance, the Alien Act of 1705 barred the entry of Scottish goods into England unless Scotland entered negotiations for the Union. The Union however promised to allow Scotland to make use of English trade monopolies abroad and to reopen trade between England and Scotland (Smout, “Anglo-Scottish Union” 462-464).

Despite the claims in the preface that the poem is not about the Union, Defoe nonetheless refers to that “blessed hour” when Scotland’s poverty will end and Scotland’s concealed wealth will come forth when the Union is joined (3, note). How the Union will do this is not specified in the poem itself but underlies the economic arguments directed at the gentry. Although the improvement of the fishing industry is certainly a positive step, the poem does not discuss how such improvement will be funded. The development of ports, bridges, harbors, and the shipping industry that Defoe promotes would have to be financed through private investment or increases in taxation. Scotland at the time of the Union debates had little surplus domestic funding at the household or administrative level. After the failure of the Darien Company and the resultant recession it caused, many of the landed gentry were in debt as were many merchants and manufacturers who had invested in the scheme. However, Article XV of the Union treaty included a direct payment, called The Equivalent, to be made from the English government to all of the subscribers of the Darien Company. The Equivalent is considered by both contemporary witnesses, such as both pro-Unionist John Clerk and anti-Unionist George Lockhart, and modern historians to be the major force that brought about the Union’s eventual passage (Clerk 151-153; Lockhart 156-157; Whately, Bought and Sold). The improvement Defoe suggests could be realized in the short run with the funding the treaty offered, free of interest, that would be made available by voting in favor of the Union.9 While the poem presents a solution to Scotland’s economic misfortunes, it also presents a very hard bargain.

Becoming a “perfect prostitute to industry” in the ways that Defoe suggested thus strongly benefited the English economy, but was not necessarily the best step for Scottish economic development and its economic and political sovereignty.10 It was, however, the most expedient. The rhetoric Defoe uses in the promotion of the forceful use of Scotland’s resources demonstrates both his mercantilist principles and his pro-Unionist goals. Through trade policy and the Equivalent, both of which are implicit in the “advice” given in the poem, the English attempted to force Scotland into Union. Novak states that Defoe attempts to be “deliberately witty and outrageous” with his wording regarding the ravishing of Scotland (Daniel Defoe 308). Whether that is true or not, the rhetoric within Defoe’s statements, as well as the analysis, inventory, and solutions within Caledonia, is deliberately mercantilist, built upon the conception of the use of force to promote one’s political and economic aims. As he makes clear in a pamphlet directed to his English audience, “In this Union here are Lands and People added to the English Empire” (5, emphasis in text). The language of mutual benefit is absent, demonstrating the mercantilist view that wealth is fixed and so in any transaction there can be only one winner. Just as Defoe is something more sophisticated than what he presented himself to be to the Scottish ministers, Caledonia is more than a friendly reflection on Scotland and its improvement. Throughout the work Defoe maintains his position as Harley’s agent and displays a keen mercantilist outlook in his analysis and recommendations that encourage the use of Scotland’s resources and reduced economic position to accomplish the goals of the English state.

University of Dallas

The author wishes to thank the editors and two anonymous referees, all of whose reflections and suggestions resulted in a much-improved final product. The research for this paper was partially funded by the King Haggar Scholars Award from the University of Dallas.

1 For an in-depth discussion of how mercantilist rhetoric influenced the shaping of the Union treaty itself and the policies England enacted beforehand to hinder Scotland’s economy, see Ramos 1-22 and 61-102.

2 Smith’s discussion in Book IV, chapters 1-8 of the Wealth of Nations initially focuses on the claim that the mercantilists conflate wealth with specie. However, he concludes in para. 49 of chapter 8 that the true flaw of the mercantilists’ philosophy is its focus on production for export rather than the consumption of the domestic population.

3 How the notion that mercantilists believed wealth was specie was disseminated in economics, and other interpretations of mercantilism in the twentieth century, are discussed in Magnusson, Mercantilism, 37-53.

4 A more detailed discussion of how these writers’ ideas influenced the crafting of the Union treaty is in Ramos (43-60).

5 As late as the 1720’s Defoe argues that the Scots should consume rather than export more of their products (Rogers 118). The economic benefits of the Union did not start to be widely felt in Scotland until the 1760s (Smout “Where Had the Scottish Economy” 45-46).

6 Because it ignores the actions taken by the English to disrupt Scotland’s economy, discussed in detail in Whately (Scots and the Union, 138-183) and Ramos (23-39), this is not a fully satisfactory answer from the standpoint of economic history. The accuracy of Defoe’s assessment is questionable. Rogers says that even after the knowledge gained from writing the Tour, Defoe’s knowledge of the lowlands is merely “adequate” and that, “His lack of firsthand knowledge of the Highlands shows up clearly…” (118).

7 Despite the Union of Crowns, without a full political union with England, Scotland still had the legal option of restoring James II or his heirs to the Scottish throne.

8 Lockhart’s account provides many details of the daily debates and intrigues in the Scottish Parliament. He also seems never to have believed Defoe to be a friend of Scotland, referring to him as “that vile Monster and Wretch, Daniel De Foe” (228-231).

9 Defoe was eventually appointed as a consultant of the committee charged with disbursement of the Equivalent to the subscribers.

10 Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun presented a counter vision of a federal union, and others still believed Scotland could maintain its own mercantilist state (Smout “Anglo-Scottish Union,” 463-466; Armitage 97-110; Robertson 200-220).

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—, editor. A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707. Cambridge, 1995.

Rogers, Pat. “Defoe’s Tour and the Identity of Britain.” Richetti, Cambridge Companion, pp. 102-120.

Schumpeter, Joseph. A History of Economic Analysis. Oxford University Press, 1954.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. Edited by Edwin Canaan, Modern Library, 1994.

Smout, T.C. “The Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. I. The Economic Background.” The Economic History Review, vol. 16, no. 3, 1964, pp. 455-467.

—. “Where Had the Scottish Economy Got to by the Third Quarter of the 18th Century?” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 45-72.

Vickers, Ilse. Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Watson, Matthew. “Competing Models of Socially Constructed Economic Man: Differentiating Defoe’s Crusoe from the Robison of Neoclassical Economics.” New Political Economy, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 609-26.

Whately, Christopher. Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707. Tuckwell Press, 2001.

—. The Scots and the Union. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

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Visualizing Crusoe

Giorgina Paiella

Visualizing Crusoe” is a DH project that examines the centrality of visualization in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The project aims to capture two dual threads that emerge from the novel and an examination of Defoe’s text in the digital age: the first, “visualizing Crusoe”—that is, using DH tools to visualize, model, and reveal aspects of the novel proper; and the second, “visualizing Crusoe”—a fitting description of a protagonist who makes meaning of his world by producing visual tools and artifacts, including lists, tables, journals, and tallies during his time spent upon the island. Three-hundred years ago—centuries before the digital humanities boom—Crusoe thinks visually. Visualizing Crusoe curates these examples of data visualization in the novel and also features new visualizations based on the text, including an interactive timeline of events in the novel and a map of Crusoe’s travels, to reveal how many of our current methods of data visualization are indebted to older, traditional forms of data visualization and how our current digital moment can provide new insights into Defoe’s canonical text.

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The Trial of the (Eighteenth) Century: Active Learning and Moll Flanders

Ann Campbell

LIKE EVERY PROFESSOR of eighteenth-century British literature I know, I find it challenging to fill undergraduate courses in my field. The English majors who have satisfied the prerequisites for 300-level period-based courses tend to gravitate to classes they assume will straightforwardly address their concerns and reflect their experiences. Consequently, courses on eighteenth-century authors such as Daniel Defoe often get cancelled while surveys of post-modernism thrive. I have tried obvious tactics, such as revising the title of a typical eighteenth-century literature course to “Hellions and Harlots in Eighteenth-Century Novels” or teaching episodes of Survivor alongside Robinson Crusoe, to increase enrollment in my courses. “Look!” such courses implicitly scream, “I can be postmodern, too!” While sexier course titles may encourage students to window shop, it is more difficult to keep them around once they see the bewigged and beribboned men and women on the covers of the assigned books. Despite the wigs, eighteenth-century literature is unquestionably relevant to today’s political, social, and economic concerns. For example, last fall I taught an attempted rape scene in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela that was eerily prescient of Senate testimony given the same week about Brett Kavanagh’s attempt to rape a classmate in prep school. As this example shows, the past doesn’t just inform the present; in eighteenth-century terms, it is its direct descendent. But how do we overcome the misalignment between students’ assumptions about the period and the content of the literature we teach in order to keep them enrolled in our courses so that they can see it, too?

Another challenge that appears to be antithetical to the question of how to help students discern connections between the twenty-first and the eighteenth centuries is how to achieve this goal while maintaining a focus on historical and cultural specificity. One of the great pleasures of reading texts from a different time and place is to learn about the habits and assumptions of the cultures they depict and interpret. Newgate is different in significant ways from a state or federal penitentiary in the United States today. Childbirth meant something different for women when there were no antibiotics or reliable forms of birth control. Marriage would have been experienced differently by those who could not easily procure divorces. These few examples are sufficient to demonstrate that knowledge about the period is a prerequisite to the historically informed close readings of texts we expect from class discussions and essays. However, concentrating too much on historical context can backfire if it alienates students from literature they already believe is irrelevant to their lives. A successful course must not only somehow forge links between periods while also emphasizing distinctions between them, but also hone skills specified by the learning outcomes for the course. In the course I refer to in this article, the learning outcomes are as follows:

  • demonstrate competency in literary research and its applications; and

  • apply field-specific critical and theoretical methods of literary analysis to produce aesthetic, historical, and cultural assessments of literary texts.

Put more simply, the course should teach students to research and analyze literary texts and to convincingly convey their conclusions to readers and listeners. In addition to these learning outcomes, I have other goals for my students, such as teaching them to perform a compelling close reading of a complicated passage, work effectively in teams, and understand the importance of historical context to interpreting literature.

The active learning activity I call Moll Flanders on Trial effectively accomplishes all these objectives. The activity itself lasts for two weeks and will not succeed unless students have already finished and discussed Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). Assuming you spend three weeks covering Moll Flanders, integrating this activity into your class will mean you have to devote about a third of an entire course to one novel. This is a substantial commitment that is justified because the activity teaches so much to students.

Active Learning Activities

As Cathy Davidson asserts, active learning is an “engaged form of student-centered pedagogy” that creates circumstances in which students can “learn how to become experts themselves” (8). Ideally, this strategy will promote “new ways of integrating knowledge” into students’ repertoires and inform their reading of texts throughout their lives (Davidson, 8). I incorporate at least one learning activity per novel into all my period-based upper-division undergraduate courses.i These activities may be as simple as working in a group to impersonate the style of an author. However, the ones that have proved most effective, including Moll Flanders on Trial, are longer and more involved. Regardless of their complexity, all of these activities require students to imaginatively enact some aspect or the period and its literature. Although dramatization is a definitional aspect of the learning activities I design and use in my courses, they are not acting exercises, but rather thought experiments. They necessitate interpretation of significant characteristics of the eighteenth century, such as how it conceptualizes of gender or class. The most successful activities also require students to compare and contrast these categories to modern conceptions of them and, finally, to the way students experience them. An effective learning activity lives in at least three worlds: the world of the text from which it is derived; the world of modern ideologies about the concepts it interrogates; and the student’s lived world.

Moll Flanders on Trial

The Moll Flanders on Trial activity enacts Moll’s trial recounted in Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), the first novel we read in my 300-level eighteenth-century novel course. Moll is charged with the felony of stealing fabric worth in excess of a shilling, the crime legal historian John Langbein identifies as “by far the most commonly prosecuted offense at the Old Bailey” (“Shaping,” 36). In Defoe’s novel, Moll is found guilty of the theft and sentenced to death, though she is ultimately transported rather than hanged. Moll Flanders on Trial takes as its basis this episode but enlarges the scope of Moll’s trial so that it encompasses larger questions about ethics, personal responsibility, and society’s obligation to protect vulnerable people. In other words, the activity is about social justice.

Trials work particularly well as class activities. As English Showalter argues of the trial that concludes Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), the structure of a trial stages conflicts implicit in literature. During trials, “intense human passions conflict with each other” and “in order to resolve the conflict the court must distinguish appearance from reality according to principles generally accepted by society” (45). Most importantly, “even when basic agreement is reached on what really happened,” as is the case in Moll Flanders, the “freedom of the individual often confronts the necessity for order and regulation” (Showalter, 45). As Showalter’s comments suggest, the most engaging aspect of Moll’s trial for students is whether she should be held responsible for crimes she commits in the context of a society that offers few legitimate opportunities for her to support herself. Where does individual responsibility end and collective accountability begin?

Moll Flanders on Trial is based on the adversarial division between prosecution and defense. Students replicate this structure instinctually because they have seen it represented in so many television and movie legal dramas. Each student must be assigned to either the prosecution or defense team before the activity begins. Ideally both teams will have the same number of students, but if there are an uneven number of students one team will necessarily be larger than the other. Typically I allow students to choose whether they wish to prosecute or defend Moll, at least until one of the teams is full. Initially, most students want to prosecute her, although by time the trial ends they often become more sympathetic to the defense’s arguments and critical of their own assumptions about Moll’s personal culpability. This shift in thinking is one of the most exciting aspects of the activity. Political or religious beliefs can make students resistant to scrutinizing their assumptions about the role government ought to play in providing individuals with education, health care, shelter, and opportunities to advance socially and economically. However, when they evaluate these same issues from the perspective of another period they are often able to objectively critique their own convictions.

Although Moll Flanders on Trial requires students to join legal teams representing either the defendant or the state, it is worth explaining to them that this aspect of the activity is historically inaccurate. First, victims of theft rather than the state prosecuted property crimes and did so at their own expense. The novel itself makes this clear because Moll and her friend the pawnbroker try to convince the broker she steals from not to prosecute her. Other aspects of the disparity between criminal prosecutions in eighteenth-century London and the activity are less obvious and must be pointed out explicitly. Also, criminal procedure during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century was not based on an adversarial system.ii As Thomas Green observes, the “accused . . . until late in the [eighteenth] century only occasionally had the advantage of counsel,” so Moll would not have been represented by an attorney, much less a team of them (270). The judge was supposed to represent the defendant’s interest by questioning witnesses brought against him or her. As Langbein points out, in most instances, and particularly in criminal trials at the Old Bailey, the prosecution would not have been represented by counsel either (“Criminal,” 282). Additionally, neither the defendant nor the prosecuting party articulated theories of cases (Langbein, “Shaping” 124). There were no opening statements or closing arguments. In fact, until almost the middle of the nineteenth century counsel was expressly “forbidden to ‘address the jury’” (Langbein, “Shaping” 129). I do not include a jury in the activity: only a judge. While a jury rather than a judge would have determined a defendant’s guilt or innocence during the eighteenth century, juries in London criminal trials generally rendered the verdict suggested by the judge, who, as Green asserts, left “little doubt of his own conclusions” (285). The absence of a jury, then, while historically inaccurate, would not likely have affected the outcome of most eighteenth-century trials.

The task of the activity’s prosecution team is broader in scope than the broker’s would have been in the trial depicted by Defoe. If all they had to do was prove Moll is guilty of stealing fabric, they would prevail every time since Moll admits she takes it (Defoe 214). Consequently, the prosecution team’s goal is to develop a theory of the case that presents Moll as a repeat offender who will continue to victimize innocent people if she reenters society. In actual eighteenth-century criminal trials, juries were more likely to convict a defendant of felony charges if they believed he or she was a repeat offender, even if the defendant had not been convicted of previous crimes (Langbein, “Criminal” 305). The novel also attests to this presumption. Moll believes she will be treated more harshly than one of her partners in crime if he is able to identify her because she is notorious in the criminal underworld for never getting caught (Defoe, 172).The defense team must excuse Moll’s criminal behavior while not attempting to deny that it occurred. They may request that Moll be convicted of a lesser crime not punishable by death. They might even imply the judge should ignore the evidence against Moll and find her not guilty. These strategies align surprisingly well with the only defenses ordinarily available to defendants during the eighteenth century. There are numerous historical precedents for the “yes, but” type of argument the defense is forced by Moll’s admission of guilt to adopt.iii As Langbein explains,

[o]nly a small fraction of eighteenth-century criminal trials were genuinely contested inquiries into guilt or innocence. In most cases the accused had been caught in the act or otherwise possessed no credible defense. To the extent that trial had a function in such cases beyond formalizing the inevitable conclusion of guilt, it was to decide the sanction. These trials were sentencing proceedings. The main object of the defense was to present the jury with a view of the circumstances of the crime and the offender that would motivate it to return a verdict within the privilege of clergy, in order to reduce the sanction from death to transportation, or to lower the offense from grand to petty larceny, which ordinarily reduced the sanction from transportation to whipping. (“Shaping” 41)iv

While it is difficult to procure a verdict of not guilty for Moll, the defense has a good chance at asking the judge to at least downvalue the goods Moll steals, a term meaning they would appraise the value of the goods she stole at less than its true worth in order to reclassify her crime as a nonfelony. This was a widely accepted practice although there was no legitimate legal precedent for it. As Langbein observes, juries sometimes even downvalued stolen sums of money, cases in which “downvaluing became transparent fiction” the purpose of which could only have been to prevent the defendant from hanging (Langbein, “Shaping” 54).

Lacking a viable argument for Moll’s innocence, the defense concentrates on mitigating circumstances and Moll’s character. Although these approaches had in theory no bearing on legal culpability, they were in fact the reason eighteenth-century juries downvalued most property crimes. Mitigating circumstances might include Moll’s poverty or her state of mind. As Dana Rabin notes, eighteenth-century defendants at trial “attributed their crimes to stress, drunkenness, and poverty— altered states of mind they hoped would earn the jury’s sympathy” (89). They emphasized their poverty in particular, characterizing it as a “force that overwhelmed their powers of self-restraint and compelled them to commit crimes” (Rabin, 93). Defoe’s novel provides ample evidence for this line of argument. Moll frequently justifies her thefts as the result of derangement induced by poverty. “Distress” takes away her “Strength to resist” (151). When “Poverty presses the Soul,” she asks rhetorically, “what can be done?” (151). Here and elsewhere in the novel she makes a sort of argument by analogy implying that her soul is being physically restrained, or pressed as she describes it, constraining her so that she cannot act according to her conscience. Students may take these statements by Moll and apply them more comprehensively to the effects of an indifferent and economically unequal society on Moll’s state of mind.

Another approach the defense can take is to produce character witnesses such as Moll’s pawnbroker friend to testify to Moll’s good qualities. As Green notes, this was a common occurrence in eighteenth-century trials (282). If a jury believed the accused was a decent person led astray by bad company or was only trying to support a family, they were more likely to downvalue stolen property. The defense team may also attempt to elicit sympathy from the judge on the basis of Moll’s sex, playing on gendered notions that women ought to be protected from hostile economic and social forces. As P. King argues, “[q]uantitative evidence indicates. . . that females were much more likely to be given partial verdicts,” meaning the jury would downvalue the goods they stole (255). The defense team can also fruitfully contextualize Moll’s crimes by focusing on her lack of opportunity in a society that treats women as property. In one memorable iteration of the trial the defense team used its closing argument to explain that if Moll had been able to go to business school and work in the corporate world she would have become a broker rather than a thief.

The trial activity takes four days of class if the class meets twice a week: two devoted to preparation and two to the trial. Although the preparation days obviously precede the trial days, I describe the trial first because preparations for it only make sense in the context of the trial. On both days of the trial the prosecution team sits together on one side of the classroom and the defense on the other. The first day of the trial begins with the opening statements, the prosecution team giving theirs first. I allow a maximum of five minutes for these opening statements, but the time allowed can vary depending on how many students are in the class. The opening statements should articulate each team’s theory of the case, meaning the strategy the teams will use to argue Moll should be executed, exonerated, or found guilty of a lesser charge. Then, each member of both teams presents evidence supporting the team’s theory of the case. Evidence for the purpose of this activity denotes an interpretation of a passage no longer than a paragraph from the novel. Each student stands in front of the class, reads relevant excerpts from his or her chosen passage, and explains in a maximum of two minutes how it contributes to the team’s assertions about Moll’s motives or character. This aspect of the trial trains students to select appropriate passages to prove arguments about texts and to articulate close readings that effectively support their contentions. It is is like writing an essay, except that it is delivered orally, written collectively, and intended to engage directly with another team’s counterarguments. The prosecution presents their evidence first, then the defense. While there are rarely more than a few minutes left in class after all the evidence is produced, students can use any available time to continue preparing for the second day.

On the second day of the trial both teams call and question witnesses to support their theories of the case. They also cross-examine the other team’s witnesses. Questioning and cross-examination are limited to five minutes per team per witness. A student from the team that called the witnesses must act as that witness. He or she sits in front of the class and answers truthfully according to Moll’s account in the novel any questions either team asks. While witnesses’ answers must not contradict the novel, they may interpret Moll’s motives and behavior in ways that are favorable to their team’s theory of the case. Witnesses who disappear or die over the course of the novel present from “beyond the grave.” All witnesses’ knowledge is limited to the episodes in which they participate or of which they have direct knowledge. Counsel is allowed to reveal to witnesses what happened to Moll later in her life and to ask them to provide their opinion of Moll’s actions. All witnesses have a copy of the novel with them to refer to specific passages during their testimony. Ideally, every witness plays a role in convincing the judge to render the verdict sought by his or her team. However, if a witness answers questions poorly or inaccurately, concedes aspects of the other team’s case during cross-examination, or becomes stubborn and defensive on the stand, then his or her testimony will benefit the opposing team. By playing and questioning witnesses, students develop skills such as thinking on their feet, recalling and recounting significant episodes of the novel, presenting in the most advantageous light a set of established facts (some of which are inevitably unfavorable to their team’s case), and acting in front of their classmates and professor. After all the witnesses have testified, the prosecution and then the defense deliver their closing arguments for up to ten minutes each. At the end of the trial the judge or judges render a verdict based on the totality of each team’s performance.

The two class sessions during which students prepare for the trial are as bustling with activity as Moll herself. Firstly and most importantly, both teams develop their theory of the case. Everything else follows from this decision. Their opening statements, closing arguments, choice of witnesses, and selection of evidentiary passages must align with their theory of the case in order for the team to prevail. Halfway through day one of preparation the teams take turns choosing witnesses. They cannot select the same ones so they need to prepare a list of alternate witnesses as well as their first choices. A coin toss determines which team chooses the first witness. Preparing effectively for the trial takes a lot of teamwork as well as thoughtful delegation of tasks to the right team members. Teams quickly learn that micromanaging everyone makes the project insurmountable. They must learn to play to team members’ strengths and trust each other to do a good job on assigned tasks. They usually end up striking this balance between assigning work to individuals and critiquing it collectively by using Google Docs. For example, one person might draft the opening statement and then the rest of the team would edit different portions of it on a shared Google document.

During the last two years I have brought in a mentor to help the teams use their preparation time wisely and avoid pitfalls such as presenting an overwrought theory of the case, choosing ineffective witnesses, or selecting inappropriate passages as evidence. These mentors can be graduate students or undergraduate students who took the course in the past and want to share their expertise. These mentors have improved the trials dramatically. They warn teams away from relying on limited or unconvincing theories of the case, help them select appropriate team members to play particular witnesses, and make them aware of strategies opposing counsel will likely use to rebut certain types of arguments. For example, one theory of the case that reappears every couple of years is the prosecution claiming that Moll is a sociopath or psychopath. Students find lists of symptoms of a sociopathic or psychopathic personality disorders on the internet or pick them up in an introductory psychology course and then try to apply them to Moll. This approach rarely works because even though the trial allows a great deal of latitude for anachronism, diagnosing Moll with a particular condition could just as easily mean that she should not be held responsible for her behavior as that she ought to be hanged for it. A mentor will help students avoid pitfalls like this.

Another aspect of the trial teams need the most guidance about is choosing team members to cast as witnesses. Witnesses should be quick-witted and comfortable in front of the class. They should also have read the novel carefully, especially if they play Moll or her pawnbroker friend. A sense of humor helps, too, since everyone enjoys the trial more when the people with the largest roles have fun. Occasionally teams select a member of their team to impersonate Moll or one of the other witnesses who becomes anxious or even paralyzed in front of the class. No matter how well a student knows the novel or how astute of a literary critic he or she is, that student must still be temperamentally suited to the pressure of being questioned and cross-examined in front of the entire class in order to make a good witness.

Figure 1 Student dressed up as Moll Flanders for Trial and Swearing to Tell the “Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth” on Her Own Memoir

Photo credit: Miranda Kuehmichel

Figure 2 A Student Testifies as Moll’s “Married Friend” from Bath

Photo credit: Miranda Kuehmichel

Students enjoy this activity so much they will often do more than is asked of them. Last fall the students who portrayed Moll and Jemy wore costumes. Jemy frequently combed through his luxuriant wig with his fingers, a tic that conveyed his vanity and had the entire class laughing. This year a student playing the married friend from Bath wore tights, a vest, breeches, and a wig, and testified in an accent straight out of a Monty Python movie. Students often bring in food, particularly cakes. Last year one student brought in a cake decorated like Newgate, complete with a key just outside Moll’s reach. Another year a student decorated her cake with a paper doll version of Moll hanging from a noose. While this cake was macabre, its dark humor perfectly captured the tone of that year’s trial.

Sometimes students conspicuously and comically attempt to bribe me. Most memorably, a student playing the governess several years ago plied me with chocolate coins as she left the witness stand. A defense team several year ago scheduled a protest outside the classroom. Their friends yelled “free Moll” and carried signs opposing the bloody code. This year, the defense team staged a séance, complete with flickering electric candles, to raise Moll’s mother from the dead to testify.

Figure 3 Moll and the Defense Team Stage a Séance to Raise Moll’s Mother from the Dead to Testify

Photo credit: Miranda Kuehmichel

Some teams’ inventiveness runs in a more academic direction. For example, a defense team several years ago painstakingly constructed a document asserting Moll’s innocence that typographically resembled eighteenth-century pamphlets they replicated from ones they found using Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. They even dyed the paper with tea and crumpled it so that it looked historically accurate. A defense team several years ago commemorated their victory in the trial by giving me a gavel set I now use every year during the activity.

It would be easy to dismiss costumes, cakes, séances, and protests as gimmicky. However, they are part of what makes the trial special and memorable to each group of students. By doing these extra things students show they are invested in the activity. At least two-thirds of the students in my eighteenth-century novel course specifically refer in their course evaluations to the trial as something they enjoyed and that contributed to their understanding of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Years later, Boise State University alumni tell me the trial was one of their best memories of college. Some students have made lasting friendships working on the trial. It has been the most consistently successful learning activity I have used over the course of more than fifteen years of teaching eighteenth-century British literature.

Assessment

Students tend not to take seriously activities that are not assessed. They view such activities as “fillers,” something that professors use to pass the time when they do not want to lecture or facilitate discussion. Students must perceive the value of the Moll Flanders on Trial activity to make it successful. Consequently, I communicate how highly I value this activity by making it worth ten percent of students’ grades in the course. There are numerous ways you could allocate points based on this activity. I choose to emphasize individual performance because that is the only aspect of the trial students control. I reward teamwork as well but it constitutes only twenty percent of the overall grade for the activity. More importantly, teamwork is what results in a favorable final verdict, earning the winning team semester-long bragging rights. I allocate ten points for this activity on a hundred point scale: two for being present during all four days of the activity (one-half point off for every day missed); three based on the delivery of a close reading or an opening statement on the first day of the trial; three for acting as a witness, questioning and cross-examining witnesses, or delivering a closing argument; and two for being a productive and cooperative team member. I base the grade for evidence on the relevance of the passage the student selects to the team’s theory of the case, the quality and oral delivery of the close reading, and whether the student uses most of his or her allotted time. As for witnesses, they must know the novel well enough to answer questions quickly and accurately. Additionally, their answers should favor their team as much as possible. Questions posed by counsel should be clear and specific and produce answers that help prove the team’s theory of the case. Students’ contribution to their teams is more difficult to measure so I rely on their assessments of each other. They turn in a description of their own contribution on the last day of class. I also ask them how their group worked together and whether all team members contributed significantly to the trial. Most of these assessments are positive. However, if similar criticisms of the same team member appear in at least two assessments then I talk to that student and determine whether the concerns expressed by their teammates are accurate. Usually, just knowing peers will evaluate you provides sufficient incentive for students to perform well.

Rendering Judgment

One of the most challenging aspects of this activity from a teacher’s point of view is not how to grade it, but how to render a verdict. There are three possibilities for a verdict. I can find Moll guilty of the felony of grand larceny, a crime that carries the penalty of execution. I can also downvalue the goods she steals and find her guilty of a lesser crime penalized by whipping or transportation to the colonies. If the defense does an excellent job with their character witnesses or by excusing Moll’s crimes I sometimes even exonerate Moll. Although I do not allocate any points for prevailing in the trial, students feel passionately about winning. The desire to beat the other team is often more motivating for them than the grade they receive. I have developed an informal system that assists me in determining which team performed best and in explaining my decision to both teams. I assign four points based on each team’s overall performance in the trial: one based on the strongest opening statement; one for the team that produces the overall best evidence, one for the team that has the best performances and questions during the witness portion of the trial; and one for the best closing argument. If the teams are tied then I give an extra point for the team whose performance is most imaginative or does things that make the trial fun and engaging. This is where costumes or cakes can tip the scale. What I’m looking for in a tiebreaker is the team that cares the most about the activity. I generally explain my reasoning for my decision briefly after I render verdict, making sure to acknowledge at the same time great performances on both teams.

Conclusion

Moll Flanders on Trial hones students’ ability to interpret literary texts and justify larger arguments based on close readings. Students must develop a collective thesis (their theory of the case), explain this thesis clearly in speech in front of the class, select and explain the relevance of the most effective evidence to support their thesis, and defend their thesis by eliciting favorable answers from witnesses. Their grades depend on their success at achieving these goals, and the trial’s outcome is based on how well the teams as a whole do so. It is pedagogically effective and a lot of fun. Additionally, this activity is flexible enough that it can be adapted to work for almost any novel with a trial in it. It can even work for some novels that are based on a sort of test, even if that test does not culminate in a trial. I have used versions of it when teaching Frankenstein and even Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (I staged a trial of Gawain by Arthur’s court for violating the code of chivalry.) One of my colleagues uses a trial modeled on Moll Flanders on Trial when he teaches The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an online course. I almost always have students who major in English education in my eighteenth-century novel course, and I encourage them to use some version of the trial in their own future classes. Many of them have done so and have let me know how it worked. They have staged trials in junior high and high school classrooms when teaching texts as different as The Great Gatsby and The Hunger Games. This activity is obviously useful to students and it also helps me increase enrollment in my eighteenth-century novel courses. I enjoy this activity every year and hope you will find some version of it useful in your courses as well.

Boise State University

i I describe another learning activity I frequently use in eighteenth-century courses in an earlier article, “Embodying Gender and Class in Public Spaces through an Active Learning Activity: ‘Out and About in the Eighteenth Century.”

ii As Langbein notes, several aspects of criminal procedure we would consider foundational were not present in the eighteenth century. These include the “the law of evidence, the adversary system, the privilege against self-incrimination, and the main ground rules for the relationship of judge and jury” (“Shaping” 2).

iii See J. M. Beattie, 251-2.

iv The benefit of clergy derived from the medieval distinction between secular and ecclesiastical courts, with members of the clergy being held to account for criminal offenses only by their own courts. It had changed so much by Defoe’s time it bore little resemblance to its medieval antecedent. It allowed first-time offenders of lesser felonies to escape capital punishment in favor of a lesser sentence such as transportation or hard labor.

WORKS CITED

Beattie, J. M. “London Juries in the 1690s.” Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200-1800. Edited by J. S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 214-253.

Campbell, Ann. “Embodying Gender and Class in Public Spaces Through an Active Learning Activity: ‘Out and About in the Eighteenth Century.’” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, vol. 7, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-7.

Davidson, Cathy. The New Education: How to Revolutionize and University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Basic Books, 2017.

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Edited by Albert J. Rivero, WW. Norton, 2004.

Green, Thomas Andrew. Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800. University of Chicago Press, 1985.

King, P. J. R. ‘Illiterate Plebians, Easily Misled’: Jury Composition, Experience, and Behavior in Essex, 1735-1815.” Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200-1800. Edited by J. S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 254-304.

Langbein, John H. “The Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers.” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 45, no. 2, 1978, pp. 263-316.

—. “Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources.” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 1983, pp. 1-136.

Rabin, Dana Y. “Searching for the Self in the Eighteenth-Century English Criminal Trials, 1730-1800.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 27, no. 1, 2003, pp. 85-106.

Showalter, English Jr. The Stranger: Humanity and the Absurd. Twayne Publishers, 1989.

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Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650-1765, by Melinda Alliker Rabb

Tita Chico

Go to a fine arts or textiles museum and you might see an exhibit with noses pressed against the display windows. Behind the glass? Doll houses—shrunken buildings, rooms, furniture, tea sets, and other objects from daily life, most often produced during the English long eighteenth century, and wondrous for their attention to detail. Imagine, for a moment, the miniature cup and saucer, that little book, the tiny bed, all to scale. Imagine, too, the sense of familiarity and difference, the recognition and the wonder that such miniature things evoke in the viewer. Melinda Alliker Rabb’s learned Miniature in the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650-1765 takes up the heyday of such objects’ manufacture, a period that specialized in producing miniature material objects as well as narratives focused on small things.

Rabb’s focus is not on the small, say, of the flea magnified by the microscope, but on the miniature. In that difference resides the force of Rabb’s insights: miniature things are produced, not discovered. Miniatures are things, as in the sense of Bill Brown’s thing theory—that is, miniatures re-objectify objects and, in so doing, short-circuit the original thing’s connotations. But miniatures have an additional quality that distinguishes them from things as such. Miniatures are replicas.

Through technologies of scale and instrumentation, as well as cognition, miniatures allude to their originals, while also producing uncanniness. And in the space of that uncanniness, Rabb finds the work of cognition. While Susan Stewart’s 1993 On Longing is a touchstone, the nostalgia Stewart sees bound up with small things only tells part of Rabb’s story. These are things in the sense of thing theory, but they are also symbols (a term Rabb works to recover), revealing what cognitive scientists call “symbol-mediated experience” (23). Rabb’s theory of the miniature and its psychological import relies upon developmental psychology that studies how the real is a form of representation. Turning to the praxis of cognitive science, Rabb joins scholars such as Blakey Vermuele, Lisa Zunshine, and Jonathan Kramnick interested in the sciences of the mind. The symbol-mediated experience differs from the effects of similitude—as one finds, Rabb argues, in the language of John Milton or Robert Hooke—by focalizing four concepts that animate many of her readings: dual representation, representational asymmetry, scale error, and spatial knowledge as mediated not experienced. Miniatures, in Rabb’s analysis, help us make sense of the larger world.

The star of this book is Jonathan Swift, whose Lilliputians are its urminiatures, appearing throughout its pages and the literary culture it studies. Gulliver’s Travels is about scale, as readers have recognized from the beginning, but Rabb argues that Swift’s satire is likewise about the dislocation miniaturization produces, especially in Gulliver’s sense of himself. Lying on his belly and peering into the Lilliputian palace is merely one of Gulliver’s encounters with miniatures in the first voyage, a “symbolic artifact” that at once invites him in (the peering) and refuses entry (he’s too large). By book’s end, Rabb argues, Gulliver’s breakdown is not attributable to the sort of fracturing of the psyche that Jonathan Lamb identifies in Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840, but instead to a desire to “defy the inherent asymmetry of symbolization” and turn himself into a horse (64). For Rabb, the voyage to Houyhnhnm does not need to replicate the cognitive work of miniaturization dramatized in the first two books because its patterns are so well established. The Houyhnhnm table (around which they gather) corresponds, symbolically, to the Brobdingnagian table and also to the Lilliputian table. In replicas of domesticity, Swift locates the psychology of being human.

Much of the book takes us through familiar literary terrain—Swift, Johnson, Pope, Sterne—and even with that, one wonders what Rabb would do with, say, Margaret Cavendish. There are especially vivid moments when Rabb takes us to new places. The turn to trade cards is one such example. The discussion ultimately leads to readings of Pope’s The Rape of a Lock, Robert Dodsley’s The Toy Shop, and Robert Gay’s The Fan, but on its own offers a strong look at miniaturization in print culture with explicit ties to material culture. We learn that a trade card from 1760, for example, for Thomas Jaques, Dealer in Ivory, Tortoiseshell, and Hardwoods (reproduced in the volume), features a small tortoise and miniaturized elephants across from an elegant woman, an association that Rabb suggests is a pointedly commercial context for Pope’s own alchemical transformation of the toiletry accoutrement on Belinda’s dressing table. And perhaps the most engaging exegesis of the miniature comes in a discussion of early experimental practice. Building on Lisa Jardine’s work on the scale models in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, Rabb turns to the miniatures designed and built by William Petty, Robert Hooke, John Theophilius Desaguliers, among others—and her research into this mostly lost object of material culture is impressive. The scientific miniature made visible experimental praxis, playing a central role in the myriad demonstrations available in the London commercial and intellectual marketplace.

As I thought more about Miniature and the English Imagination, I came to see that this is a book about uncanniness as cultural memory. Miniatures record the displacement, in Rabb’s formulation, of a century’s worth of calamities into a fascination and preoccupation with miniaturization. The cascading upheavals of the seventeenth century—political, demographic, geographic—cast a long shadow over the eighteenth. The shrinking of things into objects that lose their utilitarian value results in objects that remember but also refigure those losses and injuries. Miniatures, in Rabb’s understanding of them, reminds one of Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation in Cities of the Dead. Roach operates in a different key—that of performance in eighteenth-century London and in twentieth-century New Orleans—but makes the important point that “Much more happens through transmission by surrogacy than the reproduction of tradition. New traditions may also be invented and others overturned. The paradox of the restoration of behavior resides in the phenomenon of repetition itself: no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance. In this improvisational behavioral space, memory reveals itself as imagination” (28-29). The “much more” of Roach’s surrogation points to what Rabb characterizes as the “indirection and transference through which societies negotiate ideas difficult to confront whole and entire” (31-32). Miniatures record those social negotiations. At a moment of expanding British naval, colonial, and political power, Laurence Sterne gives us a patriarchal line that is dying out. Uncle Toby’s fortifications in Tristram Shandy both displace his war injury and facilitate his cognitive errors. They offer details, but not the sort that preoccupy and proliferate in the mind of Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, mapping on to an every wider panorama. Uncle Toby’s war shrinks and compresses.

War, the plague, London burning, regicide—these are the problems that ultimately lie within miniatures. The scope, then, of Rabb’s analysis pushes us to see the miniature as a replica of something that both is and is not, a material object that catapults the beholder into the symbolic, uneven territory of self-knowledge and self-delusion.

Tita Chico

University of Maryland

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Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel, by Helen Thompson

Sarah Tindal Kareem

What sort of outside is the certain sign that there is, or is not such an inhabitant within?” (cited in Thompson, 100). John Locke (or, at least, the outward signs of him) poses this question in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Arguably, this question is one that also concerns artists—and perhaps more urgently than philosophers. After all, as Tristram Shandy observes in Laurence Sterne’s account of his life and opinions, it is the fact that “our minds shine not through the body” that keeps storytellers in business, earning their supper by conjuring outsides and insides that seem plausibly to fit together (53). In Helen Thompson’s view, this project—conjuring insides and outsides in ways that at once invite and frustrate our efforts to fit them together—unites empiricist philosophy and the genre of the novel in the eighteenth century. Her recent book, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), argues that both empiricism and the novel dramatize the perceiver’s encounter with the sensible while also evoking the presence of that which lies beyond direct perception.

In making this argument, Thompson challenges one of the most entrenched beliefs about both empiricism and the novel: that both put a premium on firsthand experience. As Thompson observes, this view of empiricism is indebted to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s enormously influential Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, 1985), which identifies early modern science with the ratification of knowledge according to reproducible acts of witnessing. Scholarship on the novel from Ian Watt onwards has similarly stressed the novel’s commitment to a view of the world grounded in individual observation. Thompson argues, however, that this is an impoverished and oddly literal-minded conception of both empiricism and the novel.

Thompson suggests that if we take a closer look at Robert Boyle’s corpuscular chemistry and its legacy in the thinking of Locke and others, a different picture of empiricism emerges, one that does not, in fact, categorically distinguish perceptible from imperceptible phenomena. Thompson argues that if we think about the novel in dialogue, not with Shapin and Schaffer’s version of empiricism, but with the corpuscular version, a new model of realism emerges that resides, not in the transparent rendering of a stable external world, but rather in making “explicit the production of sensational understanding” (17).

For Thompson, thinking seriously about corpuscular chemistry and its legacy entails rethinking several assumptions about early modern epistemology that have informed how we think about the novel. One of the assumptions we need to rethink is our understanding of secondary qualities. Thompson argues that, for corpuscular thinkers, secondary qualities comprise “both sensory perceptions and corpuscular texture’s power to effect them” (7). In other words, secondary qualities are phenomena that traverse a subject / object distinction that has often underwritten accounts of the novel, its distinctiveness located either in its strategies for representing interiority (Nancy Armstrong) or exteriority (Watt). A second key tenet of corpuscular thinking is that matter’s nature has more to do with texture than with essence. Boyle, as Thompson shows, repeatedly characterizes corpuscles by their texture, a texture of which we are insensible. Thirdly, Thompson argues that the corpuscle’s ontology, unlike the atom’s, is relational: what a corpuscle “is” depends upon the experimental relations that it occupies (43).

This view of matter, Thompson argues, bears both on how we understand early British empiricism and how we understand the novel’s relationship to it. For Shapin and Schaffer, the very condition of empirical knowledge is that its status is not tied to the body of any one individual witness. For Thompson, by contrast, “penetrability remains the enabling condition of empirical understanding” (58). For Thompson, both empiricism and the novel proffer a form of realism that resides not in mimesis but in thinking through the nature of understanding as a “contingently produced event” (3).

Thompson’s Introduction contains a close reading of Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective (1754) that helpfully illustrates how her emphasis upon understanding not as the passive absorption of data but as an encounter between perceiver and form yields a different view of eighteenth-century fiction. While, for John Bender, Hogarth’s image promotes the viewer’s virtual witnessing, in Thompson’s persuasive reading, the plate does not affirm but rather disrupt realist apprehension—by both triggering and refusing depth, as Thompson puts it (20). In Fictional Matters’ six central chapters, Thompson goes on to show how eighteenth-century novels work in the mode Hogarth adopts in Satire on False Perspective, not transparently rendering the real but rather staging the reader’s encounter with forms that have the power to induce a sensation of the real.

Chapter 1, “Boyle’s Doctrine of Qualities,” develops Thompson’s claim about penetrability as the enabling condition of empirical knowledge. Thompson finds in the example, invoked by Boyle, of a nun pierced by consuming fragments of glass, an avatar of empiricism’s subject. In her body’s porousness, Boyle’s nun runs counter to characterizations of the eighteenth-century empirical perceiver as passive and impenetrable and empiricism’s objects as inert (53-4). By contrast, as Thompson puts it, “Boyle defines the phenomenon of perception as texture’s interaction with texture.” Boylean matter sticks, pierces, and tinges.

Chapter 2, “John Locke and Matter’s Power,” reconceives eighteenth-century fiction’s Lockean heritage, making the case that we discern a Boylean Locke’s impact upon eighteenth-century literature (68). Thompson argues that Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) adopts Boyle’s corpuscular theory of matter but also expresses ambivalence about analogy’s role in describing it. Thompson shows how Locke uses analogy (light as tennis balls swatted into people’s faces by an indefatigable squad of racket-wielding fairies!) to show how such comparisons fail to capture the phenomenon of corpuscularity (74-5). The second half of the chapter turns from the microscopic to the macroscopic, showing how Locke refuses the “morphology of spirit” we encounter in the seventeenth-century textbook, Orbis Sensualium Pictu (1658), instead adopting a Boylean anti-essentialist view of human nature, in which people’s insides and outsides are fundamentally unstable (97, 104). This chapter concludes by reading Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725) and Love in Excess (1719) as novels in which feminine identity does not proceed from an inner essence but rather responds contingently to the male perceiver in ways that, as Thompson writes, derail “the referential consistency of empirical nomination” (110).

Chapter 3, “Morbific Matter and Character’s Form,” considers how one aspect of corpuscular philosophy’s conception of the person informs eighteenth-century ideas about character. To imagine a person as comprised of miniscule parts is also, as Thompson argues, to characterize human bodies as “pervaded by tiny holes”: that is, as porous, or like knitted stockings, in Boyle’s image (113). Thompson argues that this view of the body informed anti-Galenical views of the Great Plague that understood the disease as working upon bodies in imperceptible but nonetheless fatal ways, as exemplified by the anti-Galenical physicians George Thomson and George Starkey, both of whom died as a result of their commitment to handling plague-diseased bodies. This view of persons as radically open to external influences, Thompson argues, informs character’s operation in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in which interiority is particulate and dispersed in ways that defy representation. Thompson notes the way in which H.F.’s aim to “fill” his readers’ minds with vivid impressions evokes both a Lockean theory of mind and a Boylean theory of body. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Thompson argues, interiority is formal, which is to say, delimited “by the empirical limits of one’s perception of one’s own corpuscular interiority” (132). H.F. “elaborates the paradox of a thing that is received yet not felt” (143).

In the second half of the book, Thompson turns to consider how corpuscular philosophy’s insistence on matter’s contingency meant that it was not easily enlisted to underwrite essentialist ideas about race, status, and gender. Chapter 4, “Race and the Corpuscle,” ingeniously shows how eighteenth-century fictions by Eliza Haywood and William Rufus Chetwood dramatize the central query raised by Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton’s conflicting accounts of color: are bodies colored in the dark? (146). In Boyle’s account of color, “bodies are always colored in the dark,” because color is perceptible tactilely, according to Boyle’s report of a person who is “Blind,” but can discern color by touch (“Black feels as if you were feeling Needles points, or some harsh Sand, and Red feels very Smooth” (Thompson citing Boyle, 147). Where, for Boyle, color is a “disposition” exhibited by corpuscular texture, Newton’s demonstration that light is responsible for color rendered the question of objects’ color in the dark a moot point. Thompson then turns to how these debates about color informed John Arbuthnot and John Mitchell’s development of non-essentialist theories of race. Arbuthnot, drawing upon Boyle’s ideas about how air molds human bodies, argued that air produces slavishness in some and resistance in others, thereby justifying chattel slavery on the basis, not of essential differences, but rather on the geographically contingent effects of air’s interaction with the human body. An important aspect of Thompson’s argument in this chapter is that the fact that these thinkers did not conceive of race in essentialist terms does not mean they viewed the enslavement of African bodies as any less inevitable. As Thompson puts it, “for Arbuthnot and Mitchell, depth does not harbor essence, but neither can surface assure malleability” (172). Thompson goes on to show how fictions by Chetwood and Penelope Aubin dramatize the risk that travel poses to “white women’s reproductive instrumentality,” a condition that only “resistance,” not corpuscles, can safeguard.

Chapter 5, “Quality’s Qualities: Fielding’s Alchemical Imaginary” shows how Fielding’s fiction dramatizes the novelistic consequences of human surfaces proving an unreliable guide to their essence (192). Like Shamela’s pinch-induced blushes, Fielding’s fiction asks whether words, like secondary qualities, can “be severed from the corpuscular texture by which they should be produced” (208). In Joseph Andrews (date?), Fielding exploits typography (italicizing, for example, Slipslop’s slippages, like Incense for Essence), to foreground how “words evince qualities that oppose the ambition of their users” (213). In the chapter’s final section, Thompson shows how Jonathan Wild (date?) recruits alchemical ideas to encourage the reader to read both the character and the text as performances in which the glittering surface is discontinuous with the baseness underneath.

Chapter 6, “Fixing Sex,” turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) to argue for Richardson’s engagement with corpuscular philosophy via Locke’s philosophy. Thompson argues that Clarissa’s purity is complicated by Richardson’s reliance on a corpuscular theory of breath “that undermines her metaphysical difference” (233). According to corpuscular scientists James Keill and Stephen Hales, exhaled particles coalesce, creating a grossly close atmosphere within enclosed spaces like the brothel-keeper Mrs. Sinclair’s bedchamber. Contaminated air sullies Clarissa to the extent that her expiration becomes inevitable, Thompson argues. Clarissa’s virtue cannot be fixed in matter because, as a disposition rather than an essence, it is as vulnerable to change as any other secondary quality.

Thompson’s Epilogue, “Denominating Oxygen” extends this insight into characters’ and corpuscles’ shared dispositional quality to modern chemistry and novels. Reading Lavoisier’s identification of oxygen as an irreducible element alongside Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Thompson shows how empirical knowledge continues to implicate both perceptible and imperceptible qualities. Lavoisier named oxygen in recognition of its acidifying qualities, qualities that are imperceptible (275). Thompson persuasively argues that, like Lavoisier’s oxygen, Austen’s novel characterizes entities by their dispositional qualities (Darcy’s “hauteur”; Wickham’s “charm”)—qualities, that is, defined by the impressions they make on the perceiver—in ways that prevent a distinction between subjective and exterior states.

Fictional Matter’s corpuscular perspective opens up a new way of seeing both empiricism and the novel, and convincingly grounds that vision in a particular discursive tradition. Thompson’s idea of fiction resonates with Jacques Rancière’s articulation, in Aisthesis (2011), of a “new idea of fiction” in which the object of mimesis is not characters or events but rather “the very forms in which sensible events are given to us and assembled to constitute a world”; in other words, “what is imitated … is the event of its apparition” (100). But where Rancière explicitly identifies this paradigm as a post-eighteenth-century innovation, Thompson shows how such a notion of fiction proceeds from the assumptions and language of corpuscular philosophy. Thompson’s ability to inhabit the language of corpuscular philosophy and put that language in dialogue with twentieth-century theory is both what allows Fictional Matter to make its argument so effectively and also what makes it challenging to read for someone not steeped in these discourses. Like the corpuscular matter it describes, Thompson’s prose is intricately knitted in a way that requires but also rewards close and sustained attention. At a time when, for better and worse, the pressure to make scholarly writing more widely accessible is stronger than ever, Fictional Matter shows why subtle arguments can demand specialized language and, in so doing, demonstrates the intellectual rewards of leaning into learnedness.

Sarah Tindal Kareem
University of California, Los Angeles

WORKS CITED

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Ed. Howard Anderson. New York: Norton, 1980.

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The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by J. A. Downie

Leah Orr

J. A. Downie’s new volume on the eighteenth-century novel is an excellent addition to the Oxford Handbook series, and his expansive approach to the subject is welcome. Thirty-four chapters by different contributors cover a range of subjects, from the impact of individual authors (Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen) to subgenres of fiction (travel, sentimental fiction, the Gothic) to cultural background (social structure, class, religion). Downie has adopted a liberal definition of both “eighteenth-century” and “novel,” covering works published from 1660 to 1832 and in a wide variety of fictional modes not always discussed in books on “the novel” proper. The book includes survey-style chapters by Peter Hinds, Michael F. Suarez, S. J., John Feather, and Peter Garside describing the book trade context in broad strokes, and many of the essays in this volume take an interest in looking at what was published and read rather than what coalesced later into a literary and cultural canon. While the reader will find here chapters discussing the major authors and texts found in many literary histories, these subjects are re-contextualized in ways that are much more representative of current critical perspectives on eighteenth-century fiction than one might expect from the Oxford Handbook series.

An examination of how Defoe surfaces in this text provides an example of its treatment of major authors. There is one chapter focusing on Defoe, but instead of a standard survey of the usual novels, David Oakleaf’s “Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After” looks at the print contexts in which Defoe’s most famous work was published, showing that Defoe “occupied the cultural margins” (177). Much of the chapter compares Crusoe to contemporary works like Love in Excess and immediate successors, including the usual suspects (Gulliver’s Travels, Moll Flanders, Roxana) but also a range of novels that traditionally received less attention in literary histories (The Jamaica Lady, Idalia, The Life of Madam de Beaumount, The Noble Slaves, among others). Besides this chapter, readers interested in Defoe will find his work covered elsewhere: a discussion of “Robinson Crusoe as Spiritual Autobiography” in W. R. Owens’s chapter on “Religious Writings and the Early Novel”; the influence of Defoe’s A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain in Cynthia Wall’s “Travel Literature and the Early Novel”; a reading of Roxana and The Secret History of the White-Staff as political secret histories, by Rebecca Bullard; the changing influence of the frontispiece to Robinson Crusoe in Robert Folkenflik’s essay on illustrations in novels (116-119; 124-25; 144-46; 309-313). Defoe’s influence on the novel form here includes his work in other genres. In short, the story of the novel is no longer the story of a few exemplary works by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and a handful of others, but these are instead integrated into a much more encompassing history of the genre.

Many of the essays do well in including texts that could garner more critical attention and provide new avenues for research. Thomas Keymer shines a light into some forgotten corners of the late seventeenth century, pointing out the many works of fiction published in England before Robinson Crusoe (and mostly not reprinted in the eighteenth century or later). Chapters by Peter Sabor and Tim Parnell, while focusing on Richardson and Sterne respectively, devote much of their space to the fictional contexts and responses to Pamela and Tristram Shandy, showing that these novels did not emerge or succeed in a literary vacuum, but were part of a diverse fictional world. For the late eighteenth century, Geoffrey Sill’s examination of sentimental fiction and M. O. Grenby’s look at “The Anti-Jacobin Novel” show that even well-studied categories have more diversity than has often been acknowledged.

Along the way there are some important points that would be well considered more thoroughly by scholars of the novel. Suarez points out the surprising but true fact that “If we consider the century as a whole, then the two most popular novelists (by numbers of editions printed) are Defoe and, remarkably, Goldsmith” (27). As he emphasizes, reprints mattered to how fiction was received and understood in its time, and the works that were most reprinted are not those we might expect based on the canon as we see it now. Walter L. Reed, in his survey of French fiction in England, reminds readers that “a number of influential French books of the period were published in French in London and distributed abroad from Britain,” and some French writers were living in England, much as some English writers were in France (82). Cross-channel textual exchanges were important, and appear in several essays in this collection. On the book history side, Antonia Forster reports that “Although there is little evidence that readers paid much attention to reviews, it is clear from the mass of advertising and attacks on reviewers that booksellers and authors thought or feared that they did” (384). This caution should give us some pause in thinking about how we approach reception history for this period, even with well-documented cases. Readers were as diverse as authors and books, and there were surely a wide variety of opinions.

While the nature of the Oxford Handbook series means that many essays are attempting to synthesize a critical field rather than propose a new intervention, a few stand out for innovative takes on old subjects. Brian Cowan’s “Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives” acknowledges the influence of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere on the intellectual history of the eighteenth century while showing its shortcomings. He charts a new direction for scholarship that more fully acknowledges “a pluralistic process of interest formation” that includes multiple publics and recognizes that “print must be placed within the broader context of a diverse and extensive media culture” (61; 63). Gillian Dow’s chapter on the influence of French novels is a welcome reminder of the extensive, under-studied influence of French fiction, both in translation and in its original, on eighteenth-century English readers and writers. Readers will similarly find that Simon Dickie’s account of “Novels of the 1750s” covers a great deal of under-explored territory, showing new directions for research and pointing out the chronological and generic gaps in teleological accounts of the rise of the novel—not the least of which is the long-lasting popularity of works like Robinson Crusoe, which continued to be reprinted and read alongside new works (256). For the later eighteenth century, Lisa Wood also focuses on the under-studied trend in the evangelical novel, which she argues has been overlooked because “its aesthetic effects are less important than its capacity to effect change in the reader”—and many of them were written by women writers, for an audience of young people (526). In examining texts by Hannah More, Mary Brunton, and Barbara Hofland, Wood introduces an important counterpoint to the works of William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Elizabeth Inchbald that have become more canonical. In these essays (and others in this volume), readers will find a fuller sense of the eighteenth-century novel than is to be found in previous literary histories and a wealth of new texts that deserve closer scrutiny.

While this book covers so much that it is difficult to point out gaps, there were a few missed opportunities. The book history chapters provide helpful context for the interpretive chapters, but present their facts as a field already well-covered, and do little to point out directions for future research on the print culture contexts of novel writing and publication. For a book on genre, there is relatively little formalist discussion of how novels work, beyond the hazy distinctions from the period between romance, novel, and factual writing. Jan Fergus’s thoughtful chapter on Austen and realism is one of the few extended discussions of narrative style. In some places one feels that the contributors might have benefited from reading each others’ work: Habermas is thoroughly discredited in one chapter, but elsewhere invoked relatively uncritically, for example (207; 349). Some essays repeat older critical views about periods covered in this book other than the one their authors were familiar with. Some essays repeat older critical views contradicted by other essays. One essay on late eighteenth-century fiction, for example, comments that, “From the early eighteenth century, novels suffered a tradition of evoking elite sneers. These neophyte novels are mainly adventure tales,” but this broad claim does not concur with the discussions of the diversity of early eighteenth-century fiction found in the earlier chapters in this volume (356).

One book cannot do everything, and this one covers an enormous territory with due attention to the parts of this field that have often been overlooked. For a book of this type and size, with this many contributors, there are relatively few contradictions between chapters, and all the essays are current with the scholarship in their field, with a few standout chapters suggesting ways to move forward. This book is accessible enough to be read by undergraduates but advanced enough to be of interest to those who study or teach this subject. It provides a snapshot of current thinking on the subject, with some new directions for further study. On the whole, Downie has done an exceptional job of bringing together an impressive range of scholars and embracing the richness and diversity of fiction as it was actually written, published, and read by people in the long eighteenth century.

Leah Orr

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism, by Aaron R. Hanlon

Sean Silver

At some point, while reading Aaron R. Hanlon’s A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism, it will occur to you—as it occurred to me—that the author might just be tilting at windmills. Armed with an argument, that quixotism is formally like an exceptionalism, and that exceptionalisms haunt the threadlike microgenre of the Quixote-narrative, Hanlon finds quixotes (and exceptionalisms) everywhere he looks, at least when it comes to the literature of the eighteenth century. Some of his instances seem unexceptionable. No one would doubt that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote is indebted to the tale of the Hidalgo; and it would take a Quixote of a different order to deny that Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry is a through-and-through rewrite of Don Quixote. Some seem plausible but less clear. Though critics remain split on what to make of Henry Fielding’s claims of indebtedness to Cervantes, there is enough in Parson Adams and Tom Jones of the man of La Mancha to value the comparison. Smollett’s case is similar; his Launcelot Greaves seems to lean on lessons learned in Smollett’s early-career translation of the Quixote. But a skeptical reader will be less persuaded that Gulliver’s Travels is a Quixote narrative—even if its eponymous hero at times practices the sort of unreflexive patriotism which is one possible hallmark of the quixote abroad. The same skeptic might wonder if other texts shouldn’t meet the criteria of Hanlon’s capacious category of the Quixote narrative—why not Samuel Johnson in the Hebrides, or Robinson Crusoe, or Yorick in Sentimental Journey, who takes up the question of national exceptionalisms in the book’s opening sentence and never quite lets it go?

For Hanlon is a bit of a Quixote himself, wonderfully and deliriously. How could it be any different? What else could a study of quixotism be, I mean quixotism as a genre, if it did not build in a tendency to systematize, a general drive to reduce everything that more or less fits to a latter-day instance or echo of Don Quixote? Treating quixotism as a genre or as a “character canon” means plucking out a few features distributed across texts and clumping those texts together as a tradition, especially a tradition with a particular job to do. And this, Hanlon establishes, is the formal essence of quixotism: quixotism is the effort to argue from the exception, to fit a world of evidence to a single pattern or idea. For the Hidalgo, this single, generative matrix is Romance; he elevates Romance to a transformative principle, reorganizing an inn as a castle, a maid as distressed royalty, windmills as giants. For Hanlon, it is quixotism and the related genre of the picaresque, each instance of which articulates a precise exceptionalism of its own. “Exceptionalism,” in Hanlon’s words, “produces for quixotes a self-sealing logic,” what Niklas Luhmann would call a system. Gulliver offers Hanlon a first (and most difficult) instance; Gulliver’s quixotism lies in his inattention to the foibles of England, which he repeatedly overlooks even when they are explicitly pointed out to him. The King of Brobdignag is appalled at English behavior, calling the nation a race of vermin; Gulliver simply cannot see it this way. This categorical, phenomenological interpretive impulse is what Hanlon tabs Gulliver’s “English exceptionalism,” which insists on the “idealism” of the imperial project even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Something similar, Hanlon argues, obtains for the heroes of The Algerine Captive, Joseph Andrews, Modern Chivalry, The Female Quixote, and so on, each of whom “accomplishes… the daunting task of conceptually reshaping the material world around [them] according to fictional representations.” Each hero, we might say, articulates their own particular exceptionalism, an exceptional exceptionalism in every case: from Hanlon’s first two case studies, “Gulliver and English Exceptionalism” and “Underhill and American Exceptionalism,” to the last, “Marauder and Radical Exceptionalism” (of James Marauder in The Infernal Quixote, 1801). Each hero carries their singular vision on a sort of journey, Parson Adams (Chapter 7) continually misinterpreting the world according to his own, naïve simplicity, or Arabella (Chapter 8) longing for a better, purer world than the marriage market she is about to enter—and almost bringing it into being by force of example alone. And one gets the sense that this could go on forever, limited only by the examples Hanlon finds (or transforms) with his expert eye. “The exceptionalism of quixotes,” Hanlon writes, “becomes the engine of their character inexhaustibility”—or of their critical inexhaustibility, as the case may be.

But, again, if you’re like me, there will come a twist where you will become at least a little sympathetic to the argument, possibly even a convert. This is the upshot of Jorge Luis Borges’s claim about Don Quixote: that details of the plot and action are less important than the narrator’s (and the reader’s) relationship to his hero. At some point, some time after the windmill episode, the narrator no longer treats his hero like a madman. He is won over. He begins to prefer Don Quixote’s vision to that of the realists he encounters. This thereby opens the opportunity for a reader to do the same. For Borges, this transformation occurs slowly. But it is signaled at key interpretive moments, when (for instance) Don Quixote discovers that others in his world have read the first part of the novel in which he appears. They compare the Hidalgo’s tale to a rival’s imitation, offering criticism which might in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to the thoughts the reader has already had.1 A similar moment occurs, notes André Brink, near the end of the book, when Don Quixote visits a publishing house and finds in the press the sheets of something purporting to be his story, the compositors outstripping even the life of their biographical subject in their race to get his story to the bookstalls (21).2 Here, too, the book frames itself as its own question, when the familiar crisis between reality and illusion, between the humdrum “reality” of everyday Spain and the book-world of Romance, is unmasked instead as a predicament between criticism and belief. Put differently, it is when the novel stages itself as the finished opportunity for a choice between a dreary routine of bookish skepticism and the incandescent vision which Don Quixote puts in practice.

Hanlon’s book pulls off more than a few such moments, framing a choice between the skeptical impulse of any professional critic and the seduction of an interesting argument. One such moment of choice is posed as early as the preface, when Hanlon notes that he was asked the same skeptical question every time he presented a talk or circulated a workshop paper on quixotism in eighteenth-century Britain. Someone, inevitably, would ask him if he weren’t merely “tilting at windmills.” Well, that would have been me. It was me, as I was reading: I anticipated Hanlon, in the sense that I myself was thinking just the same thing, only a paragraph earlier, or, Hanlon anticipated me, in the sense that my very thought, in my very words (which were the very words of a shared tradition, the thing you know about Don Quixote if you know nothing else), was lying in wait, like a ward or evil eye, in the text I thought I was criticizing. And what I thought was a witty first effort to start penning this review was maybe actually just the interpellation of a lowbrow critical tradition; I was signaling my identification with a conservative variety of critical practice, the bland doing of criticism that looks always to reduce a book or a poem or a critical practice to a single apposite phrase, what Elisabeth Camp calls a “frame.” I had identified, if I may put it this way, with the reality of criticism against the romance of argument, leaving criticism, especially of the skeptical sort, looking suddenly humdrum and ordinary—the kind of stuff done in a DoubleTree conference room under dingy acoustical tiles, or over a wedge salad lunch at the regional ASECS. “Yes,” someone might say (I might have said), “but isn’t he just tilting at windmills,” ha ha.

So, there are two alternatives with this book, two approaches or responses, and reading it means choosing a side. In the first, the author has become seduced by his vision, which is, formally speaking, that of Cervantes. Reading Hanlon’s book this way is to accuse the critic of lapsing into the style of his object, of becoming “a quixote.” Hanlon wouldn’t be the first critic to begin mimicking the style of his subject. I am reminded of Martin Battestin, who, over the course of a career on Fielding, perfected an arch irony and performative distance that is more than a little reminiscent of the narrative voice in Tom Jones. You might think of Samuel Johnson’s Tory prose welling up in the work of latter-day Johnsonians, a habit catalogued, even while being affectionately modeled, in Helen Deutsch’s Loving Dr. Johnson. Or you might think of the half-performative, half-apotropaic “Style” of D.A. Miller writing on Jane Austen—a variety of critique as identification summarized by Frances Ferguson as “too-close reading.” The skeptical reader might therefore add Aaron Hanlon to the list: another bright critic seduced by his subject, who now ranges the archive transforming everything into a picaresque. In the second, however, Hanlon has taken up the thread dropped by Don Quixote himself. Indeed he has perfected it, in the sense that Don Quixote, like Arabella in The Female Quixote, ultimately recants, a plot twist which most modern readers experience as a betrayal. Hanlon doesn’t recant. He doubles down. While the penultimate paragraph of the book contains a partial list of the Quixote narratives which, like the original, end with a reversal—Gulliver’s Travels, The Female Quixote, and, in a different way, Female Quixotism—Hanlon prefers instead to look forward to the political stakes of a correct understanding of quixotism, which he finds in modern-day political exceptionalisms, in the legacy of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and so on. We are all, by this account, quixotic, to the extent that we identify with an idea.

I hope it is clear by now that I count myself in the second set, that the book takes the invitation offered by Cervantes and extends it to the micro-genre that has sprung up in direct debt to his original. Hanlon has succeeded in offering a philosophical explanation of the Quixote-genre. I will just mention that what Hanlon calls quixotism, another scholar, like Frederic Bogel, might call satire, or satire as it looks in a first-person narrative. These perform similar, “double-edged critiques” (73), of their objects and of the world they stand against; they form communities of interpretation, especially in the ironic mode perfected by Swift; they offer an alternative, the possibility of sympathetic identification or realist critique. Framed somewhat more capaciously, therefore, the quixote-narrative looks like a species of satire, and Hanlon’s study will appeal to scholars of that genre. But even read narrowly, this is a book to be admired. It will become a valuable addition to studies of quixotism and the genre of the Quixote, a genre, I have been suggesting, which this inspired book both explains and extends.

Sean Silver
Rutgers University

WORKS CITED

Borges, Jorge Luis. “A Recovered Lecture of J. L. Borges on Don Quixote,” trans. Julio Ortega and Richard A. Gordon, Jr. INTI 45 (1997): 127-33.

Brink, André. The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. Cape Town: U of Cape Town P, 1998, 21.

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A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by John Richetti

Katherine Ellison

Invited by a Blackwell editor to compose this eighteenth-century volume, John Richetti writes in the acknowledgments that his task was “exhilarating but extremely challenging.” It is too short, he notes, and there is “so much that has to be left out or treated with less than adequate thoroughness and appreciation” (viii). Primary source materials are largely cited from accepted editions and foundational anthologies, such as Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989), Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia’s British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (2009), and David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Edition (2004). Richetti’s secondary sources are slim, no doubt a consequence of the limited space he has to summarize major developments during the period itself for the main audience of the Blackwell History of Literature series: undergraduate and graduate students largely unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature. The series focuses on broad but generically or thematically focused introductions to literary periods and movements. Series volumes are foundational, an invitation for beginning scholars to see the period in gestalt, delve into selected texts as case studies, and then seek out their own answers to questions that cannot be answered in the survey. His purpose is thus not to summarize the current state of eighteenth-century studies as a discipline, identify trends and recent innovations, or anticipate upcoming changes for experienced scholars of the field. Yet veteran scholars, too, can benefit from the volume’s lucid articulation of many of the major developments across the period’s verse, drama, nonfiction, and the novel form.

Blackwell histories are written by the leading scholars of a generation, and they represent the major works of the period, overview common interpretations of those works, and provide clear, authoritative information of historical relevance to the works and the period. Richetti provides all of this, and he does so in a prose style that is accessible, energetic, and playful. In the full Blackwell series, A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature stands out: Richetti’s voice captures the intellectual and artistic energy of the period. It would be difficult not to enjoy reading about the eighteenth century while perusing this ambitious volume. It might remind one of Richetti’s PennSound recitations of eighteenth-century poetry. Benjamin Gottlieb has described Richetti’s voice, in those recordings, as having a “charmingly insouciant tone, one that belies the considerate thought he has given each recitation, which are never less than great fun, and are often quite revelatory.” The same could be said of Richetti’s written tone in the Blackwell history. At one moment, Richetti can be refreshingly clear and straightforward: “Dryden himself had been no prig,” he observes on the first page of the introduction; “he kept an actress as his mistress for years” (1). At another moment, and particularly when deep into the language of his verse examples, Richetti can open to students (and experienced scholars) a new landscape of terms, such as in his analysis of The Rape of the Lock: “The technical rhetorical term for what Ariel presents as equal alternative possibilities—the loss of chastity (‘Diana’s Law’) or the crack in a porcelain vase, or a stain on Belinda’s honor or on her dress, etc.—is zeugma, whereby in this case the two objects of each verb are grammatically equal but morally askew” (15).

Richetti opens the volume with John Dryden’s “Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew” (1686) and the after-piece The Secular Masque (1699), which present the literary developments of the seventeenth century with nostalgia and regret and anticipate the eighteenth century with hope. In a sense, Dryden highlights the zeugmatic relationship between two temporal categories of human experience and morality, one looking forward and one looking back. Dryden sees in Killigrew’s earlier poetry an “unsoiled” tradition that became corrupted by the debauchery of the later decades of the century, demonstrated in Dryden’s own writings, as well as his contemporaries’. The Secular Masque looks hopefully toward the new century, and Richetti capably transitions from Dryden’s work, and from his bitter loss of the position of poet laureate, to a brief but helpful overview of the major events, local and global, of seventeenth-century English history that would continue to shape the verse, prose, and drama of the next period.

From there, Richetti’s eighteenth century is not simply a chronological list of predictable, canonical examples of verse, drama, nonfiction, and fiction; his is a period still under archival construction, as Bonnie Gunzenhauser and Wolfram Schmidgen had noted was the trend in their summary of scholarly approaches to the period in the 2004 issue of College Literature. They found that at the 2004 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, scholars were avidly presenting on their discoveries and editing of neglected texts. “Who would have twenty years ago thought that there is a large body of working class poetry in the eighteenth century?” they asked (94). Gunzenhauser and Schmidgen noted how New Historicism helped remove the boundaries that had categorized, and in many ways limited, eighteenth-century scholarship through at least the 1980s. At the same time, the embrace of theory by scholars of the period, coupled with unprecedented new twenty-first-century access to the archives through databases and digital resources provided by the “older generation of scholars,” made everything and anything fair game for the literary historian as long as one could make the connections (94). Yet, they explained, there was at that time in 2004 another shift in the works, a swing back to formalism and appreciation of the aesthetic object of the text without analysis of its cultural and historical contexts. Richetti’s choices for the Blackwell history may be an indication of which approach has dominated during these fifteen years since the 2004 ASECS: both, working together. Richetti’s History does not choose sides in this alleged tug-of-war between the historical and the formal. Richetti’s corpus, which includes essays like “Formalism and Historicity Reconciled in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones” in Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017), has proven there is room for both, and this volume acknowledges archival recoveries and offers those works the same close reading of form that it provides mainstays like Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1681) and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714).

It is worth noting how Richetti’s volume is situated within the development of its own genre, the ambitious period overview. His attention to both cultural-historical contexts and aesthetic form is in contrast to some of the earliest approaches to the broad literary survey. This genre is anchored by studies like Roger Philip McCutcheon’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1949), Geoffrey Tillotson’s Augustan Poetic Diction (1964, republished in 2014), and Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., and Marshall Waingrow’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969). McCutcheon’s first sentence characterized its approach: “the course of English literary history from 1700 to 1789 was affected only slightly by the rulers or by political events” (3). It would be difficult to imagine a scholar saying this in the twenty-first century. The accepted narrative in this foundational appraisal, and in Tillotson’s look at Augustan diction, was that the works of the period demonstrated constraint, conformity, clarity, reason, judgment, and good sense, and that as the century—referred to by those common descriptors “Augustan” and “neoclassical”—proceeded, faith in reason diminished. As far as coverage goes, McCutcheon covered only the canon, with fourteen chapters on Milton, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, etc. In their critical introduction to Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Tillotson, Fussell, and Waingrow were already moving a bit away from McCutcheon and conceding to the importance of the historical, and they opened their volume with the observation that “the eighteenth-century English mind was created by the reaction to the civil disorders of the seventeenth century” (2). But while their anthology did discuss revolution and secularism, its historicist work was not bold. It also did not attempt to account for the diversity of voices during the period. Of 96 authors included, only two were women (Anne Finch, with three poems represented, and Mary Wortley Montagu, with one, and there is a question mark after her name in the table of contents, as if her authorship had been uncertain). Those decades of twentieth-century scholarship, when broad surveys began to appear, were formalist, and they were written with great certainty. Tillotson was confident in his ability to read the (male-only) poets’ minds and guess what they “wanted”: “This is how they saw external nature when they wanted to,” he writes, and “when a poet like Milton takes up a fashion, he does so because he wants to,” and “both Pope and Thomson use fish and birds whenever they want to” (17, 20, 21). They were also certain about how their contemporary readers approached the texts: “It is still true that most readers of eighteenth-century poetry approach it by way of nineteenth-century poetry” (Tillotson 23). Their readers, like the eighteenth-century writers they included, were a uniform, un-diverse group: white, mostly male, highly educated, trained in the traditions of poetry, and in agreement about a canon quite narrow by today’s standards.

When Richetti sheds terms like “Augustan” and “neoclassical,” he is pushing against the tradition of McCutcheon and Tillotson and the longstanding assumptions that they propagated. Richetti’s survey more reflects the thinking of essay collections published since the 1980s, like Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum’s The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (1987), though he does not name that book directly. Brown and Nussbaum argued for scholars to engage in critical pluralism and called out the eighteenth-century studies community’s resistance to New Historicism and theory more broadly, compiling a convincing, polemical, alternative survey that scholars at the time, including Jerry C. Beasley, found shocking but persuasive. They, and their authors, proposed alternatives to the accepted canon and introduced new approaches to familiar works; for instance, Michael McKeon reconsiders Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel from a Marxist perspective. Not coincidentally, Richetti also appeared in this collection with a chapter on the working class and the novel form, “Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett.”

The section of the History that most clearly demonstrates Richetti’s commitment to educating new scholars about the diverse range of voices now accessible because of the archival labor of the past couple of decades is the fourth chapter on “Eighteenth-Century Verse, IV: Women, Workers, and Non-Elite Poets.” This chapter is clearly possible because of the thinking Richetti had already done for Brown and Nussbaum’s collection. That all women, working class writers, and the “non-elite” must appear together in a kind of catch-all chapter is a point of critique—one could argue that each of these populations deserves as much space as Pope, Gay, and Swift, who share their first chapter only with one another. However, although it is only one chapter, Richetti covers an impressive number of writings that will be new to most readers, including those up-to-date on new findings in eighteenth-century verse. For many of these newcomers to the eighteenth-century timeline, Richetti offers the same close reading and context that he provides for the canonical works. Not all of the poets in this chapter represent eighteenth-century verse at its best (“Read, if you can stand them,” some lines of Lawrence Eusden, Richetti jokes), but he includes many examples of occasional verse and explains its importance for the public (133). John Hawthorn, Edward (Ned) Ward, Tom Brown, and Stephen Duck receive suitable attention, though one might take issue with his assertion that Ward’s poems deserve “no analysis or commentary; they speak for themselves, they are transparently open in the simply bawdy pleasures they offer” (140). Of the women, Richetti shows how a defiant Mary Collier corrects Duck’s pastoral imitation, how an intense Ann Yearsley captures the complexity of female poetic networks, and how a lively, witty Mary Leapor “articulates a hard-edged contempt for male oppression as well as a fine eye for telling lyric detail” (144). Scholars will surely be adding Yearsley and Leapor, at the very least, to their syllabi.

Within this fourth chapter, Richetti makes an important declaration that is regrettably buried: “Among the unfortunate side effects of early twentieth-century poetic modernism has been the mystification of poetry so that ordinary folk (and even well-educated people, in my experience) consider verse beyond their abilities and comprehension” (141). The first three chapters on verse, as well as this one on working class and female poets, work toward that demystification. Richetti moves rigorously, but accessibly, through Pope, Gay, Swift, Prior, Addison, Defoe, Finch, Montagu, Thomson, Johnson, Gray, the Wartons, Collins, Smart, Watts, Goldsmith, Churchill, and Cowper, pointing out what is “striking” and at times “alienating” about the period’s poetry (93). Of Defoe’s verse, which has only recently inspired the attention it deserves, Richetti notes that it is “preeminently a vehicle for self-promoting publicity and satirical self-dramatization that are in the end interesting as signs of his aggrieved and truculent personality” (72).

Verse is arguably the strength of Richetti’s History, but the chapters on prose fiction and nonfiction have several highlights. He begins with acknowledgement of the influences of French amatory fiction and the force of female readers and writers in the publishing market. To begin with erotic pulp fiction, and Eliza Haywood’s “wildly popular” novels, is obviously to break away from the chronology of Ian Watt (157). From there, and with brief comparison to Haywood’s Idalia: or The Unfortunate Mistress (1723), Richetti looks to Roxana (1724), Moll Flanders (1722), and Robinson Crusoe (1719), with attention to Defoe’s complex protagonists and the socio-historical contexts that motivate their behaviors. The section does not offer any revelatory new readings for seasoned Defoe scholars, but it provides a helpful overview of identity formation across the author’s three novels. Readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-8), Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1749) and Tom Jones (1749), and Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751) are largely summative but, again, provide informative sketches and model close reading for scholars new to the period. It is entertaining to follow along with Richetti as he unpacks a scene; at one point, after recounting a moment in Tom Jones, he cries out, “One wonders whether Fielding wants us to believe that Northerton has a conscience!” (207).

The experimentation of the mid-century novel, the subject of Richetti’s seventh chapter, effectively captures the spirit of change after the 1750s. In his examinations of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, and Frances Burney, Richetti focuses on the surprising turns that the novel form took, the unpredictability of its legacy, and the playfulness of its conventions, always under scrutiny and ripe for parody. Keeping with the lively tone of the History as a whole, Richetti emphasizes the pleasure of reading the later eighteenth-century novels, for modern readers, and the importance of reading for pleasure during the period itself. “There is a large body of sophisticated commentary on Tristram Shandy,” he notes, “that grants the book profound philosophical and socio-historical significance,” but that scholarship “minimize[es] its playfulness and emphasiz[es] its existential implications and socio-historical bleakness” (231). What that scholarship misses, he suggests, is recognition that whimsy and bawdiness could be ends unto themselves. This is not to say that Richetti dismisses all existential considerations of his representative works. The chapter ends by questioning the popularity of Burney’s extended portrayal of female suffering of Cecilia and then, in a fitting conclusion of the novel portion of the survey, answers that question: “What is distinct, however, about Burney’s rendition of this archetype is that her suffering is inextricable from the socio-historical circumstances of her time as rendered by the novel, the weight and dead hand of those massive inheritances and the manipulations and betrayals by various characters that attend them” (252).

Of prose nonfiction, Richetti discusses familiar letters, biography, history, the periodical, literary criticism, and political and polemical writings, in many cases returning to authors featured in the verse and prose sections. Each overview of a genre provides representative examples and close readings; his analysis of Defoe’s A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France and of All Europe (1704-13) is particularly helpful in understanding that author’s complicated politics and the influence of his activist writings. The chapter ends with commentary on the intensity of Edmund Burke’s prose style, in particular the relatively ignored eloquence of his speeches arguing for the impeachment of Warren Hastings. These speeches may well be unknown even to experts of the period, and they are worth adding to twenty-first-century syllabi.

Drama is not covered in as much depth in this Blackwell history as verse and prose. Richetti has an impossible job here with just one chapter to cover the Restoration and after. He gives more attention than other surveys to the importance of tragic drama during the early decades, and he bridges the moral backlash against the raucous comedies of the seventeenth century with the sentimental melodrama of John Gay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith. Female playwrights could have been better represented in this overview, however, and while the Restoration historical context is detailed, one could use a similarly nuanced sense of the overall transformation of the stage after the 1720s.

Richetti’s History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature, as classroom tool, partners well with volumes such as Penny Pritchard’s The Long 18th Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790 (2010) and Charlotte Sussman’s Eighteenth-Century English Literature, 1660-1789 (2012). Each of these volumes offers a different set of tools for the undergraduate and graduate student. Pritchard educates readers about details that instructors might fail to mention but that help beginning readers of the period’s literature better understand characters and situations. For example, Pritchard begins by emphasizing how deferent British citizens were to categorizations of status. Lower classes would move to the side to allow higher class citizens to walk by the wall, and seating in churches was by rank. This constant reminder of one’s superiority or inferiority, Pritchard notes, caused great tension and competition across the century, and transferals of power within economics, politics, religion, and even family life influenced the period’s art. Sussman takes up with Pritchard’s cultural analyses but frames her history with the concept of selfhood, tracing the period’s literary developments as they reflect changing notions of private and public identity in print culture, geography, religion, sexuality, sensibility, and colonialism. She focuses on relationships and on the ways in which identities were grouped and “Britishness” emerged as an identification. What Richetti adds to Pritchard’s persuasive focus on class and Sussman’s expert articulation of eighteenth-century selfhood is a succinct and conversational narrative that students as well as educators can read in full or as excerpts circulated in courses covering various genres and figures. It is a good source to consult as one returns to their syllabus for the survey of eighteenth-century literature, looking for works they may have forgotten or hoping for new finds that can diversify and complicate the narrative of the period that seemed so clear to McCutcheon and Tillotson.

Katherine Ellison

Illinois State University

WORKS CITED

Backscheider, Paula R. and Catherine E. Ingrassia, eds. British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009.

Baines, Paul, Julian Ferraro, and Pat Rogers, eds. The WileyBlackwell Encyclopedia of EighteenthCentury Writers and Writing, 16601789. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Beasley, Jerry C. “Review of The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.” Modern Language Studies 20.1 (1990): 115-117.

Fairer, David and Christine Gerrard, eds. Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Edition. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Gottlieb, Benjamin. “Review of PennSound Anthology of 18th-Century Poetry.” Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/category/commentary-tags/john-richetti.

Lonsdale, Roger, ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

McCutcheon, Roger Philip. Eighteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1949.

Pritchard, Penny. The Long 18th Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790. Harlow: York Press, 2010.

Richetti, John. “Formalism and Historicity Reconciled in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.” Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. by Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 79-98.

—–. “Mastering the Discipines.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 2013 (46): 460-63.

—–. “Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. Ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York: Methuen, 1987. 84-98.

Sussman, Charlotte. Eighteenth-Century English Literature, 1660-1789. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Tillotson, Geoffrey. Augustan Poetic Diction. New York: Bloomsbury, 1964.

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The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660-1730, by David Alff

Aaron Hanlon

In the final chapter of his debut book, The Wreckage of Intentions, David Alff calls Gulliver a “convener of equine counterpublics” (163). This turn of phrase is just one flash of the subtle and necessary humor that occasionally surfaces in Alff’s study of Restoration and early-eighteenth-century projects that never came to fruition. To find what Alff is capable of finding in the rich and varied archive that undergirds his book—to practice what Alff calls the “hermeneutics of salvage”—requires a gentle and lighthearted sympathy for so many failed projectors whose writing we might otherwise dismiss as quackery or detritus (8). As Swift the self-satirist well understood, we shouldn’t be completely ruthless toward breathless projectors—proposers of schemes for improving this or that, usually driven by profit motive—because you never know when the proposer might be you. Alff seems to understand this too, which allows him to capture both the necessity and the tragicomedy of failed projects.

The Wreckage of Intentions sets out to “restore the remarkable early modern life of an idea today mired in anodyne ubiquity,” and argues that by taking account of the necessarily future-oriented genre of projection, we can “interpolate present-day readers as residents of early modernity” and “reimagin[e] what was once dreamt as a sign of that culture’s understanding of itself and capacity to change” (19, 8). Central to Alff’s approach is adept close-reading of both historical sources and capital-L or “imaginative” literature: pamphlets, advertisements, satires, plays, poems, and prose fiction all get careful treatment in the book.

Alff moves toward his central argument by breaking the process of projection into logical and clearly defined stages that give the book its structure, anchoring each stage in an illustrative case study. First, Alff argues, projects must be envisioned, projectors’ authorial personas constructed, and projects put to paper (Chapter 1). Then, printed texts of projection must be circulated to give the ideas a foothold in the world (Chapter 2). Finally, a critical mass of readers must be motivated to transform words into action, to “undertake”—in the early modern parlance that Alff carefully parses—a “performance” meant to bring projection to fruition (Chapter 3) (91-2).

The first chapter tells the tragic and at times gripping story of Andrew Yarranton and his England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677), a capacious example of improvement literature, “a bricolage transformation of professional fluency into persuasive resource” (26). Here we learn that one of the key features of the genre Alff calls “project writing” is its attempt to persuade both skeptics and decision-makers in a competitive marketplace not only of the soundness of the plan, but of the credibility of its author. This forms the basis of Alff’s incisive observation that Yarranton’s text, whose rhetorical conventions were meant to make the proposer appear disinterested—not a “projector” in the pejorative sense in which the term was used in the seventeenth century—is “a text at war with its medium” (43). That is, project writing plays up technical, matter-of-fact angles in an attempt to forestall the accusation that projectors only write to ingratiate themselves and flatter their grandiose plans. Yarranton’s is a fascinating case study worth reading about, not only because of the rhetorical moves he makes in England’s Improvement, but also because his life itself—and its shocking end—reflects so clearly the mix of vigor and tragedy that projection entails.

Having established a number of rhetorical conventions of project writing as a genre—disavowal of self interest, demonstration of technical acumen, passive voice—Alff moves into Chapter 2 with the purpose of showing how print media could transform projectors’ written ideas into viable possibilities for action. As Alff tidily puts it, “Print rendered projection a tangible event even though—and precisely because—so many schemes failed to leave the page” (59). The primary subject of Chapter 2 is the poet and miscellanist Aaron Hill, who also happened to be the mastermind behind a beech tree oil scheme, which promised to harvest beech oil for food, fuel, and other uses, for the betterment of the nation. To what I expect will be the delight of all readers of The Wreckage of Intentions, Alff even uncovers a newspaper advertisement in 1715 that brags of the superior quality of domestically harvested beech oil to “Foreign Oil,” which provides new context for twenty-first-century discussions of petroleum tariffs (80). Hill issued free pamphlets on his beech oil venture to generate interest and to prove he was not profiteering, a telling example of Alff’s argument about the role of print in shepherding ideas to the stage at which, as Alff writes, readers might “stop reading about beech oil and begin making it themselves” (71).

The third chapter, on the various schemes to drain the Fenlands of east Anglia, focuses on Cornelius Vermuyden’s drainage plan, submitted to Charles I in 1638, and published four years later as A Discourse Touching the Drayning of the Great Fennes. In a detailed historical account of the actual labor involved in drainage attempts—and the ways the reality of the undertaking diverged from the vision in Vermuyden’s Discourse—Alff demonstrates the third stage of projection, the attempt. He relates this stage to the prior stages of writing and circulating through a clear explication of the usages of the terms “project” and “undertaking” in the seventeenth century. Though today, as Alff observes, we frequently use these terms interchangeably, then “the latter term usually meant the carrying out of the former” (91). By providing examples of this distinction in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing, Alff shows that projects imply but do not constitute future undertakings, and that when projects make it to the undertaking stage, the contrast between project and undertaking is often informative.

Alff turns from the processes of projection and undertaking to more expressly literary examples of project writing in Chapters 4 and 5, on the Georgic mode and the literature of antiprojection (mainly Gulliver’s Travels) respectively.

Chapter 4 enters longstanding scholarly discussions about what caused the proliferation of Georgic verse in the eighteenth century (beyond Dryden’s issuing of The Works of Virgil in 1697). Alff’s argument here—that in foregrounding the imaginative possibilities for how agricultural improvements could transform rural life for the better, the Georgic was also spurred by an abundance of project writing on agricultural improvement—is convincing and well researched. Of particular interest is Alff’s refreshing new reading of Pope’s “Windsor-Forest” as a kind of Georgic-inspired improvement literature, in which Alff reads Pope’s poem alongside the history of projects focused on Windsor Forest itself.

Likewise, Chapter 5, a useful survey of antiprojection literature centered on Gulliver’s Travels, offers a fresh and compelling new reading of Swift’s frustrating and frequently criticized third part of the Travels. Reading the survey of Balnibarbi and the Academy of Projectors as a satire on the logic of projection, “confront[ing] the logic of projects themselves by addressing the individual stages through which enterprise moved from mind to world: language, publication, and undertaking,” Alff does as well as anyone to place part three logically in line with the rest of Gulliver’s Travels. That is, by showing how part three is a satire on the logic of projection, Alff is able to show further how Travels is a text in which, as Alff tells us, Gulliver is continually exposed to projects, but never sticks around to see what comes of them (147). This opens up promising readings of Swift’s satire in Gulliver’s Travels as more broadly driven by concerns about projection.

Alff closes his study with a coda on Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724) as an example of where Defoe turns retrospectively to “a Proposal made a few years ago,” on the settlement of the Palatines, an issue that history had already passed by (166). In this skillful final gesture, Alff takes Defoe’s bittersweet return to an idea that never got off the ground as emblematic of the value of the study of such projects. As Alff writes, “Defoe’s project sunders time, unzipping a split plot between realist travelogue and imaginary forecast.” In this way “the anticipation of action” in such projects “endures through the act of reading” (177).

In the end, I’m left with a critique, a question, and a note of gratitude for this outstanding book. The critique is that one of the Restoration’s most industrious projectors, William Petty, gets only a single footnote in Alff’s study. Yet Petty’s longstanding interest in what he and others called the “multiplication of mankind”—schemes to increase the national population to become more economically competitive on a global scale—strikes me as a significant failed project worth our attention. As Paul Slack has recently documented, Petty’s essay on “the multiplication of mankind” went unfinished, as Petty continually delayed it for lack of a solution. It was, as such, projection that came to nothing. The inclusion of Petty might also have opened up fruitful possibilities to read what looks much like the rhetoric of objectivity presented in project writing against comparable rhetoric of the Royal Society more broadly. This is particularly the case for Chapter 1, where Alff discusses Yarranton’s desire that England keep up with its Dutch rivals, also a preoccupation of Petty in his “political arithmetic” essays, and an impetus for “multiplying mankind.” The question is also about (fittingly) what might have been: was Margaret Cavendish a projector, and is The Blazing World (1666) project writing? Finally, the note of gratitude for Alff’s study is just that: it’s one of the best written and most compelling academic books I’ve read in recent memory. This book will certainly be of interest to scholars across the disciplines of literary studies and history of the early modern period, and more broadly to scholars of any period interested in historiography. The histories and literature Alff illuminates are enough to make this book rewarding, but The Wreckage of Intentions also poses important questions about how we construct our archives, and how we do literary history itself.

Aaron Hanlon

Colby College

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Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain, by Joseph Drury

Christopher Loar

The cover of Joseph Drury’s Novel Machines handsomely reproduces an engraving of a watchmaker hard at work, together with diagrams of a clock’s movement and illustrations of his tools and workspace. This beautiful image might lead an unsuspecting reader to imagine that clocks and gears play a prominent role in his account of the mechanisms of the eighteenth-century novel. But this would not be quite right. Drury’s argument asks us to embrace a broader understanding of the term machine; his book has little enough to say about watches, but a great deal to say about electrical equipment, celestial beds, coaches, and glass harmonicas. It also, to be sure, has a great deal to say about the genre we call the novel, which Drury argues was understood in the eighteenth century to be a machine itself. For eighteenth-century novelists and critics, the novel is much like any other mechanical contrivance intended to improve human life: “Once regulated by a modern philosophical method, the novel could become as useful a machine as an air pump or a microscope” (85). In the time of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the term “machine” could be broadly applied to any human contrivance that was susceptible to rational improvement. Natural philosophers in the Baconian tradition sought to transform the practical, hand-built knowledge of the mechanical arts into higher forms of knowledge through rationalization. Similarly, the novel in Drury’s account is a device that required improving, and that, when functioning properly, would improve human life. What might still be understood as analogy is, in fact, quite literal; in this period, many thinkers were coming to understand the world and the people that inhabited it in mechanical terms. As Drury notes, “neoclassical authors soon came to the conclusion that narratives were also machines and that they too were (or ought to be) governed by a corresponding set of fixed, universal ‘rules’” (27-28). Francis Bacon’s understanding of history and natural philosophy as progressive were increasingly built into this period’s fictions of personal improvement.

Drury makes clear that his project in this book is distinct from earlier treatments of the novel as a technology in a Foucauldian sense. Critics such as John Bender, taking inspiration from Michel Foucault, once treated the novel as a literary incarnation of a disciplinary mechanism that sought to instill docile forms of subjectivity in readers. On the other hand, more recent discussions of the novel in relation to technology have emphasized a range of more benign understandings of technology as a means of communication or of entertainment, wonder, and pleasure. Drury suggests that neither of these approaches is quite adequate. Instead, his argument turns to ideas drawn from the field of science and technology studies, invoking critics such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour who have emphasized a constructivist, non-determinist theory of technological development. However, he also draws from approaches associated with Don Ihde that insist that technologies can be decontextualized, to some degree; a technological innovation does have a form that “mediates” human perception and action (10). This nuanced and powerful approach allows him to discuss genre as a machine: a set of conventions and contrivances that emerge from a specific historical moment, but that produce effects independent of that moment.

Drury’s argument proceeds chronologically, with each chapter (after the introduction and the stage-setting first chapter) focused on a specific technical innovation in narrative, contextualizing that innovation not only through skillful readings of the novels but also in relation to other technological innovations and to shifting ideas about bodies, narratives, and their mechanical relationship. His second chapter, for example, considers the libertine fictions of Eliza Haywood as Hobbesian-inflected explorations of the relationship between reason and passion. For Haywood, novels as fictions can only appeal to the passions: Haywood’s fictions operate by creating attractive portraits of virtuous behavior, and by cultivating fear of punishment or suffering for bad decisions. This is mechanism in a decidedly Hobbesian sense; human decisions emerge not from a free-floating subject of reason but from a mechanical contest of power within the passionate mind, and this understanding of the subject gives shape to her fiction. Reading of Love in Excess (1719) in this context, Drury argues for Haywood’s original contributions to theories of libertinism and mechanism as compatible with free will and moral responsibility; emphasizing the role of the deliberating consciousness, she “exposes the cynicism of the libertine’s claim to be a blameless automaton and shows that his failure to deliberate results not from the intensity of his passion … but from the pervasive double standard in attitudes towards male and female sexual behavior” (54). In the process, Drury notes, she also treats the machinery of her fiction as a tool for instilling autonomy and moral agency in young women.

Drury’s next stop is Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Older accounts of the British novel as centered on realism and empiricism have sometimes had difficulty shoehorning Fielding into their accounts. Drury’s approach, however, allows us to reconsider Fielding’s self-conscious literary techniques in terms of the novel’s mechanics. In Drury’s reading, Fielding’s fiction emerges from a set of assumptions that links contemporary fiction—“romance”—to lowbrow theatrical practices that emphasized spectacle and mountebankery. Fielding seeks to associate his own fiction not with romance, then, but with realism and scientific practice. To make this association, Fielding has recourse to a narrator who comments on and exposes the novel’s own narrative machinery. This narrator can be understood as akin to the enlightened scientific practitioner/educator who must distinguish himself from the “quack,” just as Fielding’s narrator is at pains to distinguish himself from romantic writers and hacks. Drawing on recent work that emphasizes the centrality of display, performance, and wonder in the production of scientific truth, Drury reminds us that “showmanship with spectacular machines helped make scientific knowledge real” (86). But this reliance on the spectacular also threatens to undermine science’s credibility as an independent and rational arbiter of knowledge. Fielding’s self-conscious narrator, then, plays the role of the educator who creates spectacle but does not deceive; all his “tricks” are explained and marshalled in the use of education and improvement.

This chapter is followed by a study of Stern’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67). This particularly interesting chapter is concerned not, as one might expect, with Sterne’s obsessive treatment of clocks, miniature cannons, and gynecological tools, but rather on the coach. Sterne’s narrative method, Drury argues, can best be understood as a response to contemporary concerns about speed. Tristram’s narrative, seen in this light, is a literary response to the rapid production and consumption of novels as commodities; his narrative of frustration is an attempt to thwart this tendency and to promote a more mindful, patient form of reading. For this urge, the speeding carriage is a useful figure, and Tristram’s transportation troubles in book VII are a particularly powerful figure for his urge to thwart the culture of speed.

The final chapter deals with Ann Radcliffe’s fiction. Again, Drury eschews low-hanging fruit: we might expect to find deceptive mechanical contrivances discussed here, since devices for creating visual illusions (such as the magic lantern) have often been associated with Radcliffe’s fictional method. Drury instead turns to Radcliffe’s use of “acousmatic sound”: the use of mechanical contrivances to produce sounds that seem to be ambient and environmental rather than emerging from a specific source. According to Drury, the quasi-acousmatic sounds produced by devices such as the Aeolian harp and the glass harmonica were linked to an aesthetic of expression that identified the purpose of literary and musical arts as “to excite powerful emotional responses and stimulate the pleasurable reverie that occurs when the imagination searches for a specific idea to which those emotions might correspond” (146). Drury reminds us that Radcliffe wrote in an era when medicine often described the human body as a vibratory mechanism, made up of threads or chords; such medical models also often demonstrated concern that the modern vibratory body would be overstimulated by the consumption-driven world of commerce and aesthetic overstimulation. Drury ably argues that Radcliffe’s frequent use of sound in her gothic fictions is related to this tendency. Gothic narratives and ethereal music alike were thought to “transport the mind out of itself and reconnect it to the vital natural forces from which it had become alienated by modern arts and sciences” (146). Her fictional incorporation of atmospheric musical machines is a distillation of sorts of her aesthetic ambitions: to return the soul and body to the tranquility associated with imaginative practices.

As any productive scholarly project will, this work raises many questions no single monograph could answer. One such question would be the applicability of this mechanical paradigm to other fictions of this period. Drury is of course well within his rights to shunt aside many innovative writers of fiction from this period—Daniel Defoe and Charlotte Lennox make only brief appearances, for example—and his location of women as central to the development of the novel more accurately reflects our understanding of the development of fiction in this period. Readers of this journal, though, might find it intriguing to consider whether Defoe’s fictional innovations can be described in the mechanical terms that Drury outlines. Defoe was, as we know, highly interested in questions related to modernity and progress. And, indeed, the front-jacket blurb on this book gives pride of place not to the protagonists of Haywood, Sterne, or Radcliffe, but rather to Crusoe and his mechanical transformation of his Island of Despair. Much of Defoe’s fictional canon could perhaps be assimilated to a framework that understands the novel as a technology for national and self-improvement. However, all books must end somewhere; if some questions remain, that is a testimony to the fruitfulness of Drury’s method and the engaging nature of his argument.

Christopher Loar

Western Washington University

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Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730, by Leah Orr

John Richetti

Sweepingly ambitious from the outset, Leah Orr’s book proposes “a new way of approaching literary history” that uses new technologies “to study all printed texts” from the years mentioned in her title (4). Her book is an important, original, and even path-breaking attempt to turn literary history into a social and essentially quantitative science; her method is rigorously and neutrally descriptive rather than evaluative, although some conventional “literary” analysis does creep in as she seeks in due course to account for the enduring popularity into the eighteenth century of books like the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) and several others. Oddly enough, she considers the popularity of Head’s book as owing to its skillful writing and careful construction. She notes that the 1688 version is “streamlined” and achieves “narrative cohesion through its consistent narrative voice” and thoughtful plot that renders the hero, Meriton, a developed character (127-28). Such analysis is alert but obviously it is evaluative literary criticism rather than notation of publishing facts. To some extent a moment like this qualifies Orr’s description of where literary history is trending.

For her, “modern scholarship is increasingly open to re-discovering popular works by ‘minor’ authors” or even by anonymous producers of narrative texts, since literary historians, as she puts it, have turned to “studies of the reading public and book history rather than just a few examples of literature of a high artistic caliber” (11). Indeed, authorship in these years, she argues shrewdly, is “a marketing tool, used to attract readers to texts based on the creation of a ‘brand’ name of the author but otherwise little regarded” (99). Orr notes, doubtless correctly, that anonymous texts would have been chosen for purchase by late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century British readers for their content. Thus one of Orr’s strongest points is that in choosing narrative texts by authors they admire, modern literary historians “are applying a twentieth-century view of the importance of authorship backward onto eighteenth-century readers” (99).

But Orr’s dismissal of evaluative literary history strikes me as an overstatement. I don’t share her enthusiasm for turning literary history away from literary achievement by individual authors. Moreover, by no means have all literary historians (I include myself) made that turn. Some readers of this review may know that I began my scholarly career as a graduate student in the mid-sixties by reading what I called (somewhat misleadingly) “popular” fiction in the early eighteenth century, the thirty-nine years preceding Richardson’s Pamela (1740). As I explained rather plaintively in the introduction to the 1992 paperback reissue of my book, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (1969), I spent two years in the British Library reading this material, suffering from their crudity and tedium and wishing I had been studying literary masters such as Pope or Swift or Johnson. Orr, by contrast, finds that literary history of the early novel suffers from its exaltation of a small number of texts in what she labels fairly contemptuously as “developmental histories of fiction, from McKillop and Watt to McKeon and Hunter” (14). In contrast to such an evaluative perspective, Orr proposes to examine in a totally neutral, non-judgmental spirit the databases of early fiction we now have and to find what eighteenth-century readers seem to have liked and bought. She positions her work as occupying the firmest of ground, what she calls “facts about print culture and book history” (15), as she cites reprints and reissues and similar concrete evidence of popularity with those readers. Obviously, she is a book historian more interested in readers and booksellers than in authors; she scorns the critics who have promulgated what she labels a “great man” theory of literary history that has sought “the origins of a fictional movement that culminated in Robinson Crusoe or Pamela” (26). I would counter that this is not really what such literary critics claim, since Defoe’s and Richardson’s novels are more or less in their historical moments sui generis, dramatic, transformative, genuinely original departures from their narrative contemporaries and predecessors. If that makes them “great men,” so be it, since some do achieve greatness.

Orr’s method is essentially taxonomic, and her genuine if to my mind limited usefulness for students of the English novel lies in her rigorous classifications of fictions in these years. The large middle section of the book has four chapters that divide texts neatly and efficiently: Reprints of Earlier English Fiction, Foreign Fiction in English Translation, Fiction with Purpose, and Fiction for Entertainment. Her aim is to evoke far more exactly and carefully than literary historians and critics have the shapes and purposes of fiction or narrative for its readers from this period and to describe what readers at the time would have thought that they were encountering. She affirms that such readers would have accepted the claims to veracity in many of these narratives, which therefore were not approached as novelistic in our double sense of an untrue story that delivers truths about human experience. And she goes further when she asserts that works of fiction were not “advertised to appeal to learned or cultivated audiences,” and booksellers “did not think their customers were discriminating in their taste” (59). This is the language of “marketing,” and that in fact is what much of her study is about. And further she notes that the only books most readers could afford were “chapbooks, jests, and fables” (59). But then in a curious contradiction Orr says that “the subject matter and prose of such works were usually not unsophisticated” (60), which seems to be an odd way to call them in fact “sophisticated.” Her conclusion from this somewhat confusing set of assertions is that such books were also purchased by people who could afford more expensive books, “and so bridged the economic and social barriers that prevented most people from accessing the longer narratives purchased by wealthier people” (60). How the reading of chapbooks by affluent people helped poorer folk to bridge socio-economic barriers is a mystery I cannot solve.

This is a rare puzzling moment in Orr’s book, which is generally straightforward, lucid and unpretentious almost to a fault. Her version of literary history is positivistic and literal-minded; she looks at publishing data and tells us, for one example, that Elizabethan fiction reprinted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries “was very different from what is now most frequently studied,” dominated in literary history by Nashe and Sidney, with some Deloney (124). But is she really recommending that we and our students read the truly popular works such as “the choppy chivalric tales Parismus and Montelion and the easily excerpted moralistic adventures of the Seven Champions and the Seven Wise Masters” (124)? I am not certain what is gained for literary history by pointing this out, except that readers in those years without much education or sophistication preferred these works. It strikes me that Orr is not writing literary history (indeed her book is a polemic against it as it has been practiced in the current critical understanding of the emergence of the novel in English) but rather publishing history. Thus she points out that many Elizabethan fictional works were reprinted for more than a century, but that earlier seventeenth-century works by and large were not, while works from the latter end of the century continued to be printed in the early eighteenth century. A whole sub-section of her fourth chapter traces the “Reprinting of English Fiction Originally Published 1610-1660” (125-32). Of course, there is no arguing with these facts, and they are worth pondering. The question is, rather, what do these facts prove that is of interest to literary history, however one defines it?

Orr’s answer to this question comes in a subsection of her chapter four, “Reprints of Earlier English Fiction,” in which she notes after surveying the most reprinted texts in the early eighteenth century that “some frequently reprinted books, such as Gesta Romanorum or The History of the Five Wise Philosophers, are almost never mentioned in modern criticism of early fiction” (140). That does not strike me as a scandal. What does a collection of medieval anecdotes like the Gesta have to do with early fiction except as an instance of older taste for miscellaneous and curious tales? Undeniably, such works were indeed popular, and Orr finds the beginnings of an English canon of fiction in works “that found continuous favor, like Sir Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Jack of Newbery,” as well as The Pilgrim’s Progress and The English Rogue (140). Except for Bunyan’s book, these titles will be of interest only to specialized scholars, and I suppose that Orr is correct in reminding us of what might be called the “pre-canon” of English fiction. And yet one might respond that such a pre-canon is important precisely for the qualities that Defoe and Richardson may be said to have rejected or indeed transcended as their works begin the formation of the canon of English fiction we have now.

I am grateful to Orr for her hard and exceedingly careful work; she has illuminated a dark part of the early history of English narrative. Her book is informative and at times provocative. But she proposes a form of literary history that is essentially quantitative rather than qualitative, and that in my view is only a part of the story of the emergence of the novel in England.

John Richetti

University of Pennsylvania

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The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment, by Tita Chico

Danielle Spratt

Joining the excellent recent monographs on eighteenth-century science studies by feminist scholars, including Melissa Bailes, Laura Miller, Courtney Weiss Smith, and Helen Thompson, Tita Chico’s The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology.

By attending to issues of literary form, gender theory, and cultural studies, Chico reveals how scientific discourse—with its self-consciously anti-aesthetic claims of objectivity—has always relied on literary tropes and technologies from across the generic spectrum. Indeed, a core claim of Chico’s book is that during the emergence of the new science across seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, literary knowledge was actually the more privileged intellectual and epistemological category precisely because it served as “a form of practice” that “makes material possible. Literariness is itself a form of making” (5). Through this set of priorities, The Experimental Imagination exhumes from the archives the consistent presence and participation of women—as objects of study for early modern scientists, yes, but also as active creators of literary and scientific knowledge. By foregrounding this revised notion of literary knowledge and reconsidering the role of women and early modern cultural forces in the origins of natural philosophy, Chico radically reformulates key concepts and long-held assumptions established by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) and related claims about realist literary forms, thus opening up a new set of considerations for scholars of these fields.

Chico’s titular term “focuses our attention on the literary qualities of experimental philosophy as a mode of knowledge acquisition that redefined the natural world as well as the individual who understood it” (17). To that end, her introduction offers a strategic set of four keywords (literary knowledge, science, trope, and gender) that outline how her study re-theorizes previous work in the field. “Science is a literary trope” that was, especially in the early decades of the Royal Society, reliant on the flexibility of literary knowledge to address the early “epistemological uncertainty” of experimental practice and written accounts of it (5-6). Although the term “reflection” is not a formal keyword, it is nevertheless significant: Chico asserts that critics must move away from anachronistic claims of science’s inevitable epistemological triumph over its “debased sibling, literature” (8-9). Even more, Chico suggests, critics ought to reconsider whether and to what extent written works from the period actively represented any such fixed disciplinary divide between literature and science. The final two keywords, “trope” and “gender,” most explicitly underscore the range of The Experimental Imagination’s formal and theoretical commitments. Chico observes how the dynamic capacities of the trope were appealing to early modern scientists and literary authors, as they mined figure and metaphor to stake their epistemic claims. Gender is an equally powerful category that early modern writers used to frame an “architecture of social connections” to buttress intellectual and cultural notions of authority (11). Rather than echoing the common lament about the ways in which masculinized science erased the female subject into a dehumanized object of study, Chico adds new life to the conversation about science and gender by showing the generative possibilities of the embodied nature of scientists, especially as it relates to women’s participation in the experimental culture of the period. By focusing on the figurations inherent to the experimental imagination, Chico’s project reconsiders scientific subjectivity and “insist[s] on the body, particularly the scientific body, [as] the legitimate scientific body.” In so doing, she offers “a powerfully feminist rejoinder” (12) to scholarship that has too readily accepted claims of so-called objective, disembodied, and disinterested men of science without seeking a more nuanced account of women’s presence in literary-scientific discourse.

In the chapters that follow, Chico’s study explores the interplay among these keywords to compelling effect. Chapter one builds upon Shapin and Schaffer’s claims about two components of early science’s literary technology, the observed particular (which Chico has discussed eloquently elsewhere) and the modest witness, and argues that notions of early science’s tropic possibilities—particularly those connoting modernity—saturated the literary and cultural milieus of the long eighteenth century. The chapter contextualizes this early modern literary-cultural setting by reading accounts from Samuel Pepys’s diaries and Thomas Sprat’s apology for the Royal Society, showing how experimental philosophy enabled both figures to “imagine themselves and their worlds anew” (25). Shifting to the genre of the scientific report, chapter one then offers a revelatory reading of how the experimental imagination operates in Robert Boyle’s The Christian Virtuoso (1690). Here, Chico analyzes how Boyle tries out several different metaphors—a sponge, a stretched bow, and finally wool—to explain air’s elasticity, or its spring. This narrative description of air’s “wooliness” offers to readers a reassuringly familiar image in the face of an unseen phenomenon. But it is no random choice: it also suggests “the cornerstone of [England’s] national and patriotic economy [that] encourages readers to think of Boyle’s experiments with air as especially English” (30-1). These sorts of readings beautifully complement and build upon works by Thompson and Weiss Smith: where Thompson emphasizes the importance of imperceptible phenomena, corpuscles, in creating literary and scientific knowledge, Weiss Smith contextualizes Boyle’s deliberate use of analogical thinking as both a scientific and religiously devotional practice. In all three cases, the authors insist on the necessary imbrication between literary form and scientific claim.

The observed particulars that accompany such metaphoric imagery require sustained acts of the reader’s and writer’s imagination and an overall process of imagistic compilation that combine to represent an object’s “true form.” The agent who makes the protocols of the observed particular possible, the modest witness, is yet another component of the experimental imagination, a figure created when scientific narrative instrumentalizes the scientist’s body in order to obscure the scientist’s own embodiment. It is not the scientist, but rather the disembodied “sincere Hand and faithful Eye” (39) that performs experiments. While this scientific blazon can never fully erase the embodied nature of the scientist, it amplifies the sense of wonder that accompanies scientific inquiry and discovery.

Chapter two theorizes the immodest witness as a literary-cultural figure that upends any fixed claims of scientific objectivity. Turning her attention to the stage and the periodical, Chico identifies two categories of the immodest witness, Gimcracks and coquettes, and claims that their disingenuous social performances ironically reveal (as they attempt to mask) their self-interested motives and their inescapable social and affective ties, both of which are often filtered through a sexualized commodity culture. Chico’s innovation here is to focus on two case studies in what she calls the afterlives of Thomas Shadwell’s Gimcrack: Lady Science in James Miller’s The Humours of Oxford (1730) and Valeria in Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1705). While Lady Science is a foolish “scientific Mrs. Malaprop” (54), the play must disarm her potentially subversive powers as an independent, wealthy widow, first by subjecting her to a humiliating foiled amatory plot, and ultimately by having her reject scientific practice entirely. By contrast, Centlivre’s Valeria, a fashionable and learned scientific virtuosa, has no such financial independence, but she finds a sense of identity outside of and beyond paternalistic claims on her body and future through the practice of science. Coquettes are “social and epistemological problems: they invite attention yet thwart inspection” and are more threatening than their male analogue, the beau, because they promise to disrupt “the economy of sexual relations and patriarchal authority by refusing to subject [themselves] to its rules” (64-5, 67). Chico’s analysis shows how Eliza Haywood’s proto-feminist periodical The Female Spectator rewrites and “recuperates the coquette through her practice of experimental philosophy” by making the Female Spectator and her acolytes not passive objects of scientific inquiry but rather active practitioners of it (68-9). These are no Lady Sciences: they, like Valeria, are fashionable members of society whose very training in the mores of modern society makes them expert scientific observers who, through inquiry and practice, demonstrate their good taste.

The topic of immodest witnesses beautifully segues into chapter three, which considers how the literary technologies of science inculcate systems of belief in their audiences through the seduction plot. The chapter’s opening anecdote cites a scene from Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) in which Melliora’s reading of Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralite de mondes (1686) captivates her married guardian, D’Elmont, and catalyzes their affair. This coupling of science and seduction, borne out between characters with unequal power and agency, is no mistake: this is a Baconian tradition that depicts “scientific practice as heteronormative, erotic quests” (77). Such quests establish the scientist’s authority as they educate and promote belief on the part of the reader. Troubling the parameters of consent, scientific seduction plots “stage power relations among unequal participants, conjoin sexual desire with a desire for knowledge, narrate a character’s changing state and status, and imagine affect as epistemology” (78-9). Chico considers the interplay between Fontenelle’s text and another continental work, Francesco Algarotti’s Il Newtonianismo per la dame (1737) and two translations of these works by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively. The translations allow Behn and Carter to assert their own epistemic and aesthetic authority and the broader claim that natural science is within the purview of feminine education, an assertion that resonates with Bailes’s and Miller’s studies on popularizations and translations of scientific treatises. Chico insists on the importance of the dialogue as a form of scientific seduction, since the genre is steeped in a tradition of education wherein a learned man persuades and often reforms a female interlocutor. Fontenelle depicts a dialogue between a natural philosopher and a marchioness discussing the nature of the cosmos; Algarotti’s work appropriates this structure and reframes the conversation to focus on Newtonian optics. In both works, the participants are doubly seduced, by one another and scientific theory.

Science’s rhetorical and cultural power receives further treatment in chapter four, which reinvigorates standard discussions of scientific state power as represented in Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Chico focuses on how the different generic qualities of each author’s work—manifesto, romance, and satire, respectively—register concerns about the politicized, gendered, and colonial dimensions of the British state’s instrumentalization of science. In the wake of the Civil War and its aftermath, Sprat and Cavendish both concern themselves with the dire consequences of political factionalism. For Sprat, science is a means of uniting opposing political bodies by producing obedient and gentlemanly scientific subjects (111-12). For Cavendish, however, while scientific discourse might increase political discord domestically, its colonial use reaffirms and expands state power (121). For both Restoration-era writers, the metaphoric capabilities of the experimental imagination make these iterations of state scientific power possible; importantly, such scientific practice becomes a compensatory mechanism that assuages these authors’ concerns about further civic discord. With the distance of more than half a century and in response to the explosion of Britain’s increasingly violent colonial endeavors, Swift essentially inverts this formula: scientific theory and practice is absurd in its theory and much of its practice, but when imperial scientific metaphors are literalized into political practice, they devolve into debased and sinister acts of oppression. Chico offers astonishing readings of Books III and IV of the Travels through her painstaking focus on Swift’s use of the word “thing” and its philosophical basis in Houyhnhnmland, the rejection of figurative language, exemplified most overtly by their locution of “the thing which was not.” For Chico, this term indicates the society’s “apparent unwillingness to think imaginatively. . . . The metaphorics of the Houyhnhnm language demand literalization” (129). If in Book III the bags of symbols and objects that the scientists carry allow Swift to reduce the Royal Society’s phrase nullius in verba into absurdist humor, in Book IV’s debate about the extinction of the Yahoos at the Grand Assembly, such an impulse is at once authoritarian and genocidal: “Voyage IV exposes the ideological and ethical dangers of believing that reason is perception. The repetition of a debate about genocide, in a purportedly civil society that insists things just are, reveals the imperialist politics at the core of instrumentalized reason” (132). The topics of chapters three and four may resonate all too uncomfortably with the current international political climate.

Chico’s final chapter documents the capacity of poetry to provide what she calls “aesthetic mediations” about natural philosophy that “draw on but also challenge the intellectual processes of science, reimagine subjectivity, and mount a case for the superiority of the literary” (137). Crucially, the aesthetic is a moral category that parallels the modest witness, insofar as both require an imagined, idealized viewer of the observed particulars of the natural world. Chico then shows how poetic works like Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712) actively employ the protocols of natural philosophy to create art, all the while reflecting critically on both as imaginative acts. The process of narrating this mediation, Chico argues, reveals the “uneasy balance between material and theory that constitutes the observed particular in natural philosophy” (167) and elevates the literary-aesthetic observer above science’s modest witness. Take, for instance, the titular lock of Belinda’s hair. Looking through Hooke’s microscope, audiences would see the hair’s follicles and read an attached narrative description that combined a multitude of observed particulars into one unified object that appears frozen in time. Pope’s depiction of Belinda’s hair, by contrast, uses this microscopic eye to obsessively detail its transformations over time: the lock changes throughout the course of the poem descriptively (it is by turns a single curl, and multiple curls) and symbolically (it represents Belinda’s chastity, her commodity consumption, and the poem itself). Pope’s epistemology of things uses literary and aesthetic concerns to offer a fuller account of the materiality of the world, a narrative process that Chico documents in poems published in the Gentleman’s Magazine to celebrate the scientific objects of Queen Caroline’s Hermitage and in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-30), which overlays on this process an anxiety of excess prompted by colonial endeavors.

Chico’s study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments that promise to transform the fields of eighteenth-century cultural studies, studies of the major literary forms of the eighteenth century (with a focus on poetry, plays, and the periodical), and the history of science. The Experimental Imagination’s theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond.

Danielle Spratt

California State University, Northridge

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Upon a Voyage and no Voyage: Mapping Africa’s Waterways in Defoe’s Captain Singleton

Rebekah Mitsein

IN 1154, MUHAMMAD al-Idrisi drew one of the most detailed medieval world maps, the Tabula Rogeriana, for King Roger II of Sicily (Fig. 1). The map reflects the ancient geographical theory that Africa’s eastern and western rivers share a source. This image of Africa had a longstanding effect on how Europeans conceptualized the continent’s interior, one that lasted well into the eighteenth century. As late as the 1730s and 40s, travelers were still searching for conclusive evidence on whether the Niger, the Gambia, and the Senegal were three different rivers or one and whether they converged with the Nile in the hinterland. In Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738), for instance, he points out that both Herodotus and al-Idrisi suggest that “a Branch of the Nile runs westward, and after a very long Course falls into the Atlantick Ocean…by the Gambia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, being augmented in its Passage by all the Waters which fall to the South of Mount Atlas” (28). Moore proposes, as further evidence for this, the fact that hippopotamuses and crocodiles inhabit both the Nile and the Gambia and that the two rivers exhibit similar flooding patterns (28-29).i

Not simply an abstract geographical quandary, the question of whether Africa’s western and eastern waterways connected shaped Europe’s economic and imperial engagement with the continent. In his introduction to John Newbery’s World Displayed (1759), Samuel Johnson writes that the Portuguese were told by an ambassador from Benin that a Christian country lay to the east (Abyssinia) and that “by passing up the river Senegal [the Christian king’s] dominions would be found” (xxvi). It is only after attempts to find this overland route failed that the Portuguese began sailing to Ethiopia around the Cape of Good Hope (xxviii). Similarly, British explorers like George Thompson (1618) and Richard Jobson (1620) sailed up the Gambia in the hopes that, rather than crossing the Sahara as Arabic traders did, they would be able to tap into “the golden trade, by the South-parts” (Jobson 4-5). These fantasies of access went hand-in-glove with descriptions of Africa as a land packed with untold wealth found in geographies such as Leo Africanus’s History and Description of Africa (trans. 1600), which described Sahel cities rich and cosmopolitan, or Olfert Dapper’s Description of Africa (trans. 1670), which included an image of West Africans casually scooping gold out of a stream.ii The discovery of a hydraulic network that spanned the continent would enable access to Africa’s interior ivory fields and gold mines, the location of which African potentates kept secret well into the nineteenth century, and it would allow Europeans to sidestep indigenous brokers.iii Goods might also then be transported between Europe and the East Indies without needing to be shipped around the Cape or through Ottoman waters.iv

Early maps of Africa echoed these fantasies. “Geographers, in Afric maps” may have “o’er unhabitable downs/ Place[d] elephants for want of towns” (180-82), as Jonathan Swift once quipped, but far more frequently, they placed major waterways where there are none. Maps by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1635), John Senex (1721), and Herman Moll (c. 1715) all show the major western rivers and the Nile within centimeters of one another, flirting if not outright connecting, and all three add the Congo River into the mix, indicating that it, too, might be a tributary of the Nile that extends all the way through the southwest quadrant of the continent (Figs. 2-4). v Their cartouches and the decorative details make promises about what one would find if one followed these rivers. Senex’s cartouche shows an African figure bent over and gathering armloads of elephant tusks scattered on the ground. Elephants and rivers are inextricably coupled in the center of Blaeu’s map and occupy more of the interior than do human settlements. The geographical story that such maps tell far exceeded the empirical data available to Europeans at the time.

Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720) enters this discourse about Africa’s rivers in ways that test the limits of early Enlightenment mapping practices. David Livingstone argues that a map’s “cultural power” (154) comes from the way it is distanced from the place it represents: such “uncoupling of text and context gives the impression that the map discloses universal truth” (158). Captain Singleton closes this distance again. Text and context are rejoined as the eponymous protagonist and a troop of Portuguese mutineers use a contemporary map of Africa to navigate from Madagascar to the European forts on the Gold Coast. The resulting narrative increasingly mirrors the story that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps told about Africa.vi Following a serendipitously placed network of rivers through the center, Singleton and the crew reach the west coast so wealthy from the gold and ivory littering the interior that critics have read the text as unrepentant propaganda for the Royal African Company.vii However, as Singleton moves further away from the well-documented coasts into the largely unknown center, his geographical descriptions also become increasingly incredulous, haunted by contradictory details and zoologically impossible beasts that provoke sensory stupefaction. As the text aligns early Enlightenment mapping conventions with Singleton’s suspect accounting practices, the image of “universal truth” showcased by maps, both inside and outside the text, is splintered.

Defoe’s interest in geography has been well noted, though it is often assumed that he was mimicking and appropriating, and not necessarily commenting on, the methods of his day.viii Pat Rogers writes, for example, that “there is something mechanical about the mode of narration” in Captain Singleton, that “it is rather too easy to see Defoe poring over his maps and geography books at home” (113). This image is warranted by Defoe’s own recommendations in The Behavior of Servants in England Inquired Into (1726) and A New Family Instructor (1732) that any time one reads a history or a travelogue, they ought to do so with the appropriate maps open in front of them (47, 13). But Defoe was not an uncritical consumer of geography. He bookends his History and Principal Discoveries and Improvements with the caution that “What’s yet discover’d only serves to show/ How little’s known, to what there’s yet to know” (iv, 240), and he suggests that true knowledge of the world only comes through slow and “imperfect . . . gradations” as confirmed fact is built upon confirmed fact (305). He was aware that very real barriers prohibited Europeans from gaining ground in Africa, either literally or epistemologically. As he writes in the Atlas Maritimus and Commercalis (1728):

tho the Nile, the Niger, and the Congo are all great Rivers, yet they are navigable so little a way, or their Navigation is so interrupted by Cataracts and Water-falls, or by long overflowing of the Waters, or by the violent Currents, that there is no Correspondence by them. (263)

Access to the continent’s gold is equally stymied: the Europeans “have not a Mark of Gold in the whole Trade, but what we must get of the Negroes by fair trading . . . it is brought down from the Inland Countries by the Negroes, nor can we tell particularly from what Part of the Inland Countries it comes” (270). Though Defoe was enthusiastic about colonial projects in Africa and believed that, if Europe fully invested in the continent, it would “out-do in Profit to us the Commerce of both the Indies” (History 302), he also cautioned against undertaking “dangerous and impracticable Projects, such as mad Men cannot, and wise Men will not meddle with” and believing in “dark Schemes and unintelligible Proposals, which have neither probability of success to encourage the attempt, or rational foundation” (vii).ix Captain Singleton, I argue, tempers its own colonial fantasies as it questions the rational foundation of European ideas about Africa’s rivers and cautions the reader not to be taken in by geographical representations that elide empirical data with speculative infilling.

Implausible though Singleton’s trek across the interior may appear, Defoe positions it within very real eighteenth-century discussions about African geography and navigation. Their journey summons in reverse the routes that men like George Thomson, Richard Jobson, and Bartholomew Stibbs hoped to discover by traveling east on West Africa’s rivers. Like the explorers of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travel narratives, Singleton and the sailors are tasked with figuring out the most efficient way to traverse Africa, with little knowledge of what lies ahead other than bits of empirical data, hearsay, personal experience, and information from indigenous guides. However, unlike their historical counterparts, who turned around when they reached the places where the Gambia or the Senegal Rivers were no longer navigable, Singleton and his crew push on. The entire continent sits between them and Europe, and the only way out is through. As the marooned sailors debate the best course to take, they consider, and then discard, the more conventional ways that Europeans got around Africa. They can’t build a boat large enough to take them east to Goa or to sail south around the Cape. Like Robinson Crusoe, Singleton has already spent time in Barbary captivity, and he fears that sailing north will result in being “killed by the wild Arabs, or taken and made Slaves of by the Turks” (38). This conversation sketches Africa’s eastern coastline and lays out the size and scope of the task before the men. It also reminds the reader how little about Africa’s interior had actually been documented and that the detailed travel accounts that Europeans did have only describe a tiny portion of the overall landmass. As Singleton puts it, “we were upon a Voyage and no Voyage, we were bound by some where and no where: for tho’ we knew what we intended to do, we did really not know what we were doing” (emphasis original).x By describing their trajectory as both “a Voyage” and “no Voyage,” Singleton squeezes his account into the space between experiential travel and imaginative speculation, on the threshold of the known and the unknown. The starting place and the goal—the coasts—are clear, but the path that joins them is not.

The men try to decide how to accomplish the first step of this non-voyage—crossing the Mozambique Channel—and their debate reiterates the piecemeal nature of European knowledge about Africa. The sailors first turn to the locals of Madagascar. As Singleton points out, their “Correspondence with the Natives was absolutely necessary,” not only to ensure provisions and a place to stay while they gather their resources, but also for information about how to proceed (45). When they ask their African hosts about the journey, their response is that “there was a great Land of Lions beyond the sea” (46). So, the men share the lore that they have each heard about the distance between the island and the mainland. “Some said it was 150 Leagues, others not above 100. One of our men that had a Map of the World shewed us by his Scale, that it was not above 80 Leagues. Some said there were Islands all the way to touch at; some say that there were no islands at all” (46). No one type of information is more authoritative than another in this jumbled discussion. The map, though ostensibly a text that “discloses universal truth,” is not trusted above local testimony or hearsay. It, too, is squeezed into the space between experiential travel and imaginative speculation.

In fact, Captain Singleton cautions the reader throughout the first half of the narrative that seemingly objective and empirical statements are not to be taken at face value. The most obvious example of this is the extent to which Singleton himself blends the rhetoric of scientific observation with the duplicity of his piratical character.xi As most travelers to Africa did in the early eighteenth century, Singleton adopts the role of scientific observer throughout the text.xii The Gunner, a man who Singleton describes as “An excellent Mathematician, a good Scholar, and a compleat Sailor,” teaches Singleton everything he knows about “the Sciences useful for Navigation, and particularly in the Geographical Part of Knowledge” (73). From this education, Singleton knows what to include in his account about geographical features, weather patterns, currents, plants and animals, etc. Jason Pearl compellingly observes that, as Singleton adopts the trappings of empiricism, his narrative plays out “a dynamic exercise, moving back and forth between experimental and abstract forms of knowledge” (109). Indeed, Singleton translates specific observations about the local landscapes into the retrospective language of the global throughout the text, inviting the reader to consider the relationship between the two and how one is transformed into the other.

However, Singleton notes multiple times that he “kept no journal” of his travels (4, 6, 52), casting suspicion on his use of scientific discourse and on his representation of Africa, even as he builds a narrative treasure-trove of gold, ivory, and slaves, ready for the taking. If the lack of reliable records is not reason enough to distrust the consistency of his methods, he tells the reader early and outright that “[thinking him] honest [would be] a very great mistake” (7). Hans Turley points out that critical readings of the novel tend to divide Singleton’s piratical adventures in the second half from his overland journey in the first, which “can be seen as a precursor to such novels as Heart of Darkness and other colonial and post-colonial works” (200). Yet, Singleton’s piratical character is part and parcel of Defoe’s commentary on the geographical strategies frequently used to represent Africa. By being honest about his dishonesty, performing his own version of the classic liar’s paradox, Singleton not only renders the boundary between truth and falsehood unstable; he throws his narrative into epistemological flux.xiii His account is neither a text that simply lies, nor one that divulges truth, but one that unapologetically collapses divides among science, speculation, and even intentional misdirection. His story is of a voyage and of no voyage, as he says, and it is impossible to tell where the accounting ends and the tales begin.

This instability has consequences not only for Singleton’s own representation of the continent, but also for those that the text invokes and evokes: the maps in Captain Singleton are put on the stand as well. Africa’s waterways, and the narratives that surrounded them dating back to classical texts, are both the physical and metaphorical guideposts of this examination. If they can agree on nothing else, Singleton says, “we all knew, if we could cross this Continent of Land, we might reach some of the great rivers that run into the Atlantick Ocean” (65), a notion that would have been reflected in whatever map they are carrying with them, as even a cursory glance of some of the most common ones shows (Figs. 2-4). Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the Gunner, that “excellent mathematician,” is the possessor of the maps, and Singleton refers to him as “our guide” throughout. But true to the scene in which the map is lumped in with other kinds of speculative discourse, it does not turn out to be a particularly steadfast tool, though it is a successfully coercive one, convincing Singleton and the sailors of its dependability even as it turns out to be wrong time and time again.

At one point, for instance, the Gunner is convinced that he’s found the Nile, or at least the lake that the Nile comes out of:

In three days march we came to a River, which we saw from the Hills, and which we called the Golden River, and we found it run Northward, which was the first Stream we had met with that did so; it run with a very rapid current, and our Gunner pulling out his Map, assured me that this was either the River Nile, or run into the great Lake; out of which the River Nile was said to take its Beginnings: and he brought out his Charts and Maps, which by his Instruction, I began to understand very well: and he told me, he would convince me of it, and indeed he seemed to make it so plain to me, that I was of the same Opinion. (120-21)

Singleton, who thinks by this point that he “undertand[s maps] very well,” has been seduced by the “plainness” of the maps and the Gunner’s explanation of them. Yet, a few pages later, they encounter another river, one that’s so big that they mistake it for the sea, and as Bob tells us, “My friend the Gunner, upon examining, said, that he believed he was mistaken before, and that this was the River Nile, but was still of the Mind, that we were before, that we should not think of a Voyage into Egypt that Way” (136). Shortly thereafter, the men have a discussion over what direction to turn next, which plots out the west coastline, just as their initial debate over how to get off of Madagascar plotted out the east. They are once again “bound by some where and no where.” Though Singleton wants the crew to go straight north in hopes of finding the Rio Grand (the Niger), the Gunner advises the crew to continue northwest in search of a tributary that runs into the Niger, the Gambia, or the Senegal Rivers. This “good Advice” was “too rational not to be taken” (147). After all, Singleton reminds us once more that the Gunner is “indeed our best Guide, tho’” it turns out “he happen’d to be mistaken [yet again] at this time.” These moments caution that seemingly objective and “plain” geographical representations, and in particular ones that suggest that the interior of Africa is filled with connected waterways large enough to be navigable by boat, can mislead and deceive.

By making the “Golden River” and the Nile one and the same, the text exposes the layers of this hydraulic fantasy. The Golden River is, of course, one of the nicknames for the Nile itself, which connotes its historical richness as the lifeblood of an ancient and wealthy civilization. The men are also literally pulling gold nuggets from the river with ease: “we seldom took up a Handful of Sand,” Singleton reports, “but we washed some little round Lumps as big as a Pin’s Head, or sometimes as big as a Grapestone, into our hands” (123). They find ivory as well, a “prodigious Quantity of Teeth” (117), “a hundred Ton of elephant’s teeth” (151). “They were no Booty to us,” Singleton laments, though the men “once thought to have built a large Canoe on purpose to have her loaded with Ivory.” They decide against it because they don’t yet know whether the path of rivers they are following will take them all the way through the continent. But once they find a village on the western side where they stay a few months with an English factor gone rogue, the English factor and several of the crew make two trips back into the interior and return with heaps of elephant tusks. Though it is unclear at times whether they will get the ivory all the way to the Dutch factory they are aiming for, Singleton tells us they ultimately do, via “the River, the Name of which I forgot, where we made rafts” (178). The fact that Singleton “forget[s]” the name of the river leaves open the possibility that any one of West Africa’s major rivers or their tributaries could lead directly into the abundant interior and join up with the source of the Nile, the Golden River. Such a connection promises both an immediate profit through the direct acquisition of gold and ivory and the long-term potential for sustainable trade. Indeed, it may not even be necessary to name which one of the western rivers leads to this wealth because perhaps they are, as some have argued, all one and the same.

Ivory and rivers replace human settlements in Singleton’s account as they do in Blaeu’s and Senex’s maps. However, Captain Singleton deconstructs this fantasy even as it repeats it. Singleton says early on in the narrative, “even the worst part of [Africa] we found inhabited” (62), and he and the crew are told by the indigenes of Madagascar “that there were a great many Rivers, many Lions, Tygers, and Elephants” on the mainland, but that there were also “People to be found of one Sort or another everywhere” (64). Whether Captain Singleton’s subsequent depiction of Africa as void of human settlement is a conscious bit of Singleton’s deception or just an inconsistency on Defoe’s part, it exemplifies the ways that contradictory or competing details about the continent often co-existed within the same representational space.xiv This is the case even on maps that appear not to indulge in artistic speculation. Instead of filling the interior of his map with decorative detail like Blaeu, for instance, Herman Moll labels it “Parts Unknown,” but rivers run through these words, breaking them into pieces. The absence of knowledge denoted by the words is juxtaposed against the speculative presence of the rivers, which blend seamlessly with the inlets and outlets around the coast, whose positions have been scientifically verified. This juxtaposition throws into sharp relief the fact that longstanding fictions about where Africa’s access points might lead remained fundamental to how Europeans imagined Africa, even as mapmakers simultaneously acknowledged they had no empirical evidence to back up such hypotheses. After all, as Heraclitus pronounced, rivers are shifting signifiers: in eighteenth-century Africa, they were both conduits and barriers; they simultaneously facilitated and foiled penetration into the interior.

The farther Singleton and the crew move away from the coasts, the more vexed his own geographical discourse becomes. His representational strategies default to another longstanding story Europeans told about Africa’s waterways: that monstrous beasts stalk their banks. Unlike the illusion of unfettered access conjured by European depictions of African rivers, descriptions of the animals that lurk around their edges are emblematic of the limitations of European penetration into African spaces, the anxious shadows of colonial ambition. Real animals, like the crocodiles and hippopotamuses Moore cites as evidence that the Nile and the Gambia are connected, posed a danger to anyone, African or European, who traveled by river. Travelogues almost always include an obligatory brush with death via crocodile, including Singleton’s own: the Gunner has to kill one by “thrust[ing] the Muzzle of his Piece into her Mouth” because “no bullet would enter her through the hide” (116). When the Gunner thinks he has found the head of the Nile, they decide not to backtrack and follow it to Egypt in part because of “the innumerable Crocodiles in the River, which [they] should never be able to escape” (121). Such dangers were as much a part of how African rivers were imagined as their potential riches. Blaeu’s map may promise an interior full of elephant ivory, but if that ivory is going to be carried out along the major western waterways, crocodiles bar the way. And as the inhabitants of Madagascar warn Singleton, he’s unlikely to encounter the “great many rivers” of Africa without encountering its “Lions” and “Tygers” too.

While animals like crocodiles and hippopotamuses limit physical travel in texts about Africa, imagined creatures signify the limitations of epistemological access to the continent. As Pliny described in Book 8 of his Naturall Historie, African animals were thought to congregate around watering holes and breed across species:

so many strange shaped beasts, of a mixt and mungrell kind are there bred, whiles the males either perforce, or for pleasure, leape and cover the females of all sorts. From hence it is also, that the Greeks have this common proverb, That Africke evermore bringeth forth some new and strange thing or other. (200) xv

These hybrids break the rules of taxonomy and speciation that naturalists were developing in the early eighteenth century to quantify unknown places and their inhabitants, suggesting that Africa’s interior defies scientific categorization.xvi

Defoe harkens back to Pliny’s proverb in other works to signify how Africa befuddles the senses of the European observer. In Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe and Xury are “anchored in the mouth of a little river,” in sub-Saharan Africa, “as soon as it is quite dark” they see “vast great creatures ([they] knew not what to call them) of many sorts, come down to the sea-shore and run into the water” (21-22). The creatures terrify Xury and Crusoe. Crusoe can’t name them or locate the place where they come from. He can’t separate them from the darkness of night. Because Crusoe “could not see” the creatures, could only hear their “horrible noises” and “hideous cries,” he concludes that “there was no going for us in the night upon that coast” (23). He exhibits the existential anxiety Roger Caillois describes when humans encounter creatures that can blend into their surroundings: a literal “fear of darkness” manifests as disorientation, even “depersonalization” (100). Rather than taming the land and its occupants through his eyes and his pen, the observer is stymied.

Similarly, as Singleton and the men are refreshing themselves on the shores of yet another “Great Lake of water,” they find themselves among “a prodigious Number of ravenous Inhabitants, the like whereof, tis most certain the Eye of Man never saw” (113). Singleton speculates, “I firmly believe, that never Man, nor a Body of Men, passed this Desart since the Flood, so I believe there is not the like Collection of fierce, ravenous, and devouring Creatures in the world; I mean not in any particular Place.” At night, Singleton and the crew are consistently surrounded by “a prodigious Number of Lions, and other furious Creatures, [they] know not what about them, for [they] could not see them” (118). Their wailing is an assault on the ears, “Noise, and Yelling, and Howling” coming from “all sides.” They are “terrible Beasts” that Singleton and his crew “could not call by their names” (131). As Singleton slips into this discourse of animal hybridity, it flags his deviation from systematized eyewitness reporting into chaotic frenzy, where things that ought not be coupled crossbreed, resulting in offspring that are confusing and strange at best and monstrous at worst, a perversion of scientific order. Africa’s interior is a “particular place” (unique) because the interior is not documented or documentable through its particulars. Its defining factors in the British imagination are speculative details and long told stories.xvii

These eerie beasts are a critical counterpoint to the ivory and gold throughout the interior. Africa’s “open spaces are the space of the subhuman or the animal” in Captain Singleton, as Christopher Loar observes (134). The beasts’ “strange sound[s] . . . threate[n] death and madness” (136). But their uncanniness also belies the reliability of Singleton’s geographical representation. Because he can’t see, distinguish, or name any of the creatures, he is denied Adam’s dominion over the space, and he can no longer maintain the persona of the scientific observer who can objectively contain the world in a “grid of language,” as Foucault argues early naturalists did (113). As a result, the interior of Africa remains unmapped, for all intents and purposes, by the end of Singleton’s journey. It holds an embarrassment of riches, but it is also an illogical and inaccessible space, regardless of how seamlessly Singleton’s narrative connects it to the continent’s well-known and navigable coasts.

The result of Defoe’s recoupling of African maps and Africa in Captain Singleton results itself in a suspicious hybrid—a text that highlights the great distance between geographical representations and the places they purported to represent. Captain Singleton does not reproduce generic norms in a way that invites the reader to trust Singleton’s account as a probable reflection of Africa’s material reality. Rather, Captain Singleton “draws attention to” not just the “fabrication of all doctored accounts,” as Srinivas Aravamudan argues (81), but to the discursive and imaginative nature of all European representations of Africa’s interior in the early eighteenth century. Invoking maps within the text and evoking maps outside the text do not bring empirical or imperial security to Captain Singleton. Rather, the novel exposes the map as largely the product of speculative infilling rather than the product of measurements and observations from traditionally trustworthy sources. Maps, Captain Singleton reminds readers, are not universal truths over which European subjects have epistemological authority; rather, the hybridization between limited empirical data and global representation results in an unstable text. As Singleton’s own account mimics the narrative told by these early maps of Africa, it may create an alluring ideation of colonization and trade, but it also suggests that such appealing representations—like the piratical Singleton; like rivers themselves—embody a paradoxical duplicity.

Boston College

Figure 1. 1456 copy of Al-Idrisi’s world map. Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK. Wikimedia Commons. The lower left-hand landmass shows a river that stretches from the Nile Delta to the West African coast. The map is rotated 180 degrees from the original.

Figure 2. Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Africa (1635). Northwestern University Library, Evanston, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3. John Senex, A New Map of Africa from the Latest Observations (1721). Maps of Africa: An Online Exhibit. Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

Figure 4. Herman Moll, Africa, According to the Newest and most Exact Observations (c. 1715). Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 5. Relief Map of Africa (2013). Wikimedia Commons.

 

NOTES

Moore lays out the debate without weighing in, saying instead that he will leave it up to the reader to “compar[e] one Account with the other, and see whether there is a Probability that the Niger and the Nile flow from the same Fountains, or that the Niger and the Gambia are the same” (xi). He does, however, advocate for the reliability of al-Idrisi more generally, whom he refers to as the “Nubian Geographer,” on the grounds that he is “African” himself and thus, along with Leo Africanus, has “given a better Account of the inland of Africa as any other” (viii).

ii  Leo Africanus’s History was translated in to English by John Pory in 1600. Olfert Dapper’s Description was translated by John Ogilby in 1670. Both were foundational source texts for many accounts of Africa in the eighteenth century.

iii  Willem Bosman bemoans this fact in a letter to a friend published in his New Voyage to Guinea: “There is no small number of Men in Europe who believe that the Gold Mines are in our Power; that we, like the Spaniards in the West Indies, have no more to do but to work them by our slaves. Though you perfectly know we have no manner of access to these Treasures, nor do I believe that any of our People have ever seen one of them: Which you will easily credit, when you are informed that the Negroes esteem them Sacred and consequently take all possible care to keep us from them” (80). William Snelgrave complained in his travel narrative that he “could never obtain a satisfactory account from the Natives of the Inland Parts” because of their “Jealousy,” determined, as they were, to keep their trade routes to themselves (Preface).

iv  Jeremy Wear sees resonances with Defoe’s description of Africa’s material wealth in Captain Singleton and Singleton’s own desire to locate the Northwest Passage later in the text (573). Indeed, for a time, the notion of a river route through Africa was as compelling to geographers and navigators as the notion of a sea route through the Arctic.

v Incidentally, Moll provided maps for Robinson Crusoe.

vi  Baker and Gary Scrimgeour note that Captain Singleton evokes the maps of Africa available at the time—particularly in how detailed coasts “fad[e] into gross inaccuracies about the hinterland and pure conjecture as to the nature of the interior” (Scrimgeour 22). In his biography, Max Novak observes the irony of the fact that “Defoe occasionally mocked map-makers who drew designs or monstrous figures where they had no information about the terrain, but in Captain Singleton he too had to create an imaginary Africa” (584). Novak does not comment on whether this incongruity might, in fact, be Defoe expounding on this mockery.

vii  Defoe wrote propaganda for the RAC when they were struggling in the 1710s, including two tracts—An Essay Upon the Trade of Africa (1711) and A Brief Account of the Present State of the African Trade (1713)—and several updates on the parliamentary case over whether the company should be allowed to maintain its monopoly in The Review in 1709-13. See Kiern 244; Knox-Shaw 940-41. See also Scrimgeour 21-22; Wheeler 136; Novak 361. Though Defoe held “conflicting attitudes toward slavery” (Knox-Shaw 942), his enthusiasm about proto-colonial trade investments in Africa is legible in several of his works, including A History of Discoveries, The Advantages of the East-India Trade to England Considered (1720), and his contributions to the Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis (1728).

viii As Paula Backscheider observes about Defoe’s A History of Discoveries, “One of Defoe’s great strengths as a writer of history was his knowledge of geography” (114), and she suggests that “Much of the persuasive power of Defoe’s case for increased colonization comes from the range and details of his geographic descriptions” (114-15). Defoe wrote about the importance of geography to a good education in a short 1725 essay, “On Learning.” And although even contemporary critics sometimes accused him of being an “ignorant scribbler” where his own geographical representations were concerned (qtd. in Baker 263), “he certainly made use of the latest and best geographical material available” (Baker 263).

ix Several critics have read Captain Singleton with an eye toward this ambition. Wheeler argues that the fact that “The novel envisions an Africa emptied of commercial infrastructure, including trading and communication networks” (108) allows it to “rehers[e] certain cultural fantasies of expanding the empire through plundering Africa and describing a continent ripe for European commercial development” (109). Ian Newman suggests that these types of readings have been “the most productive accounts of Captain Singleton in recent years” for how they “interpret the novel as part of a discourse that seeks to define the human in a colonial context and considers the agency afforded to representations of the native communities that Singleton encounters as he journeys across Africa” (567). Wear refers to “Singleton’s walk across Africa” as “more an act of commercial reconnaissance than a nature hike,” and argues, “In Africa, Defoe implicitly suggests, infinite exploitation is the key to the accumulation of wealth” (588). Indeed, Captain Singleton stages many of Defoe’s ideations about African conquest; however, I suggest these ideations are also in tension with, and sometimes modulated by, Defoe’s occupation with geographical accuracy.

Defoe invokes this indeterminate space between somewhere and nowhere in other works to denote a place that has material reality but is outside human comprehension. In An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), he describes the dwelling place of spirits who are not “embodied and cased up in flesh, . . .who inhabit the unknown Mazes of the invisible World, those Coasts which our Geography cannot describe; who between Some-where and no-where dwell, none of us know where, and yet we are sure must have Locality” (4; emphasis original). In his poem A Hymn to Peace (1706), Defoe similarly describes a “Dark abode” that “No geography” can “describe” (11), one “Where weak Aspiring Nature soars too high;/ Which Handmaid Sense, bewilders and Confounds,/ With Reasons ill adapted Tools:/ Attepts to squareth’ Extent of Souls,/ As Men mark Lands, by Butts and Bounds” (10).

xi Jeremy Wear refers to this as the novel “give[ing] scientific discovery the taint of self-interest, which suggests a continuum of piratical acts” (574). For more on how pirates, buccaneers, and privateers navigated the line in their writings between criminal adventurers and scientific observers, see Frohock.

xii  Neil Rennie calls Defoe’s narrative technique “a plain and simple style designed as a medium to convey strange and distant ‘facts’ to a skeptical and civilized reader, half a world away” (81).

xiii  As Manushag Powell and Frederick Burwick argue, “performance is continually, regardless of medium, the key to a pirate’s successful mobility” (11).

xiv Wheeler also points out that Defoe “significantly alters the conditions of contact characteristic of contemporary eyewitness accounts” (107-08) by homogenizing the people and landscapes of what was often thought of in the eighteenth century as a diverse part of the world. George Boulukos goes so far as to propose that Defoe’s Africa in Captain Singleton is “precisely the opposite of commercial travelers’ accounts,” and that his “totally barren Africa…represents the most uncommon vision” of the continent in the eighteenth century (53). These are important distinctions to make since they reinforce the fact that, regardless of how commercially appealing Defoe’s treasure trove version of Africa might be, it was likely taken with a grain of salt by most eighteenth-century readers. However, the distance between the representational strategies broadcast in both Defoe’s fiction and eyewitness accounts appears not so wide as either Wheeler or Boulukos suggest if the text is critiquing rather than espousing the way many geographical representations flattened out specific details in favor of broad, homogenous depictions.

xv  This proverb, often translated as “Every year Africa is bringing forth some new monster,” appears in almost every travel narrative about Africa published throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For more on the history of the proverb, see Feinberg and Sodolow.

xvi  John Ray was the first person to define species by whether they could breed across type in his 1686 History of Plants.

xvii It is, in fact, Singleton’s enslaved guide from Mozambique, the Black Prince, who enables him to both fend off these wild beasts and who gets Singleton and the crew through the interior of the continent alive. I examine the implications of this and what it suggests about the African underpinnings of Enlightenment geographical knowledge in a book-length project in progress.

WORKS CITED

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. Duke UP, 1999.

Backscheider, Paula. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Baker, J. N. “The Geography of Daniel Defoe.” The Scottish Geographical Magazine 47.5, 1931, pp. 257-69.

Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. London, 1705.

Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-century British and American Culture. Cambridge UP, 2008.

Burwick, Fredrick and Manushag Powell. British Pirates in Print and Performance. Palgrave, 2015.

Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Ed. Claudine Frank. Trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish. Duke UP, 2003, pp. 89-105.

Defoe, Daniel. “An Account of the Commerce of the Several Countries on the Sea-Coast of Africa.” Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis. London, 1728, pp. 263-276.

—. The Behavior of Servants in England Inquired Into. London, 1726.

—. Captain Singleton. London, 1720.

—. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions. London, 1727.

—. A History and Principal Discoveries and Improvements. London, 1726.

—. A Hymn to Peace. London, 1706.

—. “On Learning.” Daniel Defoe: The Second Volume of his Writings. Ed. William Lee. London: 1862, pp. 435-439.

—. A New Family Instructor. London, 1732.

—. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. John Richetti. Penguin, 2003.

Feinberg, Harvey M. and Joseph B. Sodolow. “Out of Africa.” Journal of African History 43, 2002, pp. 255-61.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. Vintage, 1970.

Frohock, Richard. Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675-1725. Delaware UP, 2012.

Jobson, Richard. The Golden Trade: Or, A Discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians. London, 1623.

Johnson, Samuel. “Introduction.” The World Displayed. Vol. 1. London, 1759, pp. iii-xxxi.

Kiern, Tim. “Daniel Defoe and the Royal African Company.” Historical Research 61, 1988, pp. 243-47.

Knox-Shaw, Peter. “Defoe and the Politics of Representing the African Interior.” Modern Language Review 96.4, 2001, 938.

Livingstone, David. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago UP, 2003.

Loar, Christopher. Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750. Fordham UP, 2014.

Moore, Francis. Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa. London, 1738.

Newman, Ian. “Property, History, and Identity in Defoe’s Captain Singleton.” SEL 51.3, 2011, pp. 565-83.

Novak, Maximillian. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford UP, 2001.

Pearl, Jason. Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2014.

Pliny the Elder. The Historie of the World: Commonly Called, the Natural Historie. Trans. Philemon Holland. London, 1634.

Rennie, Neil. Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas. Clarendon, 1995.

Rogers, Pat. “Speaking Within Compass: The Ground Covered in Two Works by Defoe.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15.2, 1982, pp. 103-13.

Scrimgeour, Gary. “The Problem of Realism in Defoe’s Captain Singleton.Huntington Library Quarterly 27.1, 1963, pp. 21-37.

Snelgrave, William. A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade. London, 1734.

Swift, Jonathan. “On Poetry: A Rapsody.” Miscellanies, in Prose and Verse. Vol. 5. London, 1735, pp. 160-178.

Turley, Hans. “Piracy, Identity, and Desire in Captain Singleton.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.2, 1997, pp. 199-214.

Wear, Jeremy. “No Dishonour to be a Pirate: The Problem of Infinite Advantage in Defoe’s Captain Singleton.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24.4, 2012, pp. 569-596.

Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Pennsylvania UP, 2000.

 

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Robinson Crusoe, “Sudden Joy,” and the Portuguese Captain

Geoffrey Sill

I.

WASHED ASHORE after a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe walks distractedly about, wordlessly giving thanks to God for his reprieve, making “a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe,” and grievously lamenting the loss of his comrades (RC 41, n.284). Recalling the moment sixty years later as he writes his memoirs, Crusoe still finds it “impossible to express to the Life what the Extasies and Transports of the Soul are” when a man is saved out of the very grave. He resorts to quoting a line of verse to convey the confusion of joy and grief that he felt upon finding himself safe on shore: “For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first.i The line is a talisman for a theme that runs throughout The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe—the power of joy, and its twin passion, grief, to render affected humanity speechless, ecstatic, even senseless. Crusoe experiences the overwhelming power of sudden joy not once, but sixteen times in the course of the first volume of his travels, and he is surprised by grief another twelve times.ii

Crusoe is aware that these moments have profound philosophical and spiritual significance, though he is unable to say what it is. Had he been a scholar, as Daniel Defoe was, he might have known that joy and grief (or sorrow) are the nearly indistinguishable passions in which, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, all other passions, and most narratives, terminate (Potkay 13-14). They differ only in their objects: joy tends towards the good, or union with God; grief tends towards evil, or separation from God. Of all the passions, they are the most likely to apprehend men and women suddenly, by surprise (Miller 63-4).

Of Robinson’s experiences of “sudden Joy,” the most surprising come in the course of his encounters with an unnamed figure whom he calls by such euphemisms as “my good old Captain,” “my old Patron, the Captain,” and “my old Portugal Captain” (RC 238, 240). Crusoe is profoundly affected three times by his encounters with this Portuguese captain, who treats him like a brother despite the national prejudices that separate them and the adverse historical circumstances in which they meet. It is the Portuguese captain who saves Crusoe from being lost at sea in a small boat, who carries him in freedom to Brazil and sets him up as a planter, and who, at the end of the first volume of his travels, restores his lost wealth. The extraordinary charity of the Portuguese captain, who is unrelated to Crusoe and seeks no return on his goodness, has not been fully explored by any of the commentators who have noticed him.iii Most commentators see the captain’s kindness merely as an example of selfless humanity that does not require further examination, even though his goodness is an anomaly in Crusoe’s fictional world, which is populated largely by criminals, pirates, cannibals, mutineers, and renegades. The captain’s inexplicable goodness and his central role in the story are sufficient reasons to consider more closely his place in the history of Crusoe’s life.

II.

Crusoe’s first encounter with the Portuguese captain occurs soon after his escape from the North African port of Salé, after having been held in captivity for two years by a Turkish rover. A timeline of the significant dates in Crusoe’s life suggests that the year of his escape was 1654.iv In that year, Oliver Cromwell dictated to King John IV the terms of a treaty of peace between England and Portugal, which ended an “undeclared war” that had begun around 1650.v The treaty gave English merchants the right to trade with Portuguese colonies in Brazil, so long as the goods passed through Lisbon in transit. In the next year, 1655, an English fleet under Admiral Robert Blake forced the Bey of Algiers to repatriate the English slaves in his dominion, which would have included Crusoe (Napier 424).vi Defoe may have chosen 1654 because, prior to that year, England and Portugal were still at war, and an Englishman would have been unwelcome on board a Portuguese ship; after 1655, it is unlikely that Crusoe would have been held as a slave by the Algerian pirates, thus precluding his escape, his subsequent adventures in Brazil, and his confinement on a Caribbean island. The year 1654 was therefore the most probable time in which Defoe could frame Crusoe’s friendly encounter with the Portuguese captain.

Fig. 1. “Crusoe picked up by the Portuguese Ship.” Engraved by W. J. Linton. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London: Cassell, Petter, & Galpin, 1863.

 

After escaping from his Algerian “Patron or Master” (18), Crusoe sails south in a small boat with Xury down the coast of Africa. After a voyage of about a month, Crusoe rounds Cape Verde and sees the Atlantic Ocean before him, with the Cape Verde Islands about 300 miles to windward. Uncertain about the safety of the mainland on his left and unsure if he can reach the Islands on his right, Crusoe faces the prospect of sailing on into the South Atlantic, with no landfall until he reaches Brazil, 2500 nautical miles distant. In this unhappy predicament, Xury cries to him, “Master, Master, a Ship with a Sail” (29). All ships at sea at this time had sails, so presumably the ship that Xury sees is a carrack, a square-rigged vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic, rather than a caravel, a coasting vessel with a lateen, or triangular sail (Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire 27-8, 207).vii Crusoe deduces correctly that a carrack sailing westerly from the coast of Guinea must be a Portuguese ship carrying slaves. Crusoe is himself an escaped slave, though a European, so he knows that there is nothing to prevent the captain of the Portuguese ship from taking him prisoner, as well as Xury, and selling them both when they arrive in Brazil, particularly because Crusoe must assume that England and Portugal are still at war. In this “miserable and almost hopeless Condition” (30), Crusoe faces either a slow death at sea or life in servitude. His despair suddenly converts to “inexpressible Joy” when the ship’s captain, having discovered that he is an Englishman, “bad me come on board, and very kindly took me in, and all my Goods” (29). In gratitude for being delivered from his desperate circumstances, Crusoe offers “all I had to the Captain of the ship” (30). The Portuguese captain graciously declines Crusoe’s offer with a speech that is an example of Christian charity, such as one would expect to find in a sermon rather than on a slave ship at sea. The captain promises to treat this English stranger as he would hope to be treated himself in similar circumstances: he assures Crusoe that “I have sav’d your Life on no other Terms than I would be glad to be saved my self, and it may one time or other be my Lot to be taken up in the same Condition” (30). The captain’s speech is a plain-spoken paraphrase of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

In the Gospel according to Luke, the same ethical principle is presented dramatically. A lawyer challenges Jesus to explain the way to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks the lawyer what is written in the law, and he replies by quoting two commandments of Moses: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your Heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:25-8).viii When the lawyer asks whom he should consider his neighbor, Jesus tells him the parable of the good Samaritan: A man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked by thieves, who wounded him and left him for dead. His body was passed by a priest and a Levite, neither of whom assisted him. A Samaritan, however, felt compassion for him, poured oil and wine on his wounds, conveyed him to an inn at Jericho, and provided for his care during his recovery. Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three has fulfilled Moses’s second command, and the lawyer answers, “He that showed mercy on him,” to which Jesus replies, “Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:29-37).

Defoe’s re-telling in Robinson Crusoe of the Samaritan parable makes use of several salient features of the original. The Portuguese were considered an inferior, mixed-race people by many Europeans, much as the Samaritans were regarded as inferior by the Jews, so the charity of the Portuguese captain is as extraordinary as the Samaritan’s mercy toward his “neighbor,” the traveler. The captain buys Crusoe’s boat and goods at a very generous price, as well as Crusoe’s boy Xury, though he might easily have confiscated these goods without payment. He promises to free Xury after ten years, thus granting Crusoe cover for his unchristian act of selling the boy’s liberty. The Portuguese captain pours oil and wine, albeit in the form of his kind words and deeds, on Crusoe’s fears and grief and carries him to Brazil (or, in the parable, the inn at Jericho), where his cure begins. He frees Crusoe of any debt for the passage and sets him up on a sugar plantation. He helps Crusoe obtain “a kind of a Letter of Naturalization,” which (many years later) Crusoe admits required him to profess himself a Roman Catholic (241).

Crusoe and his neighbor, an Anglo-Portuguese named Wells, are able to grow enough food in Brazil to subsist on, but very little more (31). By the intervention of his old friend the captain, who has not yet returned to Portugal, Crusoe is advised to write “Letters of Procuration” that will allow his banker in London to send money and goods to Lisbon, which the captain will re-export to him in Brazil. This seemingly complicated financial arrangement is, in fact, necessary for historical reasons: due to the provisions of the Anglo-Portuguese trade agreement of 1654, no English ships could travel directly from the British Isles to Brazil; all trade had to pass through Lisbon, where it was licensed for export and additional duties were paid (Boxer, “English Shipping” 213). The captain returns to Lisbon, where he receives a cargo of “all Sorts of Tools, Ironwork, and Utensils necessary for [Crusoe’s] Plantation” (33) and brings them in his own ship to Brazil. When the cargo arrives, Crusoe is “surprised with the Joy of it,” particularly because the captain has also bought for Crusoe, with his own commission of £5, a “Servant under Bond for six Years Service,” perhaps a replacement for Xury, whose sale Crusoe now regrets. Like the Samaritan who provides for the wounded man’s care at Jericho, and also promises further assistance when he returns, the captain plays an essential role in facilitating Crusoe’s transformation from slavery to a subsistence farmer to a capitalist planter. The captain’s service to Crusoe is an extraordinary act of charity, particularly surprising because it is performed by a person of a mixed, and thus supposedly inferior, race. Nothing would have prevented the captain from absconding with Crusoe’s goods and money in Lisbon, except his resolve to treat his neighbor as he would be treated himself. Crusoe’s joy proceeds from his discovery that such goodness may be found in the world, even in a Portuguese.

Unfortunately, the benevolent captain’s return to Lisbon prevents him from extending any further guidance to Crusoe, who is tempted by a “secret Proposal” from a company of merchants and planters in Brazil to undertake a slaving voyage to the coast of Guinea. As Crusoe knows, such a voyage was forbidden except to contractors who held an asiento from the Spanish government (Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire 330).ix Prior to 1640, contracts to transport slaves to Brazil were granted to the Portuguese, but after the revolution in that year, there was no asiento until 1662, when Genoese merchants were granted contracts to convey slaves in ships from the (Dutch) West Indies Company and the (English) Royal African Company. All other traders were interlopers, subject to severe punishments. Presumably, if Crusoe had the guidance of “my kind Friend the Captain” (32), his head would not have been so “full of Projects and Undertakings beyond my Reach,” which were to “cast [him] down again into the deepest Gulph of human Misery that ever Man fell into” (34). Crusoe blames his subsequent misfortunes on his neglect of his father’s advice to live “a quiet retired Life,” but in fact, he had long since rejected that advice and had prospered without it. His misfortunes, including shipwreck in an ill-advised slaving voyage, are more likely due to the absence of the Samaritan-like counselor, the Portuguese captain, whose advice and assistance had twice brought him joy.

After his deliverance from a twenty-eight-year confinement on the island, Crusoe arrives back in England on the 11th of June 1687, a date that was celebrated by many Protestants as the anniversary of the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated invasion of England in 1685 (Novak 82-6). (It is also very likely the time that Crusoe may be supposed to have read the poem by Robert Wild, a satirical welcome to the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 that was indirectly related to Monmouth’s Rebellion). Crusoe’s family, other than two sisters and two nephews, is “extinct,” meaning that his inheritance is gone, and his former benefactor, the widow who had invested his money for him, is now “very low in the World,” having lost both his money and her own as well (234). Defoe seems to use the coincidence of dates to suggest a comparison between Crusoe and Monmouth: both men went into exile, both suffered trauma upon their return, and both knew grief as a result of their reverses. There is, however, one major difference: Crusoe is to be saved again by his Samaritan, who binds up his wounds and makes him whole, while the Duke found no friends among the priests and courtiers.

At his lowest ebb since arriving on that other island, Crusoe resolves on a voyage to Lisbon in order to seek out news of his estate in Brazil. In Lisbon, he quickly locates the Portuguese captain who, more than thirty-five years earlier, had rescued him at sea. The captain remembers Crusoe and is as improbably good to him as he had been on their first meeting. He knows Crusoe’s old partner in Brazil and the stewards, both secular and religious, who hold Crusoe’s estate in trust; his own son is managing the plantation and has paid his father the first fruits of income in trust for Crusoe, which the old man has unfortunately lost. However, the old man is ready to give Crusoe all of his money on hand, plus a half interest in his ship. Defoe uses an unmistakable marker of what would later be called the sentimental novel to express the confusion of grief and joy that overtakes his hero: “I could hardly refrain Weeping at what he said to me,” Crusoe sniffs (237). When he wonders at the captain’s generosity, the captain admits that, while “it might straiten him a little,” the money is Crusoe’s, and “I might want it more than he” (237), another proof of the unworldly selflessness that the captain showed in their first encounter. The old man’s affection for him so touches Crusoe that, once again, “I could hardly refrain from Tears while he spoke” (237-8). When all of the accounts are cast up and all of Crusoe’s ships have come in, “I turned pale, and grew sick; and had not the old Man run and fetch’d me a Cordial, I believe the sudden Surprize of Joy had overset Nature, and I had dy’d upon the Spot” (239). This grave consequence of sudden joy is averted when a physician is called, who, by letting Crusoe’s blood, is able to give vent to his animal spirits and prevent his death. The confusion of joy and grief that deprives Crusoe of speech and threatens his life is forcefully expressed in the illustrations of Robinson Crusoe by J. J. Grandville (1840) and J. D. Watson (1864) (Figures 2 and 3).

Fig. 2. “Robinson Crusoe surprised by joy.” J. J. Grandville and others, Aventures de Robinson Crusoé. Paris: H. Fournier ainé, 1840.

Fig. 3. “Crusoe needs a Physician.” J. D. Watson. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1864.

Having accumulated and consolidated his capital, which had grown to an estate of some £5000 and an income of £1000 per year (240), Crusoe addresses the problem of what to do with his surplus wealth. In the absence of an international banking system, he must transport it back to England himself. A sea route would expose him to Algerine pirates or to shipwreck, both of which he fears from personal experience (242). Once again he turns to the Portuguese captain, whom he identifies first as “the old Man” (235), but who becomes “this ancient Friend” (237), “my good old Captain” (240), “My old Patron, the Captain” (240), and “my old Pilot” (243)—all euphemisms that stress the captain’s age, wisdom, and goodness. The old captain advises him to travel by land through Spain and France, crossing the Channel at Calais, thus greatly reducing his exposure to shipwreck or capture by pirates. The captain further assists him in forming a party of three English and two Portuguese merchants, who with two servants and Friday form a “little Troop” (243) under Crusoe’s leadership. This “little Troop,” which is transnational, multiracial, and unstratified by class, represents humanity in the allegorical reading of the Samaritan parable, which was codified by the patristic fathers of the Roman Church, among them Irenaeus, Origen, Ambrose, and Augustine. Origen was the first to identify the injured traveler in the parable as Adam, the “original” of humanity, who after the Fall is ministered to by Jesus, represented allegorically by the Samaritan (Roukema 63). Crusoe confirms this allegorical reading of the parable when he accepts the honor of leading the troop “as well because I was the oldest Man, as because I had two Servants, and indeed was the Original of the whole Journey” (243). If the Portuguese captain is analogous to the Samaritan, and the Samaritan is an allegorical representation of Jesus, then the captain is a latter-day personification of Jesus, and the joy that his acts of charity provoke in the Adamic Crusoe (who seems unaware of the allegory that explains his joy) may be more easily understood.x

Even if it is granted that the captain’s goodness mimics that of the Samaritan and that the captain is thus an allegorical emblem of Jesus, it is still unclear why this captain should be Portuguese. The association of goodness with a Portuguese is extraordinary in that it radically contradicts the character of the Portuguese sailors, soldiers, and explorers that was generally held among the English, and perhaps even by Defoe.xi The fullest expression in Defoe’s works of the English national prejudice against the Portuguese is The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, published in June 1720, ten months after the Farther Adventures and two months before the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. Bob Singleton receives his early education at the hands of the Portuguese, from whom, he says, “I learnt particularly to be an errant Thief and a bad Sailor” (Singleton 22). As the cabin-boy for the “old Pilot” of a Portuguese carrack, not unlike the slave ship in the first volume of Robinson Crusoe, Singleton learns “every thing that is wicked among the Portuguese, 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” (23). Thus begins a long stream of invective against the Portuguese, whom Singleton describes as “the most compleat Cowards that I ever met with”; a people capable of “Thieving, Lying, Swearing, Forswearing, joined to the most abominable Lewdness”; a nation “so brutishly wicked . . . so meanly submissive when subjected; so insolent, or barbarous and tyrannical when superiour, that I thought there was something in them that shock’d my very Nature” (23). Putting these xenophobic and racist views in Singleton’s mouth, rather than his own, allows Defoe to both express them and, ultimately, disown them as Singleton’s hatred of the Portuguese is, like Crusoe’s wanderlust or Colonel Jack’s thieving, revealed as a perversity of youth from which he is to be cured through the charity of the Samaritan-like character, William.

Another instance of anti-Portuguese prejudice is found in the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Early in the story, Crusoe returns to his Caribbean island and speaks with one of his colonists, a “grave and very sensible Man,” who tells him that “it was not the Part of wise Men to give up themselves to their Misery, but always to take Hold of the Helps which Reason offer’d” (Farther Adventures 76). The man, who is a Spaniard, quotes a Spanish proverb, which Crusoe translates as “In Trouble to be troubl’d, / Is to have your Trouble doubl’d.” The man explicates his proverb by saying that

Grief was the most senseless insignificant Passion in the World; for that it regarded only Things past, which were generally impossible to be recall’d, or to be remedy’d, but had no View to Things to come, and had no Share in any Thing that look’d like Deliverance, but rather added to the Affliction, than propos’d a Remedy. (76)

He praises Englishmen for their “Presence of Mind in Distress,” while he laments that his own

unhappy Nation [Spain], and the Portuguese, were the worst Men in the World to struggle with Misfortunes; for that their first Step in Dangers, after the common Efforts are over, was always to despair, lie down under it, and die, without rousing their Thoughts up to proper Remedies for Escape. (76)

This disparaging stroke at the Portuguese, which resembles Singleton’s remark about Portuguese cowardice, appears at first to be gratuitous, but it serves Defoe’s narrative purpose by licensing English explorers to challenge the claims of Spain and Portugal to the exclusive right to settle colonies in the Americas on the grounds that these Iberian nations have, through their grief and neglect, turned away from God and forfeited their right to the land.xii

In his non-fiction writings as well, Defoe exploits the national prejudice against the Portuguese in order to advance his political and colonialist goals. In the Review of June 1704, “Mr. Review” mocks the Portuguese army, which he says is led by a “Wooden General” (the statue of St. Anthony of Padua, a miracle worker, which was carried before the troops). This “Hobgoblin Officer,” he scoffs, leads his troops in a “Wooden C[au]se,” and he laughs, “here is an Army of Portuguese; an Army of Portuguese, An Army of Old Alms Women! we should say….” (Defoe, Review 203-4).xiii Mr. Review’s sarcasm supports Defoe’s political argument that the “Portuguese war” must be fought with Anglo-Dutch troops, because the Spanish and Portuguese armies will make a “comedy” of it. At the other end of his writing career, in his Plan of the English Commerce (1728), Defoe encourages England to adopt Portugal’s colonial policy, even though Portugal itself is “an effeminate, haughty, and as it were, a decay’d Nation in Trade.” (Plan 121). Defoe claims that Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Africa currently import “above five Times as many [European manufactures] as were sent to the same Places, about 30 to 40 Years ago” (120), because the Portuguese cultivate their colonies as markets for their goods, rather than regarding the native populations as savage peoples to subjugate. The Portuguese, says Defoe, succeed by “bringing the naked Savages to Clothe, and instructing barbarous Nations how to live” according to “the Christian Œconomy, and . . . the Government of Commerce” (121). Defoe’s slighting allusion to Portugal as “effeminate, haughty, and . . . decay’d” is meant to suggest that Portugal’s monopoly on the trade in slaves, sugar, and coffee from Africa and Brazil, re-exported via Lisbon to English and European markets, could easily be usurped, either by separate traders (such as young Robinson Crusoe) or by the Royal African and South Sea companies. If England were to intervene in this trade and adopt a Samaritan-like policy of treating their neighbors (i.e. colonial populations) as they would be treated in their place, then the expanding English colonies in the Americas would be more civil, more religious, and more prosperous trading partners than they now are.

III.

In closing, we return to the sudden surge of joy that Crusoe experiences at pivotal moments in his life, particularly in the presence of the Portuguese captain. As we have seen, Crusoe is “surprized with Joy” at the goodness of the captain, which seems to rival that of Providence itself. The captain’s benevolence is inexplicable until we recognize the pattern in which it occurs. Crusoe suffers grief or sorrow, such as the prospect of dying at sea in his small boat, or starving as a subsistence farmer in Brazil, or ending his life in poverty after losing his fortune, but his grief is suddenly reversed into joy through the captain’s intervention. The captain is only an ordinary sailor, but in his acts of kindness he performs the part of the Samaritan in the biblical parable, binding the wounds of the fallen traveler. The patristic fathers of the Church interpret the parable allegorically, such that the Samaritan represents Jesus and the fallen traveler Adam, the “original” of humanity whose sins are redeemed by Jesus. The instrumental role of the Portuguese captain in the story is all the more perplexing in that the Portuguese, like the Samaritans in the Bible, were the least powerful, the most despised, and the least likely of all the European nations at the time to offer salvation to wounded humanity. But the very paradox of discovering charity on board a Portuguese ship moves Crusoe closer to understanding God’s providence toward post-Edenic humanity and what mankind must do to retain it. A principal duty of humanity, as Adam Potkay suggests, is to transform the extravagant joys of survival into the spiritual joys of obedience to God’s plan for the world and to become an agent in that plan (93-4).

A dramatic illustration of the effects of joy and grief on humanity is found in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which Crusoe, moved by the memory of his rescue by the Portuguese captain, rescues, in his turn, the crew and passengers of a French ship that has caught fire at sea (Farther Adventures 14-19). Their “inexpressible Joy” at being rescued allows Crusoe to describe at length the “strange Extravagancies” of joy they display, which resemble the “greatest Agonies of Sorrow” (16-17). Of the sixty-four who were saved, some were

stark-raving and down-right lunatic, some ran about the Ship stamping with their Feet, others wringing their Hands; some were dancing, some singing, some laughing, more crying; many quite dumb, not able to speak a Word; others sick and vomiting, several swooning, and ready to faint; and a few were Crossing themselves, and giving God Thanks. (17)

Crusoe turns his narrative account into a taxonomic case study: many sailors and passengers give vent to their joy in a manner indistinguishable from grief; some are speechless, or ecstatic; only a few retain command of their passions and give thanks to God. On the next day, the ship’s captain and one of the priests offer to Crusoe all of the money and possessions saved from the ship in return for rescuing them, which Crusoe refuses. His refusal mirrors and repays the Portuguese captain’s generosity upon saving Crusoe many years ago. Crusoe explains that “if the Portugal Captain that took me up at Sea had serv’d me so, and took all I had for my Deliverance, I must have starv’d, or have been as much a Slave at the Brasils as I had been in Barbary” (19). In his refusal, Crusoe assumes the mantle of his mentor, the Portuguese captain, and like him, pours oil and wine on the wounds of fallen humanity. Whether he fully understands and accepts the allegory of the Samaritan parable that underlies his act is unclear and, ultimately, unimportant; what matters is that his story, as he says, “may be useful to those into whose Hands it may fall, for the guiding themselves in all the Extravagancies of their Passions” (19). If it also serves England’s colonial interests, who will say him nay?

Rutgers University, Camden

The author is grateful to Gabriel Cervantes for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

NOTES

i Defoe quotes the line, “For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first,” from Robert Wild’s “Dr. Wild’s Humble Thanks for His Majesties Gracious Declaration for Liberty of Conscience” (1672), a satirical poem on Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence that plays on the twinship of joy and grief. See Sill.

ii For the mentions of “joy,” “joys,” “joyful,” “grief,” “griev’d,” and “sorrow” in Robinson Crusoe, see Spackman 355, 434-5, and 804.

iii For a reading that locates the Portuguese captain within Crusoe’s economic history, but does not attempt to explain his extraordinary charity, see Freitas 453-9.

iv Crusoe, born in 1632, first speaks to his father (and mother) about leaving home at the age of 18 (RC 8). He leaves home “almost a Year after this,” on September 1, 1651 (9). His first voyage to Africa, which includes a long illness and several trading excursions, requires about a year (17). On his second voyage, he is taken into slavery by a Turkish pirate from Salé (or “Sallee”), from whom he escapes “after about two Years” (19). His rescue a month later by the Portuguese captain thus occurs in 1654. The significance of that year in Anglo-Portuguese relations suggests that Defoe chose the dates of Crusoe’s voyages and shipwreck not for autobiographical, but for historical reasons.

vC. R. Boxer attributes the decline in English shipping to Brazil through Portugal from 1650 to 1654 to this “undeclared war” (“English Shipping” 213). A treaty with articles governing trade was “dictated” by Cromwell in 1654, the year in which Crusoe was picked up at sea, and ratified (reluctantly) by King John IV in 1656 (210-15). Trade relations between England and Portugal were strengthened by the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and his marriage to Catherine of Braganza in 1661 (217-18).

vi See also the timelines for 1655-57 at the British Civil Wars Project: http://bcw-project.org.

vii For the difference in rigging of the caravel and the carrack, see Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 27-8, 207. See Fig. 1 for an illustration of both the caravel and the carrack.

viii The two commandments of Moses are found in Deuteronomy 6.5, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and will all your might,” and Leviticus 19.18, “you shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” as well as Leviticus 19.33, said of a stranger, “you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the lands of Egypt.”

ix English voyages between Africa and Brazil that did not pass through Lisbon were “commonplace” by 1657, but were conducted outside the Asiento, and thus illegal (Boxer, “English Shipping,” 213). For the Genoese contract, see the Schimmel Archive at the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society & Historical Museum: www.melfisher.org/schimmelarchive/exhibit3/e30011a.htm.

x G. A. Starr points out that “at the time of his captivity and escape [Crusoe] is blind to the agency of Providence in his affairs” (Starr 86-7). We may add that, even after his conversion on the island, he remains blind to the persons in whom Providence is represented, though he is aware of the role of Providence itself.

xi Whether Defoe himself held these prejudices is a difficult question. Most commentators are cautious not to attribute the views of fictional characters to Defoe. Paul Dottin, however, writes that Defoe believed that the Portuguese were a “mongrel race, exhibiting all the vices of the whites as well as the negro” (30).

xii A similar argument is made in Defoe’s A New Voyage Round the World, 210-12.

xiii Defoe’s low opinion of Portugal’s prowess at arms is shared by modern historians, such as C. R. Boxer, who finds that Portuguese soldiers and sailors in the seventeenth century were “only too often forcibly recruited from gaol-birds and convicted criminals” who lacked the most basic elements of discipline and military training, worsened by an “overweening self-confidence” (Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire 116-7). Boxer, however, notes that color-based racial prejudices often affected the public perception of Portuguese soldiers and sailors (215).

WORKS CITED

Boxer, C. R. “English Shipping in the Brazil Trade.” The Mariner’s Mirror: The Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 37.3, January 1951, pp. 197-230.

—. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. New York: Knopf, 1975.

Defoe, Daniel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Edited by W. R. Owens, Pickering & Chatto, 2008.

—. The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton. Edited by P. N. Furbank, Pickering & Chatto, 2008.

—. A New Voyage Round the World. Edited by John McVeagh, Pickering & Chatto, 2009.

—. A Plan of the English Commerce. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 7. Edited by John McVeagh, Pickering & Chatto, 2000.

—. A Review of the Affairs of France. Edited by John McVeagh. Pickering & Chatto, 2003.

—. The Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Thomas Keymer, Oxford UP, 2007.

Dottin, Paul. The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Daniel De Foe. The Macaulay Company, 1929.

Freitas, Marcus Vinicius de. “The Image of Brazil in Robinson Crusoe,” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 4-5, Spring-Fall 2000, pp. 454-9.

King James Bible, Revised Standard Version. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. Edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, Oxford UP, 1977.

Miller, Christopher R. Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen. Cornell UP, 2015.

Napier, Trevylyan M. “Robert Blake.” The Naval Review XII no. 3, August 1925, pp. 399-433.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions. Oxford UP, 2001.

Potkay, Adam. The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Cambridge UP, 2007.

Roukema, Riemer. “The Good Samaritan in Ancient Christianity.” Vigiliae Christiane 58.1, Feb. 2004, pp. 56-74.

Sill, Geoffrey. “The Source of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘Sudden Joy’.” Notes and Queries 45.1, 1998, pp. 67-8.

Spackman, I. J., W. R. Owens, and P. N. Furbank. A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Garland, 1987.

Starr, G. A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton UP, 1965.

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Crusoe’s Creature Comforts

Jeremy Chow

Lord! what a miserable creature am I?”

-Robinson Crusoe

CRUSOE WAS CERTAINLY no Linnaeus. The word creature appears some 114 times in Robinson Crusoe (1719), and while it is almost exclusively deployed to signify an animal that Crusoe cannot identify, it also snakes its way into the characterization of human others. The indistinguishable nature of creatures thwarts Crusoe, and the unsteady use of the word inhibits his ability to distinguish a creature, ostensibly defined by animality, from a human. The word first appears following the shipwreck that waylays Crusoe and Xury: “as soon as it was quite dark, we heard such dreadful Noises of the Barking, Roaring, and Howling of Wild Creatures, of we knew not what Kinds, that the poor Boy was ready to die with Fear, and beg’d of me not to go on shoar till Day” (22-3). Xury’s excessive creaturely zoophobia—so extreme that he might “die with Fear”—is meant to foster Crusoe’s indomitable masculinity, situating him as protector-extraordinaire, especially of young racialized boys. Xury is, of course, Friday in beta test form. Yet, as Crusoe’s journal turns to his final years on the island, there is a sudden semantic shift in the term creature. “I was now entred,” he narrates, “on the seven-and-twentieth Year of my Captivity in this Place; though the three last Years that I had this Creature with me ought rather to be left out of the Account, my Habitation being quite of another kind than in all the rest of the Time” (193, emphasis added). “This Creature” to whom Crusoe refers is none other than Friday.

This essay examines the recycling of the word creature throughout Robinson Crusoe to trace and thus apprehend its unsteady and opaque significations.i First used by the narrative to signify indeterminate animality, Crusoe’s pronouncement of Friday as also belonging to creaturedom bespeaks the slippage between the human and nonhuman. Such an opacity becomes even more muddied when, after leaving the Island of Despair, the word creature is bestowed on the bear—“a vast monstrous One it was, the biggest by far that ever I saw”—who Friday first antagonizes and then shoots in the head for putative entertainment (247). To visualize the precarity of animality, I trace how Crusoe registers nonhuman animals, Friday, and, in a lone moment, himself as creatures, in a trajectory that corresponds with what Laurie Shannon calls “zoography.” For Shannon, “early modern writing insists on animal reference and cross-species comparison, while at the same time it proceeds from a cosmological framework in which the sheer diversity of creaturely life is so finely articulated” (8). While the novel may reflect a diversity of creatureliness—that is, who or what might be considered a creature—the granular specificity of what constitutes a creature is deliberately nebulous and rarely consistent. Thinking alongside environmental literary criticism and postcoloniality, the bearbaiting scene helps us better comprehend how both the racialized human other—Friday—and the animal are paired as some form of comedic minstrel by way of Crusoe’s deployment of the term creature.ii I argue that Robinson Crusoe ultimately encodes an alchemical calculus wherein the designation of creature—in the moments I map here—confers an unstable hybridity wherein human and animal bodies mesh with profound yet troubling effects.iii My premise is not that the bear becomes human or that Friday becomes animalized; instead, I am interested in how Crusoe’s narrative repurposes the appellation creature to signal a radical otherness that incites violent engagement and results in the dispossession of stable identity categories: human, colonist, racialized companion. As the novel demonstrates, creatureliness, at its core, renders unsettling, befuddling, and titillating effects that blur boundaries and unmoor human supremacy.

The circulation of creatureliness, as scholars have demonstrated, is fundamental to apprehending Crusoe’s companion species while on the Island of Despair, and Defoe’s works more generally.iv Stephen H. Gregg has recently argued for the instability of human and animal categories in Defoe, though not in Robinson Crusoe, emphasizing how such a binary is obfuscated by issues of comportment (with regards horses) and cognition (with regards to swallows and hounds).v In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside notes of Robinson Crusoe that “Creatureliness is a major thematic preoccupation of the novel, and the central telos of its plot” (64). Keenleyside is invested in Crusoe’s creaturely companions that make visceral the logics of speaking (to and with) and eating (or being eaten by). “Crusoe,” she writes, “senses the precariousness of his status in a creaturely world in which human sovereignty is neither possible nor justified—a world in which persons are personified creatures, and ‘some-body to speak to’ can also be something to eat” (90). The consuming, precarious creaturely world that Keenleyside highlights is an important springboard for this discussion, and also for considering the hierarchy that might (consistently) impose the human above the nonhuman. Diverging from Gregg’s and Keenleyside’s analyses, I consider a broader spectrum wherein creatureliness is not a particular affect or ability, but rather a subtle reminder of mutable, interchangeable, and constantly fungible human and nonhuman positions. Perhaps more macrocosmic in outlook, I am interested in the loose use of creature, which varies contextually to denote an otherness characterized by inferiority, animality, sickliness, and/or race. Variety is the hallmark of creatureliness, especially in the ways its invocation repositions and dispossesses.

In concert with Donna Haraway’s provocation that animals are not “surrogates for theory; they are not just here to think with,” I magnify the oft-forgotten moment between Crusoe, Friday, and the bear to underscore the instability of creaturely hybridity while also drawing attention to depictions of animal cruelty that masquerade in the novel as comedy (5). Though I have yet to locate materials that would demonstrate that Defoe witnessed, or advocated for or against, bearbaiting, Robinson Crusoe unmistakably stages an execution of the bear, which reframes depictions of injustice and tyranny as power abuses exercised only by human actors.vi Reading the ursine moments in the novel and in relation to Aesop’s Fables and graphic cultural histories of bearbaiting, I attend to the recurrence of the bear throughout the early eighteenth century as a figure that serves as a didactic foil to the human, both physiologically and morally. In both Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe, the potential yet never realized violence enacted by the bear defines, by contrast, the actual and perpetrated violence wielded by the human. Put another way, in both episodes neither bear enacts harm. Such (sole) anthropocentric violence intends to mark the human (male) figures as impenetrable and superior. Yet, the novel’s use of creature undermines such static conceptions of stalwart dominance. Though painted with humorous hues, the bearbaiting moment disguises a frightening realization: it emblematizes the slippery and elusory ways in which nonhuman animality and racialized otherness are positioned as competing entities for superiority. This battle royale is mediated by gross violence and death. In Perceiving Animals, Erica Fudge opens with bearbaiting to consider the blurring of the human-animal boundary that incites and reifies modalities of animal cruelty.vii “The violence,” she writes, “involved in taming wild nature—in expressing human superiority—destroys the difference between the species” (19). I see Robinson Crusoe’s articulation of creature and depiction of bearbaiting to similarly dissipate difference. The novel’s creaturely bent exemplifies the uneasy status of human supremacy and induces a taxonomic indeterminacy that violently exposes the fragility of the human/nonhuman divide.

Ursine Origins

Crusoe’s interaction with the bear is a short anecdote, one that is rarely anthologized or remembered. In this episode: Friday and Crusoe traversing the borders of France and Spain by way of the Pyrenees encounter a pack of wolves (more on this later) and, immediately after, a bear. Friday deliberately engages in bearbaiting in an effort to please his gleeful audience. Friday, Crusoe narrates, intends to “g[i]ve us all (though we were surpriz’d and afraid for him) the greatest Diversion imaginable” (246). Crusoe notes that despite the shock of finding a bear, it “offer’d to meddle with no Body” (247). Friday antagonizes the bear by pelting it with stones. The bear (with good reason) turns against the group. Friday scales a tree; the bear follows. Friday climbs down from the tree; the bear follows. And on the bear’s slower descent, Friday “clapt the Muzzle of his Piece into his Ear, and shot him dead as a Stone” (249).

Generally considered a “sport,” animal-baiting—including but not limited to bearbaiting, bullbaiting, horsebaiting, monkeybaiting, and lionbaiting—has a deep early modern history, which resurfaces in this anecdote.viii Rampant from at least the twelfth century until the nineteenth, bearbaiting was the practice of capturing bears—exclusively from the continent because bears are not native to England—chaining them to posts and siccing dogs upon them in a fight to the death.ix For Rebecca Ann Bach, animal baiting, especially bear and bullbaiting, is centrally about dominion and its reinscription of the anthropocentric and colonialist prepotence found in Genesis (22-3). Fudge agrees that baiting exemplifies iniquitous power distortions, suggesting that it “reveals the truth about humans,” namely that “to watch a baiting, to enact anthropocentrism, is to reveal, not the stability of species status, but the animal that lurks beneath the surface […] The Bear Garden makes humans into animals” (15). As Jason Scott-Warren explains, bear-gardens (the socially-condoned site of these fights) were figuratively “a place of strife and tumult,” and literally, a proto-zoo where bears were chained and confined for the deliberate purpose of canine and human antagonism (63). In line with this antagonism, throughout the seventeenth century, the bear gardens that abutted the Southbank of the Thames were sites of enduring debauchery and were so popular that, “the large and often dangerous crowds which assembled on the Bankside caused the authorities much uneasiness” (Hotson 278). Bearbaiting was officially outlawed in 1835 but declined, in A.S. Hargreaves’s words, “only slowly” (n.p.). Crusoe’s framing of the bear vignette recapitulates bearbaiting as an entertainment commodity, but forgoes the usual artificial setting and locates the sideshow in the bear’s native place.

Defoe’s bear episode would not have been, for eighteenth-century audiences, a non sequitur. Thomas Keymer pinpoints Defoe’s potential source for the vignette: a January 1718 article in Mist’s Weekly Journal (a publication to which Defoe contributed) records villagers near Languedoc attacked by “a troop of wolves and six bears” (306).x In addition to this source, at least one of its cultural antecedents lies in Aesop. Aesop’s Fables resonated widely with the long eighteenth-century reading public, as is evidenced by the countless editions, revisions, and republications of the morally-didactic narratives meant for even the “Meanest Capacities.” Published just a decade before Robinson Crusoe, A New Translation of Aesop’s Fables, with cutts (1708) features three anecdotes that showcase a bear.xi The second of the three, “Two Friends, and a Bear,” details two companions wandering the forest when they stumble upon a bear. The first friend, steeped in adrenaline and fearful for his safety, ascends a nearby tree. The second friend, also fearful for his safety but a less gifted tree climber, flops on the ground and plays opossum. The bear, excited by the commotion but too lazy to scale the tree, paws at the second friend, but he [the bear] “found no Breath nor any Appearance of Life, disdain’d the Carkass, and Walks off and leaves him” (Aesop 157). The bear having left the two, the first friend descends from his arboreal sanctuary, and pointedly asks the second “what the Bear whisper’d in’s Ear” (Aesop 157). The second friend reveals the bear’s infinite erudition: keep better company. A moral about friendship immediately follows:

Chuse not an empty Talker for a Friend:

Fair Complements, but weakly recommend.

True Friendship most substantial Weight must bear.

Professions, without Service, are but Air. (Aesop 158)

Two Friends, and a Bear” clearly makes a proxy of the bear—the pun on “must bear” illustrates this—by which valuable human friendships are put to the test. Aesop’s bear then operates as an animal sage disseminating fortune-cookie-like platitudes, but, as with Crusoe’s bear, the ursine inclusion invites readers to see beyond mere symbolism.

I invoke “Two Friends, and a Bear” in correspondence with the ursine interaction in Robinson Crusoe for several reasons, least of all being that bears surface in both. Not only do the episodes extend a cultural fascination with the bear in its native place (and thus a growing awareness of animal natural history and an emerging ethological science), but paired together, these two excerpts draw the reader’s attention to bear faces: the secrets bears whisper in confidence in the fable and Friday’s ursine assassination. Both demonstrate an important proximity of bear and human faces, especially as this facial intimacy may pertain to aurality.xii Both Defoe’s and Aesop’s illustrations access and recapitulate a mythos about the bear that would have been debunked but available to an early modern audience. As Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray suggest, “bear whelps were thought to be born as lumps of matter—sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything—that the mother bear then licked into shape” (xvi). The potential for bear mouths, especially maternal bear mouths, to effect into being is fundamentally a gesture of worldbuilding.xiii There is then something about the bear mouth that enacts a genesis by way of the tongue. In Aesop, it is the bear who places its muzzle to the human’s ear: the bear is the arbiter of moral advice who pushes the second friend to an epiphany on friendship. The bear’s words “lick into shape” the moral reckoning. Defoe—writing after and during Aesop’s popularity in English print culture—implicitly or explicitly recycles this narrative through inversion. The bear in Defoe is mute and instead the ursine voice is transmuted through a pun on “muzzle.” When Friday “clapt the Muzzle of his Piece into his Ear,” the result is a punny elision of animal and object. The double meaning of “muzzle” positions it both as an extension of the gun, and thus the means of facilitating violence, and also a reframing of an animal’s muzzle or snout. The gun/animal elision suggests a particular ferocity and capability of violence, both of which can be harnessed for and by humans.xiv At the same time, Friday’s placement of the “muzzle” to the bear’s ear also instills a particular physical closeness, which is, of course, undergirded by violence.

Whereas Aesop’s bear may be merely instrument to the fable’s moral, the bear in Robinson Crusoe is not, and there is no moral to be learned from the episode. Even more, it is in this moment that Crusoe’s narrative confuses and repurposes the use of creature. Following the insistence that Friday’s bearbaiting is “the greatest Diversion imaginable,” Crusoe details a curious ethological history of the bear:

[T]he Bear is a heavy, clumsey Creature, and does not gallop as the Wolf does […] so he has two particular qualities […] First, As to Men, who are not his proper Prey […] he does not usually attempt them, unless they first attack him: On the contrary, if you meet him in the Woods, if you don’t meddle with him, he won’t meddle with you; but then you must take Care to be very Civil to him, and give him the Road; for he is a very nice Gentleman. (246-7)

These details are included in a single paragraph, a paragraph that offers the bear as both a “clumsey Creature” and a “very nice Gentleman.” The gendering of the bear aside, Crusoe’s explication of observational (but completely fictionalized) ursine behavior doubles-down on the overlap wherein creatures can simultaneously be gentlemen. Whereas Crusoe’s emphasis on creature here pinpoints a particular physiology—the bear’s weight and clumsiness confer creatureliness—the disclosure of the bear as gentleman follows an understanding of the bear as mirroring civility, which is itself not a physical characteristic but rather a personality trait—the way one comports oneself.xv The hybridity that Crusoe describes here locates creatureliness within the parameters of the body and gentility within the confines of cognition, emotion, and sociality. But this civility quickly sours, as Crusoe explains, when the bear has been affronted.

[I]f you throw or toss any Thing at him, and it hits him, though it were but a bit of a Stick, as big as your Finger, he takes it for an Affront, and sets all his other Business aside to pursue his Revenge; for he will have Satisfaction in Point of Honour; that is his first Quality: The next is, That if he be once affronted, he will never leave you, Night or Day, till he has his Revenge, but follows at a good round rate, till he overtakes you. (247)

Crusoe’s haunting depiction of bears as vengeful demons hellbent on satisfaction is jarring. What is unclear is if this subsequent depiction of the bear is somehow indicative of the animal’s creaturely state—animals can be affronted and enact retribution—or his gentlemanly state, which might suggest that the capacity for revenge is reserved for humans alone, a topos that is well-situated throughout eighteenth-century fiction. Regardless of what Crusoe intends to suggest here, it is the implicit violence that might accompany the revenge—“he will never leave you till he has his Revenge”—that muddies certifying the bear as either creature or gentleman, and acknowledges a blending of human and nonhuman capacities for revenge. For Crusoe, the bear is clearly both, but whether this elevates animals by way of anthropocentrism or derogates humans to vicious beasts remains unclear.

Friday, My Pet

Crusoe may be the David Attenborough of the bear episode, narrating it with an entertained but aloof distance, but Friday is the participant who deliberately engages the bear for the viewing pleasure of Crusoe and the other expeditioners. “O! O! O! says Friday, three Times, pointing to him [the bear]; O Master! You give me te Leave! Me shakee te Hand with him: Me make you good laugh” (247). Friday repeats this line three times, which seems to follow the triplet “O!” that marks both his excitement and some form of onomatopoeic expression meant to visualize Friday’s mouth in action. Crusoe’s insistence that Friday repeats himself three times has additional import given that this is the moment that triangulates the human/animal hybridity among Crusoe, Friday, and the bear. Put another way, Crusoe reminds us of this triplet repetition as a formal indicator that draws our attention to this scene, and in so doing, highlights the blurring that transpires between colonizer, colonized-racialized companion, and creaturely-gentlemanly bear. The violence conducted under the auspices of entertainment makes fuzzy the categories of creatureliness and colonization. Crusoe maintains little control over the entire episode and instead is at the mercy of Friday’s secretive bearbaiting mission and the bear’s somewhat unpredictable actions. Friday’s position as both colonial understudy and creature (by Crusoe’s assessment, at least) obscures his ability to properly dispense with the bear: that is, to kill it outright, rather than to engage with it in a playful, didactic way.

Back on the Island of Despair, Crusoe enfolds Friday into his island life as a means of domesticating the creature—a gesture of petkeeping—and blurring the boundaries between humanness and creatureliness. Srinivas Aravamudan has similarly read Friday as Crusoe’s pet, which, in Aravamudan’s larger characterization of petkeeping in Tropicopolitans, becomes an identity that mediates racialized otherness, obeisance, and inferiority: “Friday is also Crusoe’s pet, approaching him on all fours, digging a hole in the sand with his bare hands, following him close at his heels, and even calling his own father, Friday Sr., ‘an Ugly Dog.’” (75).xvi The concept of creature similarly blends these categories. “It came now,” Crusoe narrates, “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” (171). In what follows, and under the auspices of religion, Crusoe morphs Friday into his industrious servant and companion, though the narrative does not release Friday from the confines of creatureliness. Turning to the last year of his durance on the island—and having fully proselytized Friday at this point—Crusoe details:

I was now entred on the seven-and-twentieth Year of my Captivity in this Place; though the three last Years that I had this Creature with me ought rather to be left out of the Account, my Habitation being quite of another kind than in all the rest of the Time. (193)

In one reading, Crusoe’s use of “this creature” to refer to Friday is innocent; it is merely a pet name that establishes familiarity and endears one to the other. But I am less convinced that Crusoe’s dependency and engagement with Friday is indicative of any form of mutual beneficence, which would be akin to a facile presumption of colonialism as that which is equally beneficial to colonizers and colonized. Despite teaching Friday to speak English, practice Protestantism, and model deft marksmanship, Crusoe’s recurrent reference to Friday as creature noticeably differentiates the two—Friday will never be Crusoe’s equal—while emphasizing the types of “pet names” or taxonomic categories that hierarchize their differences.

As with Xury, the journalistic narrative is adamant in reflecting the queer contingency the racialized other places on Crusoe. I employ “queer” here in its multitudinous dimensions: to acknowledge non-heterosexual relationality, to pinpoint a distortion of normative kinship models, and also in its baser form to signify strange, uncanny, or odd. Like Xury who seeks patriarchal Crusoe for protection from unknown and feral animal threats, Friday replicates this puppy dog act, a suggestive turn of phrase I will return to momentarily. Plotting his escape back home, Crusoe narrates his plan to Friday, who is incensed that Crusoe might wholly abandon him:

Why you angry mad with Friday? what me done? I ask’d him what he meant; I told him I was not angry with him at all. No angry! No angry! says he, repeating the Words several times; Why send Friday home away to my nation? Why (says I) Friday, did not you say you wish’d you were there? Yes, yes, says he, wish we both there, no wish Friday there, no master there. In a word, he would not think of going there without me. (190)

Crusoe’s paternalism is immersive and inescapable, and thus Friday’s intention to always be with his “master”—the first word Crusoe teaches him—underscores Friday’s reliance on Crusoe and positions him as subordinated sidekick.

Crusoe’s petkeeping practice similarly absorbs Friday into the fold, especially as it pertains to this moment of bearbaiting, resonating with the early modern practice of pitting one’s prized dog against the bear. The likeness I trace here is not an animalizing projection; it is one that Crusoe emphasizes in calling Friday—albeit playfully—a dog. Though Crusoe’s trusty dog dies earlier in the novel, Crusoe’s relationship with Friday seems to recast that human-master/animal-servant relationship through a literal pet name. And Crusoe underscores this in his humorous tête-à-tête with Friday during the bearbaiting: “You Dog [Friday], said I, is this your making us laugh? Come away, and take your Horse, that we may shoot the Creature” (248, emphases added). As Oscar Brownstein suggests in his overview of early modern bearbaiting,

Bears had proven themselves capable of imitating men for centuries by performing as gymnasts, wrestlers, and dancers; the bear’s size, strength, and upright fighting stance made him an inevitable sparring parting for the man-fighting mastiff. Thus in the traditional bear-baitings the gentry would wager on their own dogs in competition with others to score hits on several bears. (243)xvii

Friday is by Crusoe’s own words transformed into a “dog” that is risibly sicced on the bear.xviii Aravamudan reads Friday in mode with the trope of the enslaved human pet—Oroonoko being the exemplar—wherein the racialized, subservient body becomes the recipient of bodily violence, which is played out with comedic tones. But here, Friday is not the recipient of violence; he is the arbiter. In this same breath, Crusoe differentiates the appellation “dog” from “creature,” which seems to hierarchize the animal-other based on their proximity to and intimacy with Crusoe. Friday need no longer be creature because he has both been transformed into a dog—at least in title—and because creatures, in this context, are prey and recipients of violence. Even more strangely, Brownstein notes that “the bears and apes [and dogs forced upon them], unlike the bulls, were given human names” (243). Crusoe’s refusal here to use Friday’s non-consensually given name—that is, Friday—and instead to replace it with “dog,” positions Friday and the bear closer to one another in that neither are bestowed proper human names, which would seem to cast their lots together. This is cemented by the following sentence in which Crusoe uses the creature moniker to immediately refer back to Friday:

And as the nimble Creature run two foot for the Beast’s one, he turn’d on a sudden, on one side of us, and seeing a great Oak-tree, fit for his Purpose, he beckon’d to us to follow, and doubling his pace, he gets nimbly up the Tree, laying his Gun down upon the Ground. (248)

Friday in his navigation of the forest space becomes the creature, and the bear becomes a beast, which underscores an understanding of creatureliness for Crusoe as contingent on spatial distance and difference from his own embodiment, habits, and mannerisms.

The metamorphosis wherein Friday becomes creaturely in this moment is similarly echoed in the illustration to Aesop’s “Two Friends, and a Bear,” which I above located as an ursine cultural accompaniment to Robinson Crusoe. The woodcut that accompanies “Two Friends, and a Bear” seems to amplify the disorientation of this fable given that there are neither two human friends nor a bear illustrated (Fig. 1). Instead, the woodcut features two wolves—another creature of infinite importance with which I conclude—who have cornered a man in the crook of a tree. Despite this printing mishap, or, at best, considerable artistic license, I want to read the dissociative nature of the fable and the woodcut as integral to understanding the elision between human and nonhuman animal, especially as it may pertain to understanding the bear.xix In the woodcut, the two friends are transformed into animals themselves: one stands aggressively on the left while the other seems to pant in pain, perhaps a reaction to the axe lodged in its back. The aggressive wolf on the left comes to the defense of the wolf on the right, having successfully scared the hunter—a hunter that bears a striking resemblance to the illustration of Crusoe from the novel’s first edition—up a tree. By numbers alone, the woodcut seems to transmogrify the two friends into two wolves and the bear into the man. In both woodcut and fable, the single entity (bear/man) is the aggressor who is capable of doing harm, and the aggrieved parties are those two whose numbers exceed that of the singleton. Such a reading of this woodcut further mires the fungible, porous nature of animal/human hybridity that is at the heart of both Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe. The woodcut offers a visual illustration of the interchangeability of human/animal hybrids. Inasmuch that the woodcut does not portray the “creature” described by the accompanying fable, it is the woodcut alongside the fable that enables a discursive episteme wherein creatureliness is a status of ambiguous being.

Figure 1. Illustration from Aesop’s “Two Friends, and a Bear” in A new translation of Æsop’s Fables (1708). Google Books.

 

 

Bear-y Funny

In staging bearbaiting, Defoe provides an opportunity to reconsider Aesop’s narrative and the publisher’s woodcut in their rendering of human-bear relations. Despite Crusoe’s warning to readers to heed an encountered bear, Friday does not abide the caution and instead takes great pleasure in antagonizing the animal. Having successfully bid the bear to follow him up a tree, Friday prepares the cruel act that is meant to garner laughter: “Ha, says he [Friday] to us, now you see me teachee the Bear dance” (248). Upon seeing the bough shake, “indeed we did laugh heartily” (248). Like Crusoe’s didacticism before him, Friday here intends to relay this model of education by “teachee” the bear to dance. Whereas Crusoe’s lessons are seen as serious and useful—religion, gunmanship, food customs—this lesson is one that serves no use, and it is the uselessness of dance that subtends the humorous appeal. In order for the bear to learn the dance, Friday must first model it: “Friday danc’d so much, and the Bear stood so ticklish, that we had laughing enough indeed” (249). Friday’s bearbaiting coincides with and is an extension of Crusoe’s colonizing mission, and yet perverts that mission by making a comedy show out of a creature who is about to be ruthlessly and senselessly murdered.

But the dancing is not the “funniest” part of the episode; the murder is. “No shoot, says Friday, no yet, me shoot now, me no kill; me stay, give you one more laugh” (249). With his audience awaiting the graphic punchline, Friday descends the tree, picks up his rifle, and awaits the bear’s pursuit.

[A]t this Juncture, and just before he [the bear] could set his hind Feet upon the Ground, Friday stept up close to him, clapt the Muzzle of his Piece into his Ear, and shot him dead as a Stone. Then the Rogue turn’d about, to see if we did not laugh, and when he saw were pleas’d by our looks, he falls a laughing himself very loud; so we kill Bear in my Country, says Friday; so you kill them, says I, Why you have no Guns; No, says he, no Gun but shoot, great much long Arrow. This was indeed a good Diversion to us. (249)

Though bears are found in a variety of locations across the globe, it is unlikely that Friday would have been familiar with any bear species given the approximate location of the Island of Despair. Alexander Selkirk, the sensational figure on whom Crusoe is based, was found on what is today the San Fernández Islands—one of which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966—off the western coast of Chile. The only species of bear indigenous to South America is the Spectacled Bear, which is found exclusively in the Andes Mountains. As Keymer notes with regards to the wolf attack that precedes the bear incident: “wolves in America are to be found as far south as Mexico, though not in Friday’s homeland” (306). Given the unlikelihood that bears too would be autochthonous to “Friday’s homeland,” Defoe makes a racialized proxy of Friday, which serves a troubling purpose. This minor detail metonymizes Friday as a racialized catch-all that appears as universally indigenous given his alleged familiarity with all forms of flora and fauna. The rendered effect engenders something like hybridity wherein Friday must navigate (often unsuccessfully, according to the narrative) human/animal and colonizing/colonized positions. It is the familiarity with nature—especially his knowledge of bears and wolves—that positions Friday as lesser than Crusoe, closer to animality, and thus less civilized. Such an implicit (racist) elision has historically vilified indigeneity and deprivileged indigenous modes of being and knowledge. Friday’s supposed foreknowledge of bears furthers this colonizing divide, drawing Friday closer to the naturalness of the bear (and thus wild) and further from Crusoe’s hallmark of “civilized” masculinity.

The appellation creature, though, returns immediately following the bear’s death, and it is this moment that tips the scales of understanding a fundamental aspect of creatureliness within the novel: deathliness. “We should certainly have taken the Skin,” Crusoe writes, “of this monstrous Creature off, which was worth saving, but we had three Leagues to go, and our Guide hasten’d us, so we left him, and went forward on our Journey” (250). Not only does the bear episode convey the moment of bearbaiting as humorous entertainment, but it renders the “monstrous Creature” detritus. A sense of creatureliness is then imbued with both its capacity to die an unimportant death and also to be death itself: to rot in place, brain matter spewed outwards. It is in this way that the bear as creature epitomizes the liminality at stake in one of the many definitions of the word offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a living or inanimate being.” The short-lived bear episode demonstrates the short-livelihood of creaturely habitation within the novel, especially as it mediates the necropolitical possibility of becoming death: a death that is neither useful nor can be used.xx The waste of the bear’s body—it is not eaten, shorn, or kept—reflects the uselessness of not only the ursine body but also of the senseless violence that similarly serves no point. By the narrative’s standards, the bear’s single value is a comical death that perversely satiates the travelers’ expeditionary ennui.

The sense that creatureliness is a mediation of the peripheries of life and death, though, becomes an epistemology (perhaps even an ontology) that Crusoe weaves throughout his narrative. In the singular moment wherein Crusoe refers to himself as creature, this mediation becomes abundantly visible. As the epigraph to this article foreshadowed, when Crusoe catches a fever on the Island, he cries out in anguish, “Lord! what a miserable creature am I? If I should be sick, I shall certainly die for want of help; and what will become of me! Then the tears burst out of my eyes, and I could say no more for a good while” (78). As with the bear, Crusoe registers an identical reading of creatureliness that signals sickliness and thus proximity to death. This is not to suggest that Crusoe sees the bear’s creatureliness similar to his own. Friday’s creatureliness may be adjacent to the bear’s, but Crusoe works diligently to describe himself as both different than and superior to both. In his exasperated state, Crusoe self-identifies as a “miserable creature” to approximate his near-death state, and thus his distance from the livelihood that is indicative of non-creatureliness. Creatures then are those enacted against, often without mercy, who fence-sit on the borders of life and death, often succumbing to the latter, thus positioning their existence as ephemeral, and with the case of the bear, meaningless.

Creatures Fight Back

The last use of creature in the novel does not refer to Crusoe, Friday, or the bear. Instead, following the bear’s death, the expeditioners face an onslaught of “ravenous” and “hellish” creatures: wolves (252-3).

But here we had a most horrible Sight; for riding up to the Entrance where the Horse came out, we found the Carcass of another Horse and of two Men, devour’d by the ravenous Creatures; and one of the Men was no doubt the same who we heard fir’d the gun; for there lay a Gun just by him, fir’d off; but as to the Man, his Head and the upper Part of his Body was eaten up. This fill’d us with Horror, and we knew not what Course to take; but the Creatures resolv’d us soon, for they gather’d about us presently, in hopes of Prey; and I verily believe there were three hundred of them. (252)

The multitudinous creatures that populate the narrative return in full force here, outnumbering with bloodlust. From these final moments of the novel, it is impossible not to locate a reading of the creature with an ominous foretelling of death, an uncomfortable radical otherness that stuns the human. Whereas the bear is the recipient of gross and allegedly humorous violence, it is the wolves who are capable of offering a retributive justice.xxi If the wolf is enfolded into the pack of all other creatures throughout the novel, then it is this attack that centrally demonstrates how creatureliness can dethrone human supremacy by reciprocating the exercise of violence. It is as if, in the amassing of “three hundred of them,” the novel’s creatures return—some borne from their deaths—in full, frightening force. But the creaturely retributive justice is not entirely successful. After killing “three Score of them [wolves]” and surviving the incident with Friday, Crusoe reiterates the threat of the creature:

For my Part, I was never so sensible of Danger in my Life; for, seeing above three hundred Devils come roaring and open mouth’d to devour us, and having nothing to shelter us, or retreat to, I gave my self over for lost; and as it was, I believe, I shall never care to cross those Mountains again: I think I would much rather go a thousand Leagues by Sea, though I were sure to meet with a Storm once a Week. (254-5)xxii

For Crusoe, creatureliness is escapable, but only within the thin margin of his life, and there are casualties: both human and nonhuman. The creature comforts (and often discomforts) Crusoe experiences and narrates into being are not singular objects that are bereft of agency, feeling, or possibility. Creatures, by the novel’s wielding, violate and are violated, enact revenge, and serve as reminders of a lesser state of being that is proximate to death. Robinson Crusoe then demonstrates the potential for the subaltern creature to intervene by forcing the renegotiation of hierarchies of supremacy, and that is of great comfort to this reader.

University of California, Santa Barbara

 

NOTES

iBorrowed from the French creatur, which is itself acquired from the Latin creātor, the word originally denotes a creator, founder, or appointed official, often within religious contexts. The Oxford English Dictionary reports five different noun uses of “creature,” which make following Defoe’s use of the word a fascinating, yet difficult, feat for close readers. By 1300, creature signified “a product of creative action” or could be used to suggest “a human being, often conjured up with affective feeling.” By the end of the fourteenth century, a creature could have referred to “a living or inanimate being; an animal as distinct from a person.” But this is complicated by the fact that in the next century, the term is used to signify both “a reprehensible or despicable person,” as well as “a material comfort, something that promotes well-being.”

ii Such an undertaking is in dialogue with John Morillo’s recent endeavor to unfetter a particular genre of animal semiotics held captive by Cartesianism within early modernity. In The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, Morillo claims that “posthumanism [the dislocation of anthropocentrism and the emphasized visibility of nonhuman animals in philosophy] appears on the intellectual horizon during the eighteenth century” (xxiv). While I refrain from wading into the philosophical morass of posthumanism, Morillo’s examination of feeling for the animal and how such affects reorganize human subject positions is apposite here.

iii For a separate discussion of cultural/racial hybridity in the novel (specifically that of the Spanish sailors), see Roxann Wheeler’s “Racial Multiplicity in Crusoe.” Christopher Loar’s “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe” also offers a reading of Friday’s hybridity within a colonial/postcolonial dialectic.

iv Lucinda Cole’s Imperfect Creatures magnifies a definition of the creature to emphasize its association with early modern vermin or, “a category of creatures defined according to an often unstable nexus of traits: usually small, always vile, and in large numbers, noxious and even dangerous to agricultural and sociopolitical orders” (1).

v See “Defoe’s ‘horse-rhetorick’: Human Animals and Gender” and “Swallows and Hounds: Defoe’s Thinking Animals,” respectively.

vi Defoe makes explicit mention of the bear garden—demonstrating its survival—in 1708 when he complains that his reading public has forsaken him. He writes, “Had the scribbling World been pleas’d to leave me where they found me, I had left them and Newgate both together […]? ‘Tis really something hard, that after all the Mortifications that they have been put upon a poor abdicated Author, in their scurrilous Street Ribaldry, and Bear Garden Usage, some in Prose, and some in those terrible Lines they call Verse […] whatever I did in the Question, every thing they think an Author deserves to be abus’d for, must be mine.” Daniel Defoe, An Elegy on the Author of the True-born-English Man, (London: 1708), 2.

vii Fudge, as if by kismet, also opens her book with the bear garden: “There was a Bear Garden in early modern London. In it the spectators watched a pack of mastiffs attack an ape on horseback and assault bears whose teeth and claws had been removed” (1). Andreas Höefele’s Stage, Stake, and Scaffold similarly opens with the bear garden as a way of situating the discussion of Shakespearean theater and what Höefele sees as parallel histories: animal abuse and capital punishment.

viii James Stokes’s “Bull and Bear Baiting: The Gentles’ Sport” demonstrates the popularity of animal baiting in Somerset in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His graphs and images, which reveal the overwhelming practice, are particularly striking.

ix The dogs used for bearbaiting were often English bulldogs or English mastiffs. In many ways the dogs stand in for a particular form of English nationalism by way of canine identification. In Brownstein’s words, “to a large extent the story of bear-baiting is the story of the English mastiff, a particularly large and potentially ferocious animal for which England was famous as early as Roman times” (243). On bears’ extinction in England, see Brownstein 244.

x Keymer wagers that Defoe may have, in fact, written this piece (306).

xi Though I was unable to find a 1719 version of Aesop’s Fables, because there are editions published both before and after 1719, I have every reason to believe that this particular anecdote was circulating among a literate public at the time of Robinson Crusoe’s writing and publication.

xii Tobias Menely’s The Animal Claim offers another discussion of animal voices within the eighteenth century, especially with regards to sensibility and the cultural zeitgeist of sympathy.

xiiiKeenleyside’s chapter on Defoe and creatureliness focuses also on the mouth especially that of Poll, Crusoe’s parrot.

xiv See Christopher Loar’s “Talking Guns and Savage Spaces: Daniel Defoe’s Civilizing Technologies” in Political Magic for a separate reading of the fraught relationship between technologies of violence and the racialized other.

xv This description of the gentlemanly bear is resonant with Margaret Cavendish’s depiction of the “Bear-men” in The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666) who are characterized as showing “all civility and kindness imaginable” (157). See John Morillo’s The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660-1800 for a reading of Cavendish’s animal hybridity.

xvi For another discussion of eighteenth-century petkeeping, see Laura Brown’s Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes.

xvii For a separate literary iteration of a similar moment, see Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” (1810) wherein a bear is endowed with uncanny humanoid abilities: fencing. I am grateful to Amelia Greene for this recommendation, and her careful reading.

xviii Brownstein notes the gambling aspect of this sport, and the investment in dogs: “But the spectator’s interest was in the dogs, their willingness, pursuit, attack, and tenacity; it was the dogs which won the prizes which were offered and it was the dog’s owners, primarily, who made the wagers” (243-4).

xix For a history of woodcuts and their recycled nature, see Megan E. Palmer “Cutting through the Woodcut: Early Modern Time, Craft and Media” and Kristen McCants, “Making an Impression: Creating the Woodcut in Early Modern Broadside Ballads,” both in The Making of a Broadside Ballad.

xx As J.A. Mbembe articulates in “Necropolitics,” the apogee of the state’s sovereignty is realized in the “power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11).

xxi For a later eighteenth-century essay that depicts wolf cognition and rationalizes lupine animosity towards humans, see “On the Intelligence of Animals” (1792).

xxii For a separate reading of the storm and new materialist forms of violence in Robinson Crusoe, see my forthcoming essay “Taken by Storm.”

WORKS CITED

Aesop. A new translation of Æsop’s Fables, adorn’d with cutts; suited to the Fables copied from the Frankfort edition: by the Most Ingenious Artist Christopher van Sycham. The Whole being redered in a Plain, Easy, and Familiar Style, adapted to the Meanest Capacities. Nevertheless corrected and reform’d from the grossness of the language, and Poorness of the Verse us’d in the now vulgar translation: the morals also more accuratel improv’d; together with reflections on each fable, in verse. By Joseph Jackson, Med. London, 1708. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. Duke UP, 1999.

Bach, Rebecca Ann. “Bearbaiting, Dominion, and Colonialism.” Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Edited by Joyce Green MacDonald. Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1997, pp. 19-35.

“bear-baiting.” A Dictionary of British History. Edited by John Cannon and Robert Crowcroft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2015. Oxford Reference.

Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes. Cornell UP, 2010.

Brownstein, Oscar. “The Popularity of Baiting in England before 1600: A Study in Social and Theatrical History.” Educational Theatre Journal 21.3, 1969, pp. 237-250.

Chow, Jeremy. “Taken by Storm: Robinson Crusoe and Aqueous Violence.” Robinson Crusoe After 300 Years. Edited by Andreas Mueller and Glynis Ridley, Bucknell UP, Forthcoming 2018.

Cole, Lucinda. Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740. U of Michigan Press, 2016.

“Creature.” Noun. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44082

Defoe, Daniel. An Elegy on the Author of the True-born-English Man. London, 1708.

—. Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Thomas Keymer, Oxford UP, 2007.

Fudge, Erica. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. U of Illinois Press, 2002.

Gregg, Stephen H. “Defoe’s ‘horse-rhetorick’: Human Animals and Gender.” Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe. Edited by Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson, AMS Press, 2014, pp. 235-250.

—. “Swallows and Hounds: Defoe’s Thinking Animals.” Digital Defoe 5.1, 2013, pp. 20-33.

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Hargreaves, A.S. “bear-baiting.” The Oxford Companion to British History. Edited by Robert Crowcroft and John Cannon, Oxford UP, 2nd ed., 2015. Oxford Reference.

Höfele, Andreas. Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Oxford UP, 2011.

Hotson, J. Leslie. “Bear Gardens and Bear-Baiting during the Commonwealth.” PMLA 40.2, 1925, pp. 276-288.

Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. U of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Loar, Christopher. “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth Century Fiction 19.1-2, 2006, pp. 1-20.

—. Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750. New York: Fordham UP, 2014.

Loomis, Catherine and Sid Ray, editors. Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage. Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2016.

Mbembe, J.A. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 2003, pp. 11-40.

Menely, Tobias. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. U of Chicago Press, 2015.

McCants, Kristen. “Making an Impression: Creating the Woodcut in Early Modern Broadside Ballads.” The Making of a Broadside Ballad. Edited by Andrew Griffin, Patricia Fumerton, and Carl Stahmer. Santa Barbara: EMC Imprint, 2016. http://press.emcimprint.english.ucsb.edu/the-making-of-a-broadside-ballad/woodcutting

Morillo, John. The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin. U of Delaware Press, 2018.

“On the Intelligence of Animals.” The Lady’s Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge 1, Nov. 1792, pp. 270-77. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online.

Palmer, Megan E. “Cutting through the Woodcut: Early Modern Time, Craft and Media.” The Making of a Broadside Ballad. Edited by Andrew Griffin, Patricia Fumerton, and Carl Stahmer. Santa Barbara: EMC Imprint, 2016. http://press.emcimprint.english.ucsb.edu/the-making-of-a-broadside-ballad/woodcutting

Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Rutgers UP, 2nd ed., 2004.

Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. U of Chicago Press, 2013.

Scott-Warren, Jason. “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1, 2003, pp. 63-82.

Stokes, James. “Bull and Bear Baiting in Somerset.” English Parish Drama. Edited by Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Husken, Rodopi, 1996, pp. 65-80.

Wheeler, Roxann. “‘My Savage,’ ‘My Man’: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH 62.4, 1995, pp. 821-861.

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Martial Manners: Revisiting the Cavalier Mode in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier

Máire MacNeill

CRITICAL ANALYSES of Daniel Defoe’s 1720 novel Memoirs of a Cavalier have focused on the work as an attempt to revise popular histories of the Civil War to reflect the political theatre of the early eighteenth century. According to Nicholas Seager, the novel was a bid to “correct the party-inflected historiography of the English Civil War” by drawing upon the many memoirs and reflections of the conflict that began to appear in print from the end of the seventeenth century (481). Elsewhere, both Paula Backscheider (123-35) and Robert Mayer (198-99) argue that the aim of the Memoirs was to remind its readers (faced with the imminent threat of Jacobite uprising) of the horrors of civil war, while Morgan Strawn reads the novel as a call for a “vigorous monarch” to uphold the state religions of England and Scotland, lest hostile nations exploit dissent for their own benefit (330-31). Andrea Walkden, in her analysis of the novel as an attack on seventeenth-century aristocratic kingship, reads it as a demonstration of the hero’s increasing disillusionment with the royalist cause and his strained heroic aspirations (1064), while Katherine Armstrong goes further, reading the novel as a deliberate exposure of royalist motives and a justification of the 1688 Revolutionary Settlement (29-50). Read through these critics, the Memoirs are revealed as a work that courts the political past while simultaneously editing it so that historical circumstance might better conform to the mores of the early eighteenth-century mainstream, which largely favored stability, toleration, and representative government.

While these readings of the text have been primarily concerned with its explorations of the nature of war, politics, and heroism—understandably so, given the novel’s narrative focus on martial campaigns—critics have paid less attention to the Cavalier’s behavior and activities outside of a wartime context. This is in spite of the fact that the cavalier social “type” has been associated with distinctive fashions, attitudes, and modes of social conduct since the middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the image of the cavalier that exists in the popular imagination—he of the lavish dress, the bouts of drinking, the public swagger, and the Continental manners—was as crucial to the construction of cavalier mythology as his political and martial affiliations. The cavalier aesthetic proposed a masculine identity equally designed for both the pleasures of peace and the glory of war: a spy who crept into a royalist camp in 1642 described seeing many of these Cabalieros richly deck’d with long shag hair, reaching down to their heels who were Commanders to a Troop of horse that were all armed in jet; the Coronet bearing these words in the Banner, Damme we’ll win the day (Nocturnall Occurrances sig A2v). The report may have been a piece of parliamentarian propaganda, but it was propaganda that the cavaliers themselves were willing to adopt, as Thomas Corns has suggested (52-53). Throughout the 1640s and 1650s, the cavalier configured his social performance (and particularly his heavy drinking) as part of his soldierly identity and loyalty to his king (Lemon 157-161). For Charles Cotton, “Wine makes the Soul for Action fit” (443), while Robert Heath demanded: “Let’s drink then as we us’d to fight, / As long as we can stand” (22). Defoe, writing over sixty years after Cotton, Heath, and other cavalier poets, also uses his narrator’s social behaviour to inform his political and martial sensibilities, but disrupts the sociable/warlike balance to shift the cavalier hero’s reputation away from convivial excess.

Defoe published the Memoirs at the end of a decade which had capitalized on scrutinizing male manners against the social norms of the previous generation and promoting a version of politeness that brought “aesthetic concerns in close contiguity with ethical ones” (Klein 4). Polite gentlemen were now expected to eschew competition and favor order, negotiation, and eloquence as solutions for resolving their disagreements. These new social expectations were met with hostility by some, who argued that politeness was merely politesse, a French import, and relied heavily on social intercourse with women, who would act as compassionate guides through this new realm of manners and morals. Female influence, critics claimed, would only serve to dilute rugged English masculinity. This was a misrepresentation of many advocates of politeness: for Shaftesbury, for example, politeness could only be achieved through friendships between educated men. Likewise, many proponents of good manners emphasized the importance of plain, unaffected speech, and disliked stiff and grandiose conversation. Nevertheless, as Michèle Cohen has shown (44-61), criticisms of politeness as effeminate resounded throughout the eighteenth century.

For critics invested in soldiers as social performers, the question of whether military men could truly display polite behavior became an interesting thought experiment, and Julia Banister has drawn attention to Richard Steele’s struggle to make soldiering compatible with politeness (26-33). While soldiers’ profession placed them in an inescapably competitive (and primarily masculine) environment, their heroic return to England as defenders of the nation’s honor helped to induct them into polite society. This ability to occupy both separate worlds of war and society would seem to make the soldier a perfect candidate for a figure who could be both polite and manly. Yet while a fictional soldier like Steele’s Captain Sentry might glide through London coffee houses and dinner parties, diverting his friends with stories of wartime valor and fraternizing with landed gentlemen as their equal, his is a “frank,” “irregular” type of sociability, distinct from other men’s politeness (Steele 2:368). In the Memoirs, Defoe likewise commends the narrator’s “Soldierly Stile” in the novel’s preface (sig A2v), and curtails his hero’s toleration for social norms—the Cavalier clashes with both “bad” foreigners and other cavaliers who engage in the riotous social performance of the traditional cavalier narrative—and foregrounds his friendships with other soldiers. Upending narratives of cavalier exile during the Interregnum, Defoe’s Cavalier specifically elects to go abroad in the capacity of a soldier rather than as a scholar or private gentleman, taking with him his friend “Captain” Fielding, a man who “had certainly the Lines of a Soldier drawn into his Countenance” (Memoirs 5-6). Destined for war even as he sets out to tour Europe, the Cavalier’s narrative should be read in the context of eighteenth-century debates about soldierly civility.

In fashioning his hero, Defoe had eighty years of well-established (if heavily mythologized) cavalier behavior to draw upon, and in select passages throughout the novel, he manipulates and subverts traditional narratives of cavalier social performance so that his hero’s conduct more closely resembles eighteenth-century civility. Defoe’s Memoirs were one of several works written in the early eighteenth century whose form suggests an interest in freeing the cavalier from poetic fancy. While the earlier cavalier mode had been celebrated chiefly in poetry and drama, genres that privilege aesthetics and license whimsy, Defoe utilized prose much like more recent representations of the cavalier, which included the “commonsense” Spectator papers and authentic Civil War biographies, such as Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698-99) and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702-04). Employing a prose style that underplays the action, as Melinda Rabb has noticed (121-123), Defoe’s plain and unaffected English invites his readers to accept the truth of his narrative. Likewise, his emphasis on martial events, even subtitling the work “A Military Journal,” also shifts away from the sociable/warlike balance of the historical cavalier. Yet by noticing Defoe’s debt to biography and journalism, we should not be indifferent to the Memoirs as fiction; indeed, Defoe “was courting [] an identification” of his novel with contemporary romances, and some readers believed it to be fiction at least as early as the 1750s (Seager 491-93). Despite cavalier literature’s new trade in plain-spokenness, Defoe exploits the sobriety of prose to produce a text that is often ambiguous in what it describes. My reading of the Memoirs is less cynical than Sharon Alker’s, which suggests that the novel shows a narrator who elides his participation in wartime violence to sustain the veneer of heroism, but whose psyche eventually breaks down after the trauma of war. Nevertheless, Alker is correct to query the transparency of the narrative: she, like Rabb, has drawn attention to the Cavalier’s evasiveness when describing the atrocities of war. Among the novel’s scattering of social performances, I wish to analyse an earlier example of his ambiguity in his description of an encounter with an Italian courtesan, to show that Defoe deliberately obscures his account to avoid painting his hero as either a rake or a prude.

In Memoirs of a Cavalier, Defoe counters the depictions of the drunken revelry, sexual braggadocio, casual violence, and elaborate costumes which had traditionally been so closely linked to the cavaliers, and so offers up a new version of the royalist hero for an eighteenth-century audience. No longer one who acted upon strong passions such as love, honor, and hatred, the cavalier is now a man who prized contemplation, fraternity, and social responsibility, and his oft-expressed distaste for French and Italian culture punctures the historical obsession with Continental fashion. Concurrently, the Cavalier shuns many of the qualities of eighteenth-century politeness, such as polished conversation or friendship with women, and thereby evades some of the sharpest criticism against polite behavior. Examining the Cavalier’s social performance in the Memoirs enables us to decipher the vexed and unstable attitudes towards these controversial seventeenth-century heroes and contribute towards the on-going discussion of how men should behave in the early Hanoverian age.

I.

The cavalier of the mid-seventeenth century, as royalists and royalist-sympathizers depicted him, often appears as a chivalric ideal, a descendent of the “parfit gentil” knight of old, whose actions are dictated by the principle of honor. Largely conservative, these works put forward a narrative that idealizes a pre-bellum age of patrician political domination and social pleasures. Lovelace’s cavalier who longs for a bucolic arcadia away from the battlefield has become the prototypical example of this type, but similar variants abound in seventeenth-century literature. For example, in Gondibert (1651), William Davenant sketches out a cavalier ideal of a benevolent government populated by well-educated aristocrats. The cavaliers’ natural place at the center of society was further bolstered by their appreciation for the “good life,” as Earl Miner names it (43-99). Cavalier literature praised the ale-house as a central gathering place for men to meet, drink, and enjoy good fellowship with one another, “an expression and reinforcement of personal and lasting bonds of early modern ‘friendship’” (Hailwood 218), and depictions of the louche cavalier swagger thrived in the drinking songs that connected cavalier freedom with loyalty to the king and hatred of Cromwell: “Hey for Cavaliers, / Hoe for Cavaliers, / Drink for Cavaliers, / Fight for Cavaliers, / Dub-a-dub, dub-a-dub, / Have at Old Beelzebub, / Oliver stinks for fear” (Butler 313).

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 would seem to confirm cavalier supremacy. The “good life” hailed in earlier royalist literature came together with the hedonistic pursuits cavaliers had enjoyed during their years in exile on the Continent. According to Charles II, the age’s great arbiter of materialist taste: “All appetites are free and [] God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure” (von Ranke 79). Their spectacular appetites bled into the literature written in sympathy towards the cavalier ethos, which balanced the quasi-chivalric narrative with the enthusiasm for perpetual revelry. For example, George Etherege’s The Comical Revenge (1663) offers two equally-flattering perspectives on the cavalier in the parallel high and low plots. The first utilizes the classical cavalier themes of love and honor to depict a love triangle which ends in a duel. The second plot is a comic portrait of the capers of young cavaliers in Interregnum London, who enjoy drinking and casual dalliances, often mirroring the structure and events of the high plot. Later authors resisted the cavalier epithet for their heroes but upheld their social performances in the rakes of the 1670s. Throughout this decade, heroes continued the cavalier pastimes of drinking, whoring, and fighting, and were not condemned for doing so. Examining the protagonists of Aphra Behn’s plays, Robert Markley writes that “the innate goodness of her heroes ‘naturally’ leads them to embrace both Royalist loyalties and libertine lifestyles; wenching, drinking, and spending money are ‘natural’ manifestations of their inherent virtue” (117). The mode peaked with Behn’s The Rover (1677), written in conscious imitation of the cavalier aesthetic of the 1650s to produce a nuanced portrait of the cavalier social performance, one that heavily mythologizes the shared experiences of the men who had spent the Interregnum years together. As one of the cavaliers concludes: “Sir, my Friends are Gentlemen, and ought to be Esteem’d for their Misfortunes, since they have the Glory to suffer with the best of Men and Kings” (82).

It was not until the 1690s that the cavalier narrative came to be seriously reconsidered. A new “type” of soldier emerged after the 1688 Revolution: the gentleman officer, who entered the public imagination due to the significant army reforms initiated by William III. Unlike the cavalier, whose historical military experience had always been balanced by his social performance, the gentleman officer was defined by his status as a well-behaved soldier. The reformed army demanded patriotic loyalty, boasted a meritocratic approach to advancement, and highlighted a modest, unaffected self-conduct as the mark of a gentleman officer: martial victories were won by soldiers who were both mannerly and moral. The ideology of the reformed army quickly entered the public imagination through popular plays like The Constant Couple (1699), while the cavalier was aging out of relevance; fictional characters in the 1690s and 1700s who were explicitly identified as cavaliers, such as Major-General Blunt in The Volunteers (1693), were old men, harmless and slightly foolish parental figures. The Rover was performed rarely, and when it was revived in the early eighteenth century, many of the racier lines were changed or eliminated, while the focus of the titular rover’s romantic plotline began to shift away from the tragic Spanish courtesan Angellica Bianca towards the high-spirited Hellena, whom he marries at the end of the play. The cavalier social performance was difficult to reconcile with the new soldierly ideal, and in 1699, James Wright spelled out the sentiment bluntly: “Cavalier is a Word as much out of Fashion as any of ‘em” (96-97).

Steele produced a more positive depiction of a cavalier in the form of Sir Roger de Coverley, who was introduced in the second issue of the Spectator in March 1711 and appeared as a regular character until he was killed off in October 1712, two months before the end of the periodical’s first run. As has already been suggested, the use of prose, a format with no obligation to follow the linguistic conventions or structural mnemonics of poetry and drama, gave Steele flexibility to fashion the cavalier in a way more palatable for early eighteenth-century London. An older man, de Coverley had participated in the cavalier social performance that dominated London society in the decades following the Restoration: he had been “a fine Gentleman, had often supped with my Lord Rochester and Sir George Etherege, fought a Duel upon his first coming to Town, and kick’d Bully Dawson” (1:8). But (as the references to the long-dead London icons firmly establish) this behavior is part of the distant past. In maturity, de Coverley participates in no activity that we associate with the traditional cavalier narrative: he rarely attends plays, exists in chaste devotion to his “Perverse Widow,” and is uninterested in wearing the latest fashionable clothing (1:8). His Tory politics are not those of a Jacobite, but rather a country squire, and he seeks to maintain stability rather than to incite revolution. In one number he describes receiving abuse from both roundheads and cavaliers during his childhood; “Sir Roger generally closes this Narrative with Reflections on the Mischief that Parties do in the Country; how they spoil good Neighbourhood, and make honest Gentlemen hate one another” (1:125), thus rejecting cavalier political loyalism. His present-day pastimes are strongly reminiscent of the “good life” seen in the pastoral cavalier literature of the pre-Restoration period. His social life is conducted in predominately male spaces, such as the London coffee shops and the country estate where he lives as a bachelor, surrounded by male servants, and which he runs as an idealized feudal system. His drinking habits are tame and jovial rather than dissolute: Mr Spectator notes with amusement that when de Coverley’s friends are unwell, he presses wine possets upon them, “for which reason that sort of People who are ever bewailing their Constitution in other Places are the Chearfullest imaginable when he is present” (2:157).

De Coverley was one of the most recognizable fictional cavaliers of the 1710s. He featured prominently in essays throughout the Spectator’s run, and numbers after his death include letters of condolence from the readership. The periodical itself remained very popular even after it ceased publication, and continued to be printed in collected volumes, which entered a fifth edition in 1720. Yet Steele never explicitly identifies him as a cavalier; it is an identity generated through the description of the cavalier social performances he conducted in the 1660s. Steele’s refusal to name him as a cavalier allows him to avoid the political connotations of the term and instead sentimentalize him as an old Tory “rather beloved than esteemed” (1:8), a man of common sense and social stability, who cherishes male friendship, without becoming engrossed in libertine excess, and represents no political danger. De Coverley offers a version of the cavalier narrative that rejects the social exclusivity and misbehavior of the mid-seventeenth century in favor of the accessibility, amiability, and domesticity promoted in the Whig ascendency, acting as an important intermediary between the corrupt libertine of the seventeenth century and Defoe’s austere hero of the eighteenth.

II.

Defoe’s catalogue of material prior to 1720 makes him an unlikely author of a work appreciative of cavaliers, as he had little patience for the aesthetics of love and honor. In the 1660s, The Comical Revenge had made the duel the climactic point of heroic virtue; forty years later, Defoe deplored the practice throughout the run of his periodical the Review of the Affairs of France. Likewise, although he admired the craft behind Rochester’s poetry, he disliked his lewd modern imitators: “Pleas’d with the Lines, he wish’d he had not Writ / They Court his Folly, and pass by his Wit” (More Reformation 13). Politically, Defoe frequently wrote in opposition to cavalier tenets. His 1706 verse satire Jure Divino was a ruthless attack on divine right monarchy, and a declaration of support for William III and his victory over the cavalier icon James II. As Andrew McKendry has argued, this panegyric cast the King favorably against biblical rulers, as he “refashions 1 Samuel 8–12, the account of Saul’s accession, into an origin story for popular sovereignty” (84). Finally, although Defoe had previously written pamphlets both for and against war, he could be critical of soldiers and keen to keep them “at arm’s length” from society, as Banister writes (25-26). It is difficult to imagine the convivial seventeenth-century cavalier, or even Steele’s genial Tory, emerging from any of Defoe’s earlier works.

Defoe’s interest in the cavalier narrative had less to do with an exploration of the minutiae of its ideology than the fact of its success. Re-fashioning biblical stories to justify William III’s ascendency had given him experience in transforming inherited ideas into allegories palatable for an eighteenth-century readership, and the Memoirs perform a similar task. Although the royalist cause had been defeated three times between 1642 and 1651, it had eventually triumphed with Charles II’s restoration and twenty-five-year reign. As such, and despite the cavaliers’ hedonistic reputation, their claim to legitimate power still held weight in the early eighteenth century. This weight had immediate relevance, as the cavaliers’ claim to power had an uncomfortable parallel with the current Jacobite invocations of patrilineal legitimacy and rightful inheritance. The eventual victory of the cavalier cause in 1660 after years of martial and cultural defeat had the potential to act as a rallying cry for Jacobite loyalists. Far better, then, for those opposed to Jacobitism to claim the cavalier for one of their own, to demystify his status as a “lost cause” figure, and furnish him instead with the mentality of a modern gentleman officer. Written and published in the years immediately following the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion, but framed in Defoe’s introduction as having been found “in the Closet of an eminent publick Minister, of no less Figure than one of King William’s Secretaries of State” (sig. A2r), Memoirs of a Cavalier is an attempt to do just that.

Born into a family “of a very plentiful Fortune […] nearly allied to several of the principal Nobility” (2), the Cavalier’s early life resembles that of his upper-class predecessors in seventeenth-century literature. He is furnished with a good education through private tutors and at Oxford, and he spends his leisure time hunting on his family estate with his father. Like both the seventeenth-century cavalier and the modern polite gentleman, friendships with men are vital to the Cavalier’s narrative. His relationship with his father is a template for the subsequent friendships he forms with other men throughout the novel: his father does not demand absolute obedience from the Cavalier; he will act as an “Advisor, but will never impose” his authority over the Cavalier’s plans (4). The Cavalier finds an additional ally in the “generous free” Fielding, his near-constant travel-companion for the first section of the novel, and the two men even nurse one another through the plague (28). Although the Cavalier refers to his presence only infrequently, this is suggestive of the close, almost brotherly relationship that Defoe employs in his novel Captain Singleton, published in the same year as the Memoirs. Stephen Gregg has drawn attention to the friendship between Bob and William in the latter novel, in which neither man “had or sought any separate Interest,” as indicative of the early eighteenth-century homosocial bond (122-23): the two men are so alike that they think and act as one. Following this, the infrequent mentions of Fielding in the Memoirs suggest that he is a silent observer to all that the Cavalier sees and concurs with the Cavalier on all matters.

Other friends arrive late in the narrative: the Cavalier finds a friend and a mentor in Sir John Hepburn (a historical figure whose biography bears similarities to the Cavalier’s own), who is instrumental in assisting him with his military career, and during his time fighting on the Continent, the Cavalier also “obtained some […] very close Intimacies with the General Officers” (131). The gracious, considerate relationships that men have with one another in the novel act as an important counterpoint to the behavior of seventeenth-century cavaliers. Defoe’s Cavalier and his friends do not commit acts of vandalism, or challenge one another to duels, show no interest in fashion, while gambling is mentioned only once, negatively, as part of an “old English proverb”: “Standers-by see more than the Gamesters” (29). For politics, ambivalent feelings towards Charles I temper loyalty to the royalist cause. Drinking occurs infrequently, and never to excess: the Cavalier occasionally drinks wine as a guest in foreign households, while Hepburn at one point has a “Glass of Leipsick Beer” (58). A later troop of “bad” cavaliers demonstrate the consequences of excessive drinking: during the war in England, the Cavalier’s Major captures a parliamentarian house and gets very drunk with his men. The lady of the house launches an attack with her servants and the Major and his men, “too drunk to rally,” are unable to fight back. The Cavalier arrives to rescue them, but “the Men […] when they came to run for their Lives, fell over one another, and tumbled over their horses, and made such Work, that a Troop of Women might have beaten them all,” and the Major hides in humiliation for a fortnight (200-02). Unlike Cotton, Heath, or Butler before him, Defoe cannot make the cavaliers’ excessive drinking compatible with martial valor; it is rather evidence of weakness, compounded by a defeat by a woman and her servants. The Cavalier and his friends drink only in moderation and are thus not party to humiliations akin to those of the Major and his men.

The Cavalier’s adventures begin at twenty-one, when he decides to leave England for the Continent. His professed desire to travel derives from his belief that he “thought a Gentleman ought always to see something of the World before he confined himself to any part of it” (5)—a statement that paints his tour as a detached survey of foreign culture rather than an epicurean debauch. As a tourist, the Cavalier is not easily impressed: he discerns “nothing very remarkable” in the cathedral at Amiens (8); “there was not much to be seen” in Paris (10). Most damningly, the French court “looked like a Citizen’s House when the family was all gone into the Country” (11). The lauded sights of the great French cities, the reader gathers, ultimately disappoint. The Cavalier’s experience in France shows a land fraught with corruption, with a society that places more value on politesse than on Christian decency. Almost as soon as the Cavalier and Fielding arrive in France, they become lost. Eventually a priest comes to their aid and provides the two Englishmen with food and wine at his home before helping them get back on the road and offering them some money. For this assistance the Cavalier is grateful, but he adds to his description the spiteful remark that “though Civility is very much in Use in France […] ’tis a very unusual thing to have them part with their Money” (7-8). And indeed, soon after this first encounter, the Cavalier and Fielding are robbed. In fact, theft and violence characterize most of his French experiences. After dismissing the splendors of Amiens Cathedral, he describes seeing a “Mountebank Doctor” selling his wares to a great crowd, and nearby a gang of thieves work hard to trick other tourists out of their money, by picking their pockets and then bringing forward the wrong man to be identified by the victim. “This was the first French Trick I had the Opportunity of seeing; but I was told they have a great many more as dexterous as this,” the Cavalier assures us (8-10).

Cavalier narratives traditionally presumed a violent social culture: groups of cavaliers attacked other men, women, and property; cavaliers fought one another in private combat; cavaliers acted as seconds to their friends in duels. For Defoe’s Cavalier, the only instance of violence that occurs outside of a wartime context happens when he is in France and works to show the bonds of friendship between the Cavalier and Fielding against foreign enemies. The Cavalier receives word that Fielding has been ambushed and attacked by a group of men, and that he must go to assist him. The passage reads:

I [] followed the Fellow [] into a large Room where three Men, like Gentlemen, were Engaged very briskly, two against one: the Room was very dark, so that I could not easily know them asunder; but being fully possessed with an Opinion before of my Captain’s Danger, I ran into the Room with my Sword in my Hand: I had not particularly Engaged any of them, nor so much as made a Pass at any, when I received a very dangerous Thrust in my Thigh, rather occasioned by my hasty running in, than a real Design of the Person; but enraged at the Hurt, without examining who it was hurt me, I threw my self upon him, and run my Sword quite thro’ his Body. (13)

At this point, the Cavalier realizes that there has been a mistake: Fielding is not one of the other combatants and the Cavalier has no way of explaining himself. Bleeding heavily from his leg and confused by the labyrinthine “Entries and Passages” of the Parisian streets, he eventually manages to return to his lodgings. He cannot stay long, however: rumors emerge of the other man’s death, and as he has committed a capital crime, the Cavalier is forced to flee. He recuperates at a safe house for ten days before leaving Paris for good. On the road, his wound reopens, “in a worse Condition than before,” and he is forced to be treated by a “sorry Country Barber” in a remote village outside of Orleans (13-15).

This picaresque incident offers a flavor of the libertine cavalier narrative while simultaneously rewriting it to fit better with the sensibilities of the early eighteenth century. Although the men who are fighting are “like Gentlemen,” part of a higher social class like the seventeenth-century cavalier, and the Cavalier himself seems to fall into fighting with enthusiasm, this is certainly not a formal duel, nor is it the consequence of a bout of drinking turned violent. The Cavalier is acting in response to an unfair ambush on his friend, “two against one.” “Honor,” a word of crucial importance in the seventeenth century for justifying acts of violence, is not used at any point in the passage. Unlike the seventeenth-century cavaliers who fight with and against their friends over casual slights, Defoe’s Cavalier only becomes violent with civilians as foreigners who have launched an unfair attack on his friend. Like the later depiction of the drunk major bested by the parliamentarian lady, the affair is robbed of any sense of gallant adventure in the Cavalier’s confused journey home and collapse from blood loss. The rest of his time in France is spent in uncomfortable obscurity, fleeing from the law while attempting to allow his leg to heal. The Cavalier may have been justified in fighting when he thought he was rescuing his friend, but the chaos of the aftermath confirms that there is nothing glamorous about his heroism.

After his French adventures, the Cavalier leaves for Italy, where he has his only significant encounter with a woman described in the narrative. Although meaningful friendships between men resonate throughout the Memoirs, the Cavalier largely snubs relationships with women. His mother disappears after the opening pages. Before leaving on his tour, he gains a fiancée, whom he never meets, and much later in the narrative he misses a battle “owing to two Days Stay I made at the Bath, where I met with some Ladies who were my Relations” (225). In Italy, however, the Cavalier encounters a courtesan, who appears in a three-page passage (33-35). He records having spent an evening at her apartment, during which time he was “prevailed upon rather than tempted” to sleep with her (33). That the courtesan was a woman of great beauty, the Cavalier readily admits; he relates that she also possessed great taste, sang and danced divinely, and “her Conversation exceeded, if possible, the best of Quality, and was [] exceeding agreeable.” Upon realizing her profession, however, his attraction to her disappeared, “the Place filled me with Horror, and I was all over Disorder and Distraction.” The woman offers him food and wine to placate him, but the Cavalier goes on: “I began to be in more Confusion than before, for I concluded she would neither offer me to eat or to drink now without Poison, and I was very shy of tasting her Treat” (34). At the end of the evening he manages to escape her apartment, unpoisoned and unseduced, but nevertheless gives her five pistoles before he leaves, as well as his word that he would meet with her again.

The Cavalier’s next encounter with the woman occurs outside a church. He had resolved to break his promise to meet with her, but after she greets him kindly, the Cavalier allows the rest of their relationship to be a mystery: “I cannot say here so clearly as I would be glad I might, that I broke my word with her; but if I saw her any more I saw nothing of what gave me so much Offence before,” the Cavalier admits to his reader, before concluding that “if I did any Thing I have some Reason to be ashamed of, it may be a less Crime to conceal it than expose it” (35). These two final, meandering sentences are deliberately obscure, designed to draw a delicate curtain over the relationship. He does not admit that he slept with her and insists that there was no repeat of their first encounter at her apartment, with wine, dancing, and sexual propositions. Nevertheless, he is unable to deny that he saw her again, and his very suggestion that he might be concealing rather than exposing a source of shame by refusing to describe his later encounters with her leads us to the obvious conclusion that they conducted a sexual relationship in secret.

As with the Cavalier’s fight against his friend’s attackers, the story of his encounters with the courtesan is both a nod to and a rewriting of the libertine cavalier narrative. The seventeenth-century cavalier had a justly-earned reputation for whoring, but Defoe is careful not to place the meetings with the courtesan as a series of raucous encounters. She is deliberately written as beautiful, refined, and socially respectable—Defoe wants his eighteenth-century readers to recognize her as a woman of some worth. It is only when she admits her profession that he realizes that she is not a woman of “quality,” provoking his disgust. Although the relationship continues, the Cavalier does not flaunt it—rather the opposite. His refusal to admit to any impropriety with the woman, as “it may be a less Crime to conceal it than expose it,” differentiates the Cavalier from his seventeenth-century counterparts: he has no interest in boasting of his sexual conquests. Nevertheless, his refusal to deny a sexual relationship suggests that Defoe was unwilling to allow that his narrator simply spent an evening in friendly conversation with the courtesan. Men who enjoyed platonic dialogue with women could be stereotyped as French and effeminate (Cohen 50-51)—a sacrifice too far in salvaging the cavalier for modern manners. To avoid thus compromising his stoic English hero, Defoe is forced to prevaricate, rejecting the plain speech he had employed up to this point and claim to “conceal” the truth merely out of propriety. It is for the reader to decide what exactly happened in the courtesan’s apartment—although her determined pursuit of him is a hint that the Cavalier possesses his own sexual allure.

Although the Cavalier’s encounters with the courtesan are dominated by feelings of fear and guilt, he is contemptuous of the rest of Italian culture. He writes: “I saw nothing but lewdness, private murders, stabbing men at the corner of a street, or in the dark, hiring of bravos, and the like.” To this, he adds dismissively that despite enjoying the classical architecture in Rome, he had “no gust to antiquities” (Memoirs 31-32). In neither France nor Italy, the countries to which he devotes the most pages of his Grand Tour, does the Cavalier find anything that he can adopt as part of his own way of life. Particularly indicative of this is that the elaborate cavalier dress sense, so infamous both in the seventeenth century and afterwards, is not a prominent theme in the novel. Accordingly, the Cavalier makes no mention of the stylish French or Italian clothing in fashion among his fellow officers during his time abroad. Descriptions of clothing are brief and dismal: when his portmanteau is ransacked in France, the thieves find only “Linen and Necessaries” to steal (8). Later, the dirty clothes of the Duke of Saxony’s army are evidence of men’s physical fortitude, as they “were used to camp in the open Fields, and sleep in the Frosts and Rain,” while the Cavalier also admires the Swedish soldiers who “were well clad, not gay” (52-56). His most detailed description of his own clothing occurs when he goes disguised to spy during wartime: “dressing my self up a la Paisant, with a white Cap on my Head, and a Fork on my Shoulder [] I thought my self very awkward in my Dress” (248). In fact, the most thorough critique that he makes of any clothing comes much later in the novel, in his description of the Highlanders’ finery at the 1638 Treaty of Berwick:

The Oddness and Barbarity of their Garb and Arms seemed to have something in it remarkable [] Their Dress was [] antique []; a Cap on their Heads, called by them a Bonnet, long hanging Sleeves behind, and their Doublet, Breeches and Stockings, of a Stuff they called Plaid, striped a-cross red and yellow, with short Cloaks of the same. These Fellows looked, when drawn out, like a Regiment of Merry Andrews ready for Bartholomew Fair. (156)

Until this point in the Memoirs, the Cavalier has largely ignored the costume of those around him. The sudden interest in the bonnets and tartan of the Scottish Highlanders, and the insistence on the “oddness” and “barbarity” of their clownish appearance, is a comment on early eighteenth-century political sensibilities rather than a reflection of the sartorial interests of a seventeenth-century cavalier. This description of the Highlanders is as unflattering as the description of Italy: their tribal dress identifies them as ridiculous and old-fashioned. As a counterpoint to these “bad” Scots, the novel offers up a “good” Scotsman, Sir John Hepburn, who is the colonel of a “Reformado” Scottish regiment within the Swedish army. A man with “as much Gallantry in his Face as real Courage in his Heart” (57), Hepburn plays a prominent role in the first half of the novel, assisting the Cavalier in his ambitions as a volunteer in the Swedish army by introducing him to King Gustavus Adolphus. However, other than his name, there is little in the text that is identifiably Scottish about Hepburn; nothing in his speaking, dressing, or thinking that differentiates him from the Cavalier, leaving us to conclude that the ideal Scotsman, in Defoe’s mind, is indistinguishable from his English hero.

Unlike earlier narratives, Defoe underplays the importance of social performance in the formation of the cavalier: the Memoirs’ emphasis on military events accentuates the hero’s martiality, while his social experiences and private thoughts primarily serve to subvert the traditional expressions of the cavalier mode. After a prolonged army experience in Germany, he spends “two Years rather in wandring up and down than travelling” (131): he is, like Behn’s Willmore before him, a rover, but one whose rootless drifting inspires a return to England and Civil War rather than Continental debauchery. The narrative breaks off after the Royalist defeat; how the Cavalier occupied himself throughout the 1650s is left to the reader’s imagination, although it seems probable that his adventures were not the libertine cavalier narratives of seventeenth-century legend. These men may still exist within the Memoirs—the debauched cavalier Major and his men whose drunken mishaps result in their humiliation—but their actions can no longer be parsed as heroic, and Defoe offers up a new version of the cavalier hero as a plain-spoken man whose dominant impulse is the pursuit of military heroics.

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