Defoe’s Tour, Wales, and the Idea of Britishness

Roger Lund

IT is generally acknowledged that Daniel Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1726) is the most notable contemporary travel account of early eighteenth-century Britain. There has, however, been less agreement as to the most salient features of the Tour as work of art. A number of scholars have variously responded to the notion that Defoe’s Tour is a “homogenous projection of the nation” of the kind described by Benedict Anderson as national “imagined communities” (Speller 586). According to Pat Rogers, Defoe offers us “(in Celia Fienne’s words) ‘an Idea of England’” (quoted in Text 44). Terence Bowers argues that Defoe offers more than this: “The community Defoe envisions in the Tour is, as the title announces, ‘Great Britain,’ or more precisely, ‘the Whole Island of Great Britain’” (Bowers 151). However, as Trevor Speller points out:

how we interpret the British sense of nationality in the eighteenth century is largely dependent on how we read texts such as Defoe’s Tour. We should see the Tour as a text whose overt desire for national homogeneity is subverted by its own insistence on anomalous territories. (Speller 586-587)

Jo Ann T. Hackos argues, along lines similar to Rogers and Bowers, that central to Defoe’s conceptualization of British homogeneity is his exploitation of the metaphor of England as a garden, but like Speller, she concedes that such a view is complicated by the presence of anomalous spaces. “Like the landscape gardener in whose picturesque gardens the eye was led to the wilder forms of nature on the horizon, Defoe concedes that the ordered garden of England is set off by the wilderness at its edges” (Hackos 260). Amongst these marginal locations, Hackos lists Scotland, Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, and Wales. Hackos concludes that Defoe “refuses to describe the wilds at the borders, as if they were a paradise when they are in reality a wilderness” (Hackos 261). While I am in general agreement with the argument (advanced by Speller and Hackos) that descriptions of certain “anomalous territories” in the Tour may subvert the desire for national homogeneity, this is not the case with Defoe’s treatment of Wales. As I argue here, where Wales is concerned, Defoe’s account is transformative, replacing much of its “wildness” and “otherness” with images of domestic peace and prosperity in the interest of promoting an image of national homogeneity.

Of course, Welsh “exoticism and alterity,” born of its language and its mountainous terrain, posed a problem for all travel writers (Jones, Tully, and Williams 102). As Sarah Prescott reminds us, “The perceived ‘strangeness’ of Wales to the English is an important point to remember when assessing claims for ‘unified Britishness’ in the eighteenth century” (85-86). It is also a point to remember when assessing Defoe’s account of Wales in the Tour. Through a process of rhetorical refraction which serves to eliminate all sense of wildness or anomaly, Defoe sets out to domesticate Welsh exoticism and to transform Wales from a geographical and cultural outlier into a more familiar province, one whose cultural anomalies have been smoothed away in order to depict the Welsh as full participants in the “imagined community” that is Great Britain.

I

By announcing that his subject is not England, but “Great Britain” Defoe is “taking on a project of some ambition and scale, one that aligns itself with William Camden’s monumental Britannia (1586, numerous editions in the seventeenth century), to which Defoe refers throughout the Tour” (Bowers 151). [1] By announcing that his subject is Great Britain, Defoe may also allude to the ambiguities involved in the process of transforming the identities of marginal territories, like Wales, in consistency with some larger national imperative. Wales had a peculiar identity that is longstanding and not always consistent with notions of a greater national unity.

Both the English and the Welsh had adopted Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of England (1138) as a cornerstone of their national identity. “Geoffrey’s pseudohistory provided both nations with a distinguished past of the greatest antiquity, but for both, the idea of a unique Britishness was also a way of defining themselves against one another” (MacColl 249). Echoes of this history persist into the eighteenth century where one of the earliest travel accounts of Wales still refers to the inhabitants as “Ancient Britons,” a term suggesting their primitive or aboriginal status (Richards, “Dedication”). As Alan MacColl points out, however, Monmouth’s History was particularly important for the Welsh since it concluded with “the promise that the island would be restored to the descendants of the Britons (i.e., the Welsh) at some time in the distant future” (MacColl 251). From the standpoint of the English, the same History provided them with “a device for advancing their claim to a historic right of dominion over Wales” (MacColl 253), a right fiercely contested by the Welsh until their absorption by England with the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543.

Long after they had been attached to England, the Welsh would continue to assert the right to define their own identity, separate from that assigned them by the English. According to the sixteenth-century historian Humphrey Llwyd, the true name of his nation was “Cambria, and not Wallia, Wales, as it is now called by a new name, and unacquainted to the Welshman” (qtd. in Schwyzer and Mealor 2-3). The very title of the most venomous, and most popular, eighteenth-century satire on Wales, William Richards’ Wallography; or the Briton describ’d (1682, rpt. 1738) draws attention to the ambiguity surrounding the notions of Welshness and Britishness alike. The Welsh, in turn, continue to explore their own cultural and national identity in works like George Owen’s Descriptions of Wales (1602) and Theophilus Evans’ “Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Mirror of the Early Centuries)” (1716), both of which offer legendary accounts of the Welsh people. In 1715, Welshmen in London founded the Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons, a charitable society designed to help the families of London Welshmen in distress. The word “Antient” in their title actually served to distinguish their own claims as “Britons” from the newer usage of the word “Britain” adopted by writers since the Union with Scotland. [2]

Welsh poets and novelists also try to explain and defend the Welsh to an English audience for whom Wales appears to be a strange and foreign land, not a familiar neighbor, and certainly not a coadjutor in some larger “British” enterprise. Works like Evan Evans’ Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764), described by one scholar as the “most influential Welsh antiquarian work of the eighteenth century,” pointed to the richness of Welsh contributions to British literary culture (Thomas and Reynolds xiv). Such works form part of what one Welsh scholar has described as a form of “contributionism.” That is to say, they are “‘tributary offerings’ whose function is to contribute to wider British glories” (Thomas 118). There is an unavoidable ambiguity as to what exactly is implied in the relationship between Welsh contributions and British glories since there is always the lingering suggestion that truly British glories had been Welsh from the beginning. Like Defoe, eighteenth-century Welsh writers were also struggling with a newer and more modern notion of “Britishness.” As scholars tell us, the notion of “Britannia maior” (Greater Britain) meaning the entire territory of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland “began to emerge in the fifteenth century” and developed into the “imperial Great Britain of Stuart aspiration,” which “led eventually to its political realization, in modified form, in the Union of 1707” (MacColl 251). This is the notion of Britain that emerges from his pamphleteering on behalf of the Union with Scotland, and in general terms, it is the more general notion of Britain that Defoe seeks to advertise in the Tour. As we shall see, the notion endorsed by many of the Welsh themselves that they enjoyed a special status as “Britons” would require a special effort on Defoe’s part to fit them into his own conception of the “Whole Island of Britain.”

II

As an Englishman interested in Wales, Defoe was apparently ahead of the curve. According to the editors of a collection on Travel Writing in Wales, it wasn’t until the 1770s that “perceptions changed from predominantly negative views of Wales as an inaccessible terrain and backward nation to a growing appreciation of its distinctive landscape and ancient culture” (Jones, Tully, and Williams 102). Certainly images of the wildness of Wales and its inhabitants had been enhanced by hostile caricatures like William Richards’ Wallography: or, the Briton describ’d: being a pleasant relation of a journey into Wales (1682). The “Welsh people are a pretty odd Sort of Mortals,” he argues, “and I hope I have given you a pretty odd Character of them” (41). [3] In screeds like Wallography, there is a “sense of the otherness of Wales which calls into question the peaceful harmony often suggested of Wales’s integration with England and her role as a pacific Anglo-centered partner since the Tudor union.” Richards’ presents a version of Wales that is a:

fierce and threatening strange land of savagery. It is a classic colonial view … and the unfamiliarity of Wales to an eighteenth-century English audience again needs to be kept in mind when assessing the scale of the task facing those writers who were attempting to place Wales in a more prestigious position on the collective map of Great Britain. (Prescott 88-89)

Defoe is one of those writers. His discussion of Wales in the Tour is analogous to his effort on behalf of Scottish Union two decades earlier; to borrow a phrase from Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson, “Defoe’s job was to help people … to imagine a unified British nation in the best possible terms” (Alker and Nelson). When we compare Defoe’s account of Wales with those provided by earlier caricaturists or those writing at the end of the century, we encounter neither the hostility of a Richards nor the emotional excesses of those later travelers experiencing the sublime effects of the mountainous terrain. Instead, we find a new focus on the “Idea of Britain” and the “Britishness” of Wales, that is to say, an emphasis on shared interests that connect that “patchwork” of regional customs and local loyalties of various kinds that militated against a sense of national identity (Colley 17).

It is impossible to prove a negative, but one might argue that what is most visible in Defoe’s account of Wales is what isn’t there. Virtually every traveler to Wales mentions the difficulties created by the Welsh language, which “three out of four of them still spoke out of choice as late as the 1880s” (Colley 13). For English writers from Shakespeare to Smollett, the phrase “say it in Welsh” had been an invitation to ridicule. According to the author of A Trip to North Wales, Welsh is:

a Tongue (it seems) not made for every Mouth; as appears by an Instance of one in our Company, who, having got a Welsh Polysyllable into his Throat, was almost choak’d with Consonants, had we not, by clapping him on the Back, made him disgorge a Guttural or two, and so sav’d him. (Ward 61-62)

John Macky, whose Journey Through England (1724) provided both an inspiration and an irritant to Defoe, remarks that everyone speaks Welsh here, “and even if they understand English, if you ask them a Question, their Answer is, Dime Salsenach, or I cannot speak Saxon or English” (Macky 136). Apparently, little changes over the course of the eighteenth century. According to William Mavor, author of The British Tourist’s, or, Traveller’s Pocket Companion, Through England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (1809), the continued use of the Welsh language “must ever be a bar to the general improvement of the country.” Those who can only speak:

a local and almost obsolete dialect, must of necessity be confined to the spot where they were born; and in consequence contract notions as confined as their situation. They are precluded from launching into the world, and from improving their circumstances. (Mavor V: 201-202)

Mavor reflects the more general conclusion that, as long as Welsh was spoken, it would continue to mark the Welsh as foreigners and retard their full incorporation into a Greater Britain.

Surprisingly, Defoe does not appear to share this opinion. Indeed, where the Welsh language is concerned, aside from an offhand remark that the names of certain Welsh hills “seem’d as barbarous to us, who spoke no Welch, as the Hills themselves” (Tour II: 89), he seems to have no opinion whatsoever. In general, Welsh gentlemen are, Defoe writes, “very civil, hospitable, and kind”:

When we let them know, we travell’d merely in Curiosity to view the Country, and be able to speak well of them to Strangers, their Civility was heightened to such a Degree, that nothing could be more Friendly, willing to tell us every thing that belong’d to their Country, and to show us every thing that we desired to see. (Tour II: 102)

Defoe insists that the Welsh are both civil and perfectly communicative—but in what language? On this topic, central to the Welsh themselves, Defoe is mute. One might ascribe such silences to carelessness or to limited familiarity with his subject (Pat Rogers points out that Defoe seems to have less immediate knowledge of Wales than of other parts of the British Isles), but it is also possible that such aporia may be intentional, reflecting Defoe’s determination not to repeat the same clichés about Welsh unintelligibility retailed by travelers like Richards or Macky. Indeed, to become embroiled in a discussion of the relative merits of a separate language in Wales (with suggestions of a separate culture and separate political identity) would be to complicate unnecessarily the integration of the Welsh into the imagined community of Britain where English is spoken.

It is possible, I would suggest, that Defoe’s Tour of Wales is marked as much by what Defoe refuses to talk about as it is by what he wants us to see. For example, Defoe’s Tour may be the only account of Wales ever written that has almost nothing to say about the weather, which, as Esther Moir has shown, was legendary (133-36). Later travelers to Wales complain incessantly about waiting for the weather to clear so they can climb Mount Snowden or even see its top. Lord Lyttelton’s account of his travels through northern Wales (1746) begins in medias res: “I write this from the foot of Snowdon, which I proposed to ascend this afternoon; but alas! The top of it, and all the fine prospects which I hoped to see from thence, are covered with rain” (Account II: 741). Defoe never mentions Welsh weather, and he seems to have little more enthusiasm for Welsh mountains. Mt. Snowden, which in later travelers would inspire spasms of delight, is, for Defoe, simply a mountain of “monstrous Height” which “according to its Name had Snow on the Top in the beginning of June; and perhaps had so till the next June, that is to say, all the Year” (Tour II: 92). Like Welsh weather, Welsh mountains have no symbolic resonance for Defoe whatsoever. Thomas Gray, for example, incorporates the very name Plinlimmon into the incantatory flow of The Bard. But for Defoe, Plinlimmon is just an enormous pile of rock. It is “exceeding high,” he tells us, “and though it is hard to say which is the highest Hill in Wales, yet I think this bids fair for it; nor is the county for 20 miles round it, any thing but a continued ridge of Mountains” (Tour II: 89).

One is tempted to contrast this account with Lord Lyttelton’s response upon reaching the summit of Mr. Berwin where “a prospect opened to us, which struck the mind with awful astonishment. Nature is in all her majesty there” (Account II: 745-46). By 1726, when the final installments of the Tour were published, the prospect vision, of the sort rehearsed here by Lyttelton, had become a literary commonplace. The prospect vision is not foreign to Defoe. Terence Bowers points to the vision Defoe achieves from the heights of the Pennines:

Not only does Defoe naturalize this landscape, he also gives it a special status in the Tour. Along with being ‘the most agreeable Sight that I ever saw,’ this mountain view constitutes the highest prospect of the Tour, and one that has demanded a special effort—both physical and mental—to achieve. (161)

The Pennines are not the highest point in the Tour, however. That comes in Wales where the sheer height and number of the mountains and the terror they inspire make leisured prospects impossible. It is fair to say that Defoe is all but impervious to the sublimity of the Welsh mountains. He speaks almost clinically about the mountains in Merionithshire:

which range along the Center of this Part of Wales, and which we call unpassable, for that even the People themselves called them so; we look’d at them indeed with astonishment, for their rugged Tops, and the immense height of them: Some particular Hills have particular Names, but otherwise we called them all the Black Mountains, and they well deserved the name. (Tour II: 91)

For Defoe, Welsh mountains produce few recollections of pleasure. Instead, travel through Glamorganshire involved “horrid Rocks and Precipices,” and indeed, “we began to repent our Curiosity, as not having met with any thing worth the trouble … we thought to have given over the Enterprise, and have left Wales out of our Circuit” (Tour II: 81).

Mountains were a huge impediment to travel in Wales; most roads tended to hug the coast. Welsh mountains also provided a challenge to the attempt to see Wales as part of the larger “imagined community” of Great Britain. As Linda Colley points out, “The degree to which the Welsh were able to see themselves as one people was also limited by an acute north-south divide, the country’s central range of mountains,” which made trade, travel, and communications between northern and southern counties very difficult (Colley 13). Mountains stand as internal barriers within the island, and they thereby “foster regionalism, which was still intense and pervasive in eighteenth century, and work against the idea of geography as the uniting principle of nationhood” (Bowers 158). As Bowers points out here, minimizing the difficulty of travel was part of a larger strategy to “create an image of Britain as a country without internal barriers. The mountains, however, constitute obstacles that cannot be ignored” (158). The mountains were the most salient geographical feature of Wales, and while Defoe could hardly ignore them, he could minimize their importance by describing them as troublesome, but not determinate impediments to union; they were certainly not enough to persuade Defoe to leave “Wales out of our Circuit.”

III

Visitors to Wales were often described by the natives as “curiosity-men,” meaning “those who were hunting after wonders” (Mavor 254). Although the title page of the Defoe’s Tour promises “A Particular and Diverting Account of Whatever is Curious and Worth Observation,” one is struck by how few things seem worthy of his attention. One might consult the pages of any travel account written after the Tour to find examples of the “curiosities” that travelers found in Wales. In Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Wales (1778, 1781), generally conceded to be one of the best accounts of late eighteenth-century Wales, we are treated to seemingly random effusions on minstrelsy, old coffins, bandits, Prince Arthur’s foster father, the Pillar of Eliseg, Welsh castles, and, of course, the Druids. Defoe does indulge in the occasional digression, most particularly his admiring account of ancient Celtic stone work that he finds (or that his literary sources had found) on the mountain tops of Wales. These were “generally Monuments of the Dead” and were of immense size, stones that were “from 7, 8, to 10, and one 16 Foot high” (Tour II: 94). Defoe marvels that:

A great many of these stones are found confusedly lying one upon another on the utmost Summit or Top of the Glyder, or other Hills, in Merionith and Carnarvonshire; to which it is next to impossible, that all the Power of Art, and Strength of Man and Beast could carry them. (Tour II: 94)

Defoe also mentions in passing a number of other minor curiosities, like his description of Brecknock-Mere, a long lake “of which, they have a great many Welch Fables, not worth mentioning,” one of which involves the myth that the lake actually covered an ancient city which had sunk into the earth “by the Judgment of Heaven, for the Sin of its Inhabitants” (Tour II: 80). What is “worth mentioning” for Defoe is the wealth of fish that were routinely taken from the lake, a detail that would be cited in later travel accounts. Defoe also notes that other travelers had spoken of the legend that beavers had once inhabited the rivers of Wales (Wyndham 78). The legend is fully amplified by Thomas Pennant, who describes a pool in the River Conwy:

called Llyn yr Afangc, or the Beavers Pool, from being, in old times, the haunt of those animals. Our ancestors also called them, with great propriety, Llost-Lydan, or the broad-tailed animal. Their skin was in such esteem. … They seem to have been the chief finery and luxury of the days of Hoel Dda [an ancient king of southwest Wales, ca. 880-950]. (Pennant 300)

For Pennant, even beavers come cloaked in these mists of nostalgia. Not for Defoe however, who treats the presence of beavers with a skepticism unusual amongst Welsh travelers. According to his version of the tale, “the Country People told us” that the beavers “bred in the Lakes among the Mountains, and came down the stream of Tivy to feed” (Tour II: 88). Even so, the people “could shew us none of them, or any of their Skins, neither could the Countryman describe them, or tell us that they had ever seen them.” Defoe concludes that the natives may have meant otters and not beavers. Only when he checks his copy of Camden’s History is Defoe convinced that “there were Beavers seen here formerly” (Tour II: 88).

This is just one tale from a vast trove of uncertain anecdotes available to Welsh travel writers, and presumably available to Defoe as well. When one compares Defoe’s responses with those of later travel writers, it seems clear that he deliberately resists the impulse to copy such tales. There are exceptions, however. Pat Rogers points out that “Defoe’s non-antiquarian form allows him to slip in a mass of antiquarian matter, largely filched from those who had gone before” (Text 116). For example, Defoe does include canned accounts of architectural monuments, including discussions of St. Asaphs, Llandaff, and St. David’s cathedrals, drawn one suspects from Gibson’s edition of Camden and Dugdale and surveys published between 1717-1721 (Text 176). Defoe is often most alert to details linking Welsh history with developments in his native England. Carnarvon is a “good town,” he says:

with a Castle built by Edward I to curb and reduce the Wild People of the Mountains, and secure the Passage into Anglesea. As this city was built by Edward I so he kept his Court often here, and honoured it with his presence very much. (Tour II: 93)

It was here his eldest son and successor Edward of Carnarvon was born. “This Edward was, the first Prince of Wales; that is to say, the first of the Kings of England’s sons, who was vested with the title of Prince of Wales” (Tour II 93). For Defoe, there is an added advantage in the republication of such details since they serve to link the history of Wales with the larger history of Britain.

The English had been encouraged to think of the Welsh as a people who looked backward. When the Welsh themselves formulated their sense of identity, “it was very much towards their earliest days that they looked—to the days of Owain Glyndwr and even earlier, to the times before Edward I’s conquest of 1282” (S. Rogers 16). According to William Mavor, the Welsh are a people “who are cut off from every source of rational information, and have their knowledge confined to a few old ballads of their bards, and to uncertain records relative to their sanguinary chieftains…” (V: 202). Defoe understands that the Welsh pride themselves on their antiquity:

and above all, upon their Antient heroes: their King Caractacus, Owen ap Tudor, Prince Lewellin, and the like noblemen and princes of British extraction; and as they believe their country to be the pleasantest and most agreeable in the World, so you cannot oblige them more, than to make them think you believe so too. (Tour II: 102)

This claim is probably disingenuous since Defoe goes out of his way to demonstrate just how little interest he has in Welsh history. “As I have always said, I carefully avoid entering into any Discourses of Antiquity, as what the narrow Compass of these Letters will not allow” (Tour II: 83). In effect, Defoe’s narrative exploits both strategic silence and assertive negation, as he repeatedly tells us what he does not intend to discuss.

Defoe remarks that, in Radnorshire, he did not meet “with any thing new, and worth noticing, except Monuments of Antiquity, which are not the Subject of my Enquiry” (Tour II: 80). He asserts that he:

saw a great many old Monuments in this Country, and Roman Camps wherever we came, and especially if we met any person curious in such things, we found they had many Roman Coins; but this was none of my enquiry, as I have said already (emphasis mine). (Tour II: 91)

According to Pat Rogers, Defoe had read widely in Roman history; his antiquarianism “is nourished by a lively sense of the way in which traces of the past survive in existing objects: an almost pagan feeling for the historic charge in any human environment” (Text 144-145). While this may be the case elsewhere in the Tour, purely antiquarian interest seems all but nonexistent in Defoe’s account of Wales, where he tells us explicitly that he has no intention of discussing the ancient past. Some landmarks of Welsh history cannot be avoided, however, and Defoe notes in passing that it was among the mountains of Montgomeryshire that “the famous Glendower shelter’d himself.” The local people “shew us several little Refuges of his in the mountains, whither he retreated,” and from whence, he made such bold “Excursions” into England (Tour II: 80).

Defoe remarks that, in Radnorshire, “the stories of Vortigern and Roger of Mortimer, are in every old woman’s mouth” (Tour II: 80). Many of these same stories would be found in the mouths of travel writers like Thomas Pennant, who relates how Vortigern gathered the materials for an impregnable fortress, which “all disappeared in one night” (Pennant 352). The prince’s wise men assured him that “his building would never stand, unless it was sprinkled with the blood of a child born without the help of a father” (Pennant 352). The wise men ransacked the kingdom until they heard of a boy described as “an unbegotten knave,” a boy named Merlin who was the “offspring of an Incubus; a species of being now unhappily out of all credit” (Pennant 352). One suspects that this is precisely the sort of fabulous account that Defoe wants no part of. For example, it is hard to imagine Defoe lamenting the fact that incubi had lost “credit” with the public. Instead, Defoe tells his readers only that Carmarthen was famous for the “birth of the old British Prophet Merlin, of whom so many things are fabled, that indeed nothing of its kind ever prevail’d so far, in the Delusion of Mankind” (Tour II: 84). If such tales are but “delusion,” there is little reason for Defoe to waste his time on them.

As with his withering deflation of popular accounts of the “Wonders” of the Peak, Defoe was suspicious of Welsh “wonders” of every kind. As Pat Rogers points out, Defoe tends to withhold praise from “false curiosities or touristic nonevents. The author looks for ‘remarkables’ (a favorite term), but he constantly adjudicates upon the merits of supposed or soi-disant wondrousness” (Text 162). This is a process at work in Defoe’s account of Holywell. The “Stories of this Well of S. Winifrid are, that the pious Virgin, being ravished and murthered, this healing Water sprung out of her Body when buried.” But, says Defoe, “this smells too much of the Legend to take up any of my time” (Tour II: 98-99). Defoe has a bit more patience with Protestant marvels. For example, he includes an account of St David, who “they tell us, was Uncle to King Arthur, that he lived to 146 years of age, that he was Bishop of this church 65 years, being born in the Year 496, and dyed Ann. 642; that he built 12 Monasteries, and did abundance of Miracles” (Tour II: 87). Whether we are dealing with accounts of miraculous water jetting from the wounds of a saint, or a bishop who presumably lived 146 years, Defoe has little patience with such “delusion.” Pat Rogers notes that, Defoe’s choice of details has a political purpose:

Modern travel literature commonly rejoices in finding local oddities and neighborhood customs; Defoe attempts to bring all Britain under the writ of his metropolitan textual authority, and to this end diminishes the claims of the outlying regions to independence and uniqueness. (Text 166)

This is particularly the case with Defoe’s account of Wales, which even more than Scotland, had a reputation for local oddity.

IV

Defoe’s Tour is an unusual travel guide since it also has almost nothing to say about the personal habits of the Welsh, their diet, their homes, or their hygiene, a response that stands in marked contrast to other travel accounts of Wales. Richards’ Wallography, for example, paints the Welsh as the embodiment of Hobbes’s state of nature: they are nasty, poor, brutish, and short; indeed, they are scarcely human:

They are of a boorish Behaviour, of a savage Physiognomy; the Shabbiness of their Bodies, and the Baoticalness of their Souls, and that, which cannot any otherwise be express’d, the Welshness of both, will fright a Man as fast from them, as the Oddness of their Persons invites one to behold them. (41)

According to Ned Ward, the Welsh actively cultivate their own form of squalor. Welsh “houses generally consist but of one Room,” crammed with parents, children, and servants along with “two, or three Swine, and Black Cattle … under the same Roof, and hard to say, which are the greater Brutes.” The Welsh burn cow dung for fuel and use “Swine’s Dung” instead of soap:

Necessary Houses are the only Places reputed needless here: Perhaps the same Pot that boils their Food serves them for another Use … They live lazily and heathenishly; they eat and drink nastily, lodge hardly, louse frequently, and smoke Tobacco everlastingly. (7-14)

In A Gentleman’s Tour Through Monmouthshire and Wales, in the Months of June and July, 1774, H. P. Wyndham remarks that he can only account for the limited number of tourists he had encountered on his journey through Wales from “the general prejudice which prevails, that the Welsh roads are impracticable, the inns intolerable, and the people insolent and brutish” (iii). According to another account, if the Welsh inns are bad, the provisions are worse: only “dry bread and bad cheese” (Hucks 19). The author of A Tour Through the South of England, Wales and Part of Ireland… (1793) takes an even dimmer view of Caerphilly, which:

affords one solitary alehouse for the accommodation of strangers. It seems almost improper to dignify this place with the name of a town; it resembles more the irregular assemblage of huts, which one would expect to meet with among the Hottentots, or a body of the wild Tartars. (Clarke 172-173)

Even Dr. Johnson, whose Diary of a Journey into North Wales (1774), offers a generally favorable report, still complains about the difficulty of finding good food and lodging on the road (80-81).

Given this consensus, it is significant that Defoe expresses no interest in the poverty of the Welsh. If the Welsh seem backward, it is the product not of their nature but of their physical isolation. Defoe remarks that he found the people of Carmarthen:

more civiliz’d and more courteous, than in the more Mountainous parts, where the Disposition of the Inhabitants seems to be rough, like the Country. But here as they seem to Converse with the rest of the World, by their Commerce, so they are more conversible than their Neighbors. (Tour II: 84-85)

Defoe is all but unique amongst Welsh travelers in the ease with which he finds decent food and lodging. “We generally found their provisions very good and cheap,” he says, “and very good accommodations in the Inns” (Tour II: 102). Indeed, Defoe’s account of his entertainment in Wales is notable for its emphasis on the civility and generosity of his hosts. Given the responses of other travelers to Wales, one can only conclude that there is a good deal that Defoe has chosen not to tell us.

The evidence of Welsh backwardness notwithstanding, Defoe proceeds to offer a portrait of Wales that is, like the country around Cardiff and Swansea, a “pleasant, agreeable place, and is very Populous” with “very good, fertile, and rich Soil” (Tour, II: 82). “Populous” is a term with significant economic implications. It was a cherished maxim of mercantilists of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries “that people are the riches of the nation.” No nation can thrive which is under-populated. “Populousness” is therefore an index of prosperity (Landa 102-111). Long before he came to write the Tour, Defoe had argued that “the glory, the strength, the riches, the trade, and all that is valuable in a nation as to its figure in the world, depends upon the number of its people, be they never so mean and poor” (Landa 104). It may be the case, that as with other favorite words, Defoe’s use of the term “populous” is merely a matter of habit or a trick of style. Then again, if one assumes that Defoe has a particular point to make about Wales, that it plays a greater role in modern Britain than has previously been supposed, then it makes sense to emphasize the number of people that one finds there, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

As Geraint Jenkins observes, eighteenth-century Wales “was a land of small towns and had the reputation of being economically backward and archaic in its attitudes” (Jenkins 129). In 1800, the two largest towns in Wales were Carmarthen and Wrexham, each with a population of fewer than 4000 inhabitants (Davies, et al. 76). Defoe offers no concession to these facts, however. He remarks that Carmarthen is an “Antient but not a decayed Town. … [It] is well Built, and Populous, and the Country around it, is the most fruitful, of any part of all Wales” (Tour II: 84). It is less mountainous than the surrounding countryside and it “abounds in Corn, and in fine flourishing Meadows, as good as most are in Britain, and in which are fed, a very great Number of good Cattle” (Tour II: 84). Clearly, if we are describing a town with fewer than 4,000 citizens, “populous” is a not a term of description, but a term of art. This seems particularly obvious in Defoe’s account of Aberystwyth which is:

enrich’d by the Coals and Lead which is found in its neighbourhood, and is a populous, but a very dirty, black, smoaky place, and we fancied the People looked as if they lived continually in the Coal or Lead mines. However, they are Rich, and the Place is very Populous. (II: 88-89)

Defoe’s repetition of the word “populous” twice in a single passage seems almost contrived. Indeed, no other eighteenth-century traveler to Wales is as consistently optimistic about the health and prosperity of Welsh towns as Defoe, and he insists that, because they, too, are “populous,” the towns in Wales are as good as “most are in Britain” (Tour II: 84).

Betty A. Schellenberg points out that for Defoe the “discourse of improvement,” overrides “all other rhetorics” and provides a “coherence” to the narrative of the Tour (300). This is certainly the case in Scottish sections of the Tour, where Defoe nags the Scots about the opportunities for improvement that they have missed. In his remarks on Wales, however, Defoe seems more to assume improvement than to demonstrate its presence, for when one compares his account of Wales with the accounts of other travelers, one concludes that Defoe can only achieve a focus on “improvement” by shutting his eyes to the backwardness and poverty that are so apparent to others. W. Hutton remarks that in Wales “agriculture is yet but in its infancy. The rich vales are greatly neglected, and much of the mountains might easily be brought into cultivation. The same stile of husbandry we were in, three centuries ago, the Welch are now.” Nor do the Welsh themselves seem inclined to rise to the challenge. Whatever else the Welsh may do, “I know what they do not do—improve their Farms” (Hutton 136, 173). Defoe seems tactically oblivious to this fact, assertively contradicting what would become the prevailing wisdom, that the “barrenness of the soil together with the mountainous nature of the country … are certainly serious impediments to the flourishing state and prosperity of the people” (Hucks 149).

If English readers had taken their view of Wales from Richards’ Wallography, they would have concluded that the country produced nothing that an Englishman could possibly want:

The Country is mountainous, and yields pretty handsome Clambering for Goats, and hath Variety of Precipice to break one’s Neck; which a Man may sooner do than fill his Belly, the Soil being barren, and an excellent Place to breed a Famine in. (45)

The only livestock worth mentioning “were Goats and Heifers, a runtish Sort of Animals of a dwarfish Size, but very hardy, of a flinty Constitution, calculated on purpose for the Meridian of a Rock, on which (it seems) they can as heartily feed, as an Ostrich on an Anvil” (60). The author of A Trip to North-Wales is equally dismissive of the size of Welsh livestock. “Horses are no Rarities,” he argues, “but very easily mistaken for Mastiff-Dogs, unless view’d attentively; they will live half a Week upon the Juice of a Flint-Stone” (Ward 5). Viewing “attentively” is Defoe’s declared purpose, and he notes that this same country is actually “noted for an excellent breed of Welch horses, which, though not very large, are exceeding valuable, and much esteemed all over England” (Tour II: 90). Hackos has argued that the metaphor of the garden is “a dominant trope” of the Tour, conveying the idea that “Britain as a whole can become one great ordered and flourishing entity.” Feeding into “this metaphor are the repeated observations of abundance and growth” (Bowers 164). Where Wales is concerned, however, Defoe sometimes finds it necessary, in the interest of the larger narrative of British prosperity, to emphasize abundance even when it is not otherwise apparent, as in his effort to make it seem like a decided advantage of Welsh agriculture that their horses are smaller than normal.

V

This pattern of transforming visible deficits into apparent surpluses continues throughout Defoe’s circuit of Wales, as features which at first might seem impediments to progress are carefully recast as part of the greater circulation of British trade:

The whole County of Cardigan is so full of Cattle, that ‘tis said to be the Nursery, or Breeding-Place for the whole Kingdom of England… for though the feeding of Cattle indeed requires a rich Soil, the breeding them does not, the Mountains and Moors being as proper for that purpose as richer Land. (Tour II: 89)

Defoe is certainly impressed with the dangers of the terrain; he tells us that Brecknockshire has been nicknamed Breakneckshire by the inhabitants. But what most impresses Defoe is just how much is produced in such a barren landscape. Here in Brecknockshire:

Provisions are exceeding Plentiful … nor are these Mountains useless, even to the City of London … for from hence they send yearly, great Herds of Black Cattle to England, and which are known to fill our Fairs and Markets, even that of Smithfield itself. (Tour II: 80)

According to Defoe:

The South Part of [Glamorganishire] is a pleasant and agreeable place, and is very Populous; ‘tis also a very good, fertile, and rich Soil, and the low Grounds are so well covered with Grass and stocked with Cattle, that they supply the City of Bristol with butter in very great quantities salted and barrell’d up just as Suffolk does the City of London. (Tour, II: 82)

Defoe is a Londoner and some readers have criticized him for the occasional parochialism of the Tour. Shannon L. Rogers remarks that “Defoe’s response’ to Wales is typical of a “city Englishman of his time—horrified, disdainful, and often downright cranky” (17). This overstates the case, for when compared with Wallography (which is genuinely “cranky”) or even Macky’s Journey Through England, Defoe’s Tour seems a specimen of optimism and good will. His references to London serve less to indicate parochial preference than to imply connection between Wales and the rest of Britain. We find this theme repeated in Defoe’s description of the environs of Denbigh:

a most pleasant, fruitful, populous, and delicious Vale, full of Villages and Towns, the Fields shining with Corn, just ready for the Reapers, the Meadows green and flowry, and a fine River, with a mild and gentle Stream running thro’ it … we had a Prospect of the Country open before us, for above 20 Miles in Length and from 5 to 7 Miles in Breadth, all smiling with the same kind of Complexion; which made us think our selves in England. (Tour II: 98)

Both Rogers and Alistair Duckworth have treated this passage not as reportage but as a carefully crafted description of “Whig” landscape. In this regard, this passage resembles other descriptions in the Tour (Rogers, Text 143; Duckworth 454). For our purposes here, however, what stands out is Defoe’s assertion that even though we are in Wales, we “think our selves in England” (Tour II: 98), an assertion that deliberately submerges geographical or political distinctions in some larger imaginative construct, like the idea of Britishness.

VI

Defoe makes no secret of his belief that these agricultural riches must eventually circulate throughout Great Britain. This is one reason why he pays particular attention to Welsh rivers and ports like Monmouth, which “drives a considerable Trade with the City of Bristol, by the navigation of the Wye,” or Chepstow, the “Sea Port for all the Towns seated on the Wyeand Lug, and where their Commerce seems to center” (Tour II: 77). As Defoe said in the Review, “Rivers and Roads are as the Veins and Arteries, that convey Wealth, like … Blood” (“Of Trade in General” 6). This is an observation consistent with Bowers’ assertion that Defoe “envisions the geography of Great Britain as a coherent and dynamic system. The island emerges in the Tour as a kind of organism.” In this reading, London constitutes both the “Center” of the book and the heart of the nation’s circulatory system. Defoe shows how “every Part of the Island” supplies the city with “Provisions” (Bowers 169-170).

Defoe points out that this region of Wales produces “great Quantities of Corn for Exportation, and the Bristol Merchants frequently load Ships here, to go to Portugal, and other Foreign Countries” (Tour II: 77). Defoe also imagines a prosperous future for Conwy because it sits at the mouth of a river:

which is not only pleasant and beautiful, but is a noble Harbour for Ships, had they any occasion for them there; the Stream is Deep and Safe, and the River Broad, as the Thames at Deptford. It only wants a Trade suitable to so good a Port, for it infinitely out does Chester or Liverpool itself. (Tour II: 97)

Critics had argued that Welsh ports were “by no means so commodious and safe as those of England,” but in fact, coastal trade was expanding in the period 1660-1730, and Defoe responds immediately to signs of the change (Hucks 149).

Defoe has high praise for Swansea, which does:

a very great Trade for Coals and Culmn, which they Export to all the Ports of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, and also to Ireland itself; so that one sometimes sees a Hundred Sail of Ships at a time loading Coals here; which greatly enriches the Country. (Tour II: 82)

Milford Haven is one of the:

greatest and best Inlets of Water in Britain. Mr. Cambden says it contains 16 Creeks, 5 great Bays, and 13 good Roads for Shipping … and some say, a Thousand Sail of Ships may ride in it, and not the topmast of one be seen from another; but this last, I think, merits Confirmation. (Tour II: 85)

Defoe mentions in passing that Pembrokeshire was the place made famous by the landing of the Duke of Richmond. What really matters, however, is that the city of Pembroke is “the Largest and Richest” and:

at this Time, the most flourishing Town of all S. Wales: Here are a great many English Merchants, and some of them Men of good Business; and they told us, there were near 200 Sail of Ships belong’d to the Town, small and great; in a Word, all this part of Wales is a rich and flourishing Country. (Tour II: 85)

Taken together such images of Welsh prosperity can be seen as part of the larger patterns of prosperity outlined elsewhere in the Tour. As Linda Colley has argued, “pride in abundance as the token of an elect nation rested not just on agriculture but, even more stridently, on commerce.” And the “cult of commerce became an increasingly important part of being British” (37, 56).

Defoe is writing to convince the reader that Wales should be considered, not as an outlier, as some marginal excrescence on the left flank of England, but as an integral part of Great Britain. What we are offered in Defoe’s account of Wales is an inventory of Welsh rivers, ports, mines, and abundant agriculture, all of which are set to assume their role in the great economic expansion which would eventually make Britain the center of the commercial universe. This is admittedly to refashion Wales in a British mold, a consummation devoutly resisted by many of the Welsh themselves, determined to force the English to recognize Welsh cultural achievements on Welsh terms. In truth, however, to produce an account of the various “curiosities” in Welsh history, literature, and lore, of the sort that would come to define Welsh travelogue, would be to accede to the conclusion of hostile observers like Richards, who snidely wonders “if there are any good Things in Wales.” If you “find any,” he tells his readers, “I pray Heaven to crown you with the Fruition of them.” But because Wales may not be:

a Province … much crowded with Blessings; may you therefore flourish in the Affluence of good English Mercies; may you always possess good English Riches, Health and Honours, and all other Happinesses and Prosperities of our own Nation! (Richards xiv-xv)

As the introduction to a recent collection of essays on Travel Writing in Wales points out, discussions of Welsh identity have frequently turned on the dichotomy between the center and the periphery (Jones, Tully, and Williams). This distinction has a long history. One of the earliest, and most poisonous, portraits of seventeenth-century Wales describes it as “the most monstrous Limb in the whole Body of Geography, for it is generally reported to be without a Middle, or, if it hath a Navel, it is yet a Terra Incognita” (Richards 56). But this is not all; according to Richards’ account, the reason why the Welsh:

do so much affect the Circumference of their Country, and abominate the Center, is, because they are ashamed of the Dominion; and indeed it is a Sign they have but a little Kindness for their Nation, who, like unnatural Sons, run from their Mother, their Country. (Richards 56)

Although the Welsh had officially been joined with England since 1536, Welshmen would continue to assert their own national identity. As Richards so rudely suggests, the English often found it impossible to consider the Welsh as anything other than marginal to the larger purposes of England. It is against this backdrop of hostility that Defoe’s achievement comes clear. Defoe assures us that, in the Tour, he describes things “as they are,” but clearly this is not what occurs with Defoe’s description of Wales. Given the rancorous accounts of Welsh peculiarity offered by contemporary observers, Defoe can hardly afford to focus on the exceptional or curious features of Welsh language, history, scenery, or customs—the kind of thing that would swell the volumes of later Welsh travelers. Instead, his announced intention of touring the “Whole Island of Great Britain” allows him to tacitly ignore Wales’s status as a virtual province of England and focus instead on its place in “our nation,” firmly bound to the rest of Britain with the ligatures of commerce. To be sure, one detects elements of boosterism in Defoe’s account of Wales; yet one also discovers an extraordinary tact in his praise of the volubility of people whose language he can’t understand, in his emphasis on the “populousness” of cities that are little more villages, and in his deliberate deflection of the traditional claims of Welsh landscape and lore, all in the interest of creating a more coherent vision of the “imagined community” that is Great Britain.

Le Moyne College


NOTES

Versions of this paper were delivered at the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History, Bangor University, July 26-28, 2012, and the Conference of the Defoe Society, Bath Spa University, July 22-23, 2015.

[1] Of course, Camden’s Britannia is an important source for Defoe’s account of Wales. As Pat Rogers observes, his descriptions of the mountains often amount to little more than ‘imaginative infilling’ of information he gathered from the pages of the 1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia (Text, 90-95; “Maps,” 33).

[2] The Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons was a precursor to the more notable Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, founded in 1751, whose interests were charitable as well as literary and antiquarian. http://www.cymmrodorion.org/THE%20SOCIETY/OUR-HISTORY

[3] For a fuller account of Wallography, see Roberts, “‘A Witty Book, but mostly Feigned’: William Richards’ Wallography and Perceptions of Wales in Later Seventeenth-century England.”


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Defoe Before Immunity: A Prophylactic Journal of the Plague Year

Travis Chi Wing Lau

THE critical response to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) has unsurprisingly focused upon the issue of literary form. The Journal’s disorienting narration, which erratically shifts back and forth from episodic anecdotes about plague victims to reprints of the statistical bills of mortality, has long provoked readers to acts of generic classification. Commentators have variously called it historical fiction, life writing, journalistic reportage, Protestant plague treatise, and even a mélange of all of these possibilities. While this thread of criticism has proven valuable for the history and theory of the novel form in the eighteenth century, this “tenacious impulse to draw lines between the factual and fictitious,” as Margaret Healy rightly describes this trend, often tries to pin the novel down to tensions between oversimplified categories of the “real” and the “imaginative” or between “history” and “fiction” (27). In my view, the desire to know the Journal by taxonimizing it is but a starting point for an engagement with a text that remains so persistently uncategorizable. [1]

This essay offers a reading of A Journal of the Plague Year through its relation to a series of key events in early eighteenth-century medicine and politics. Defoe’s interest in the plague dates back to as early as 1709, when he began publishing essays on the imminent threat of plague in a number major English periodicals, including The Daily Post, Applebee’s Journal, and Mist’s Journal (Landa 271). His anxieties were to be realized a little over a decade later when an outbreak of plague struck the Marseilles region of France in 1720 and when an epidemic of smallpox struck London in 1721. Hardly minor events, these two epidemics, alongside sporadic cases of cholera and yellow fever, led Parliament to pass the Quarantine Act of 1721. Defoe would publish a year later Due Preparations for the Plague, a plague treatise, and shortly after, A Journal of the Plague Year.

Neglected in this standard account of the context surrounding the composition and publication of Defoe’s plague writings are the developments in medicine, specifically inoculation. Many immunologists credit Edward Jenner with his development in the 1790s of the first method of immunization in English history: vaccination. Jenner, in his observations of the health of the working classes in Gloucestershire, realized that cowpox, a proximal disease to smallpox, could be used to safely produce an attenuated form of infection in healthy subjects. However, the practice of smallpox inoculation was introduced into England much earlier. Beginning in 1700, Dr. Martin Lister and Dr. John Woodward, fellows of the Royal Society, would receive reports of the Chinese inhalation and Turkish engrafting methods of inoculation circulating among informants on major trade routes (Silverstein, Miller 438). The latter method became popularized through Cotton Mather’s Boston experiments in America and Lady Wortley Montagu’s interventions with the aristocracy in England. Montagu, after following her husband to his post as ambassador in Constantinople, witnessed and documented in 1717 the Turkish practice of variolation, or the deliberate exposure of a non-infected individual to live viral matter in efforts to induce a lesser case of smallpox and eventually generate immunity to it. In a letter to her friend, Sarah Chiswell, in April 1717, Montagu wrote that “the small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting . . . I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England” (Montagu 338-9). So convinced of the procedure’s efficacy and its potential value to the English public, Montagu subsequently authorized both of her children to be variolated by Charles Maitland, surgeon to the Turkish Embassy. Continued debates about the practice’s efficacy and viability ultimately led to the Royal Experiment of 1721.

During the height of the epidemics in 1721, the youngest child of the Prince and Princess of Wales fell ill to what was believed to be a case of smallpox. Princess of Wales, Caroline of Ansbach, scientifically-minded and eager to find a treatment for her child’s ailment, solicited King George I for permission to carry out experiments on prisoners condemned to death in Newgate Prison to which he eventually agreed. On the morning of August 9, 1721, Hans Sloane and John George Steigherthal supervised Charles Maitland in the inoculation of three male and three female prisoners. The Royal Experiment was attended by practitioners of all three major branches of medicine (physician, surgeon, apothecary), including prominent members of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society. This event was likely the first recorded clinical trial in medical history that used human subjects (Silverstein, Miller 437). Despite its problematic ethics and lack of experimental controls by contemporary standards, the Royal Experiment of 1721 heralded a decade of medical and lay fascination with immunity. As Arnold Zuckerman writes of this period, “the emphasis in 1720 was on prevention, not cure” (280). This decade laid the groundwork for what would develop into the heated public health and sanitation debates of the Victorian period, as well as the anti-vaccination movement, which would become one of the largest anti-medical campaigns in Western history. [2]

Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague, released just over a month before A Journal of the Plague Year, directly responded to the Quarantine Act of 1721. Alongside the medical establishment’s investment in inoculation as a potentially viable practice, which medical men sought to legitimize and promote through repeated experimentation, England also responded governmentally to the epidemic threats coming from abroad. Historians have noted that, in the eighteenth century, England became increasingly stringent on maritime trade. [3] This isolationist foreign policy was supported by many politicians and physicians, including Dr. Richard Mead, whose theories of contagion outlined in his treatise, A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Method to be used to prevent it (1720), underpinned much of the government’s legislation. The Quarantine Act of 1710 under Queen Anne enabled the surveillance and detention of all vessels arriving from reportedly infected areas for forty days. Such a length of time allowed for proper airing out of ships and goods, as well as the identification and quarantine of any crew members or passengers believed to be or revealed to be sick. Notable was the harshness of the Act’s penalties: aside from fines, customs officials were given legal right to use force against anyone even attempting to violate or skirt the regulations. The subsequently amended Quarantine Act of 1721 under George I maintained these strict regulations from the prior 1710 act but added the prohibition of commerce for a year with any country deemed infectious, as well as sanctioned the use of cordon sanitaires around any town that may have had cases of infection. [4] These “lines of health” were policed by armed militia, which violently delineated “healthy” and “infected” spaces as a strategy to prevent the spread of plague through the trafficking of goods and bodies. Often overlooked in this history is that despite the very fact that plague itself declined rapidly after the 1665-1666 visitation at the center of A Journal of the Plague Year, quarantine legislation only intensified during the early eighteenth century. [5]

Quarantine laws within and without came to shape a vision of English nationhood based on a logic of immunity. Etymologically, immunity derives from a classical Roman juridico-legal term, immunitas , which referred to a citizen’s exemption from civic duty or obligation. In the case of eighteenth-century quarantine measures, “immunization no longer protects individuals or classes of people from communal obligations” but instead “preserves communal norms through the rejection” and expulsion of threats, real or imagined (Hammill 89). Such active preservation of communal norms through militarized and legislative means would come to shape an English nation that defined itself as healthy, vigorous, and pure. The political valence intrinsic to immunity’s early definition did not disappear as the eighteenth century progressed but rather became naturalized through medical frameworks that would solidify by the nineteenth century as a product of the specialization and professionalization of the hard sciences. Thus, the immunological turn in both English medicine and politics was no mere coincidence. Political philosopher Roberto Esposito notes that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries featured a conceptual shift in immunity from natural to acquired, “from an essentially passive condition to one that is actively induced” (7). Turning to the 1720s allows us to track the beginnings of this shift from passive immunity (one’s civic status) to active immunity (one’s biological status), and from a purely legal understanding of immunity to an increasingly medicalized one. What many literary and medical historians have attributed to Jenner’s politicization of vaccination in the 1790s as a means of preserving a vulnerable English nation against French radicalism is actually a culmination of transformations in immunity that had begun far earlier in the eighteenth century.

Taking seriously Wayne Wild’s contention that Defoe “was acutely sensitive to changes in medical theory and rhetoric over the intervening fifty years” between the Great Plague of 1665 and the 1720s, I consider how Defoe was not only grappling with the austerity of the Quarantine Acts and England’s approach to disease management, but also contributing to the developing discourse of immunity in the English imagination (61). [6] In the face of the epidemics from the south of France and the numerous visitations throughout English history, could England ever truly become immune to the plague? What would such immunity look like and whom would it protect? Produced well before the birth of modern epidemiology, A Journal of the Plague Year poses such questions. If, as Margaret Healy has asserted, “bubonic plague and the novel are perhaps more intimate associates than has previously been realized,” I argue that their shared intimacy is an immunitary one (28).

I

“yet I alive!”
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

While mostly avoiding simplistic arguments about plot in favor of formalist analyses, many critics of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year take for granted—surprisingly, I think—the detail of H.F’s survival. Benjamin Moore characterizes H.F. as “more than simply an observer”; rather, he is a

compiler of and commentator on plague discourses, and in this capacity holds a dominant perspective on the information constituting the narrative. Thus H.F. who must be in the position of both knowing and narrating events, appears not only as a privileged persona recording the information sometime after the plague, but also as one of many people reacting to it when it was first available. (137-9)

As the means by which Defoe sorts through the conflicting discourses on the plague in the 1720s, H.F. is necessarily the “privileged persona”—both fluent in these discourses and able to narrate them through a series of exemplary instances. Yet consistently implied in Moore’s description is that H.F.’s special status depends crucially on his uncanny “capacity” to “continue” long enough to observe the plague’s effects on the individual and the collective levels of English society, collect his findings into the journal that becomes Defoe’s text, and make available his account of the plague’s visitation to an English readership. This raises a key question: how and why does H.F. survive?

Wayne Wild has traced how Defoe’s two plague texts diverge. Even as the Journal eschews the otherwise overt didacticism of Due Preparations, both remain preoccupied with “determining strict boundaries and being ever-vigilant in defining one’s own space” to contain infection (Wild 63). The texts’ prescriptions, both physical and spiritual, serve what Louis Landa has called a “utilitarian” purpose of inculcating 1) specific bodily practices (i.e. maintaining a strict diet), 2) relations (i.e. deliberate self-disclosure of illness, quarantining sick from the healthy), and 3) movements through public and private space (272). Like the Quarantine Acts, Defoe’s plague writings underscore the necessity of distinguishing between safe and infected spaces. In addition, they interpellate able-bodied subjects capable of responding to crisis. The mode of the Journal is fittingly paranoid: through its chapter-less and section-less form, Defoe encourages citizens to adopt an anticipatory self-policing approach to survival that sometimes works with or against municipal regulations that attempt to mediate however ineffectively the relationship between healthy and sick bodies. Defoe frames these various techniques of disease management as H.F.’s “Eye-Witness” testimony: from H.F.’s constant relocation across the city’s “face strangely alter’d,” to his use of Dr. Heath’s medicines, to the double-edged “shutting up of houses” (17-8, 193). This “plague-by-proxy” method, in which Defoe forces the reader to inhabit the perspectives of H.F. and other citizens attempting to survive the visitation, parallels rhetorical and ideological strategies popular with writers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct manuals. These guides, on topics as mundane as gardening or as esoteric as occult magic, circulated widely among both educated and lay readers as entertainment and as didactic resources. If critics have been inclined to turn to religious texts like sermons as analogues to Defoe’s Journal, comparing the novel’s didactic strategies to those of a conduct manual is particularly apt. [7] As a handbook on the plague, Defoe’s Journal reads like an early survival guide.

Critics of the Journal have long noted that its lurid scenes of urban life in a state of emergency, where domestic homes become atomized prisons for citizens scattered throughout the city, parallel a Foucauldian model of a panoptic society. [8] John Bender, in his now seminal Imagining the Penitentiary, reads the city’s reactionary attempts at disease management (i.e. citizens designated as searchers and guards for and against other citizens “shut up” in their houses) as exemplary of a panoptic society being produced through increasingly penetrating forms of surveillance and quarantine. H.F.’s engagement with these penitential methods results in his own self-cordoning, an internalization of the policing measures of panoptic power diffused away from a singular, external sovereign and into the individual bodies of citizens themselves. The novel-as-survival guide then enables this process of internalization of discipline within readers. “The good citizen is both watched and watcher,” writes Bender of H.F.’s “private self being constituted narratively through isolated reflection … as the internal restatement of external authority” (76-7). Yet, persuasive as this framework has been, it fails to address what so memorably defines the Journal as a work of fiction: contradiction and paradox. It presumes a coherent narrative strategy, which in Bender’s formulation, embodies a certain “structure of feeling” in which “reformative confinement becomes part of the institutional texture” of modernity, as well as a fixed definition of contagion. Yet both of these remain unstable throughout the novel (83). This instability centers around H.F., who not only narrates chaotically but also, in going against nearly every piece of advice on plague prevention he administers or that is administered to him, serves as a conspicuous counterexample of how one might survive the plague.

Rather than “surviving by isolating himself from the plague, becoming an island of health in infected London,” H.F. regularly leaves the security of his home (DeGabriele 8). In one of his many entries about the city’s massive burial pit, he articulates a need to examine it for himself:

It was about the 10th of September, that my Curiosity led, or rather drove me to go and see this Pit again, when there had been near 400 People buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the Day-time, as I had done before; for then there would have been nothing to have been seen but the loose Earth. (Defoe 53)

H.F. terms this impulse to roam about the city “Curiosity” and likens it to a kind of drive that compelled him to visit again and again the pit within which four hundred bodies have been interred. Mass burial is rendered a spectacle, which H.F. desires to witness not when the pit is empty but when it is filled with moldering bodies. [9] H.F., who in another moment describes this impulse as an “instructive” one, then enables the reader to witness and learn through his account (Defoe 54). Yet, H.F.’s restless “Curiosity” motivates him even to act against decrees made by the municipal government:

There was a strict Order to prevent People coming to those Pits, and that was only to prevent Infection: But after some Time, that Order was more necessary, for People that were Infected, and near their End, and delirious also, would run to those Pits wrapt in Blankets, or Rugs, and throw themselves in, and as they said, bury themselves. (53)

It is important that here H.F. is not making a commentary on the practice of preventing people from coming to the pits. Unlike his criticism of the “shutting up of houses,” itself unevenly argued throughout the text in a series of pathetic anecdotes about families left to die in their own homes or forced to make desperate escapes on one hand and praises of the municipal government’s efficiency and benevolence on the other, H.F. knows that the order “was only to prevent Infection” and was later made more necessary as more people became infected. Here, he explicitly disregards the “strict Order” with full knowledge that the “Order” served a valuable purpose of ensuring public health and safety. H.F. does not frame himself as susceptible to the plague—or at least not in the same way. Instead, by virtue of his observational distance, he sets himself apart from the “Infected” who seek to “bury themselves.” In short, this framing invests authority in H.F. to ignore the “strict Order,” interdictions that plague commentators like Richard Mead emphasized as key to the containment of infection, and to diagnose the “Infected” as “delirious.”

In a similarly counterintuitive moment, H.F. waffles on his decision to stay in London despite the entreaty of his brother to escape the city into the countryside. If “the best Physick against the Plague is to run away from it,” it is telling that H.F. chooses to do the exact opposite (Defoe 156). As opposed to depending on the rational calculus of something like Crusoe’s double-entry bookkeeping to make the decision to stay, H.F. instead relies on act of faith: bibliomancy, or the act of opening the Bible to a random passage as an indicator of God’s judgment (Defoe 15). The arbitrary randomness of this act flies directly in the face of H.F.’s otherwise informed rationality that he tries to embody throughout the novel. The very certainty of providential design, as with the ability to read and preempt the shifting “signs” of plague on human bodies and city structures, is repeatedly undercut by H.F’s privilege of “constant vacillation” and argumentative flip-flopping (Wild 66). If Defoe’s novel is supposed to be prescriptive, the text’s model, H.F., seems hardly a model at all but rather an exception full of inconsistencies.

H.F.’s contradictory behavior has typically been explained either in terms of the plague’s disruptive effects or in terms of the novel’s engagement with epistemological uncertainty and eighteenth-century problems of knowing. [10] H.F.’s “Curiosity,” in the latter category of readings, parallels an empiricist impulse to know and experience first-hand. But how do we reconcile this risky, almost suicidal empiricism with H.F.’s own equivocating even about matters as pressing as his own livelihood? H.F., while in some passages praising the efforts of the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen of London, also enumerates instances of governmental failure and corruption, and the misreporting and adulteration of the bills of mortality. These, combined with his portraits of superstition, quackery, and crumbling ecclesiastical and medical authority, are what lend the Journal its sense of horror and helplessness (Defoe 81-82, 84, 182). Our critical impulse, understandably, is to look for identifiable, stable moments that might affirm Defoe’s commitments to Lockean philosophy, New Science, or Protestant theology. [11] Doing so, however, limits the possibilities for a more capacious reading that does not seek to rationalize the Journal’s recursivity and inconsistency within a singular framework. As opposed to adhering to any “coherent design,” Defoe’s Journal powerfully witnesses the failures of both religious and secular responses to plague (Zimmerman 422). Helen Thompson, in her examination of the peculiar form of character in Defoe’s Journal, resists Bender’s assumption that the “aggravated epistemological environment of the plague” necessarily produces in private spaces a self-conscious, discerning subjectivity (Thompson 155). Instead, by turning to Boyle’s medico-corpuscular philosophy, which posits the “plague’s imperceptible materiality,” she reads H.F. (and the very notion of “character” itself) as decidedly the bearer of “unknowable or secret things” that do not “correlate, even from the side of its bearer, with subjectivizing particulars” (Thompson 156-7). Central here is that Boyle’s (and Defoe’s) imperceptible plague-causing corpuscles render causation impossible to pin down within this shifting space of contagion, populated by porous bodies that are capable of admitting and emitting minute “effluvia” at any moment (Defoe 64). The text is devastating because it refuses to offer any certain measures against the disease, for “the Plague defied all medicine,” scientific or spiritual (Defoe 34).

II

To consider what remains after these failures, I turn now to the novel’s conclusion, which famously ends with an abrupt shift away from prose to four lines of verse, what H.F. describes as “a coarse but sincere Stanza of my own”:

A dreadful Plague in London was,
In the Year Sixty Five,
Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls
Away; yet I alive.
                                        H.F. (193)

After over two hundred pages, we finally learn two important pieces of information: the narrator’s name, H.F., and that he survived the 1665 plague, which killed over one hundred thousand people in the course of the visitation. [12] Defoe’s unexpected transition from often paragraph-long run-on sentences, turgid with textual “buboes,” to these brief, “coarse” lines demands closer attention. [13] What are we to make of the single conjunction “yet” that affirms the survival of whom the novel’s title page describes as a “Citizen who continued all the while in London”? “Yet,” used here as a conjunction, underscores H.F.’s exceptional fear of living in the face of mass death. More provocatively, as the OED reminds us, “yet” suggests an addition, a continuation, or a furthering (“Yet”). H.F. literalizes this “yet” by “continuing all the while in London” long enough to tell his remarkable story. The mechanism of his “continuation,” what enables H.F. to stay “yet alive,” remains unclear—it is that which falls out of the providential and rational frameworks that H.F. puts forth to his readers as possible ways of processing the plague as an event. Furthermore, the semicolon coupled with “yet” orthographically separates H.F., the “I” who remains “alive” to finally be named at the novel’s conclusion, from the “Hundred Thousand Souls.” H.F., who signs off his narrative by again differentiating himself from these swaths of unnamed plague victims, speaks with a “clinical detachment of one who has nothing to fear,” a “privileged textual position” of someone who is immune (Gomel 410). If the corpuscular bodies that cause the plague are indeed imperceptible and untraceable, H.F’s inexplicable survival further complicates the problem of causation. The novel ends not with curative resolution but with troubling dis-ease: how does one avoid infection if all forms of prevention seem to fail? The very contradictions exemplified in the novel’s concluding “yet” problematize the distinction among different possible mechanisms for immunity (i.e. fortune, nature, Providence). What we are left with then is H.F. as the last surviving remainder, “material resistant to schemes providential and scientific”—the immune body that never appears in the flesh but reminds us powerfully that it is still “yet alive” (Flynn 7).

The Royal Experiment of 1721 and the numerous trials with variolation (and later, vaccination) demonstrated that immunity was achieved through the introduction of infectious material into a body to produce or augment health. Yet this production of health, as Roberto Esposito reminds us, is a reactive one: the immunitary mechanism operates on a perverse logic of exclusionary inclusion or exclusion by inclusion—the body preserves and defends itself by paradoxically incorporating within its boundaries matter that is marked foreign and hostile. Immunized life “thus depends on a wound that cannot heal, because the wound is created by life itself”; inoculation “can prolong life, but only by continuously giving it a taste of death” (Esposito 8-9). Defoe’s Journal dramatizes this immunological paradox by spectacularizing H.F.’s movements in spite of the city’s disciplinary regulation of its citizens and the statistical tracking of their bodies through the bills of the mortality revealed to be inaccurate. H.F.’s survival narrative is one that demonstrates that he is not “fully subject to either public or private authority” (DeGabriele 18).

H.F.’s immune status of being “yet alive” directly challenges the fantasy of perfect immunity imagined by quarantine in which national health is preserved by the consistent identification, separation, and purgation of infected bodies. The Journal is a corpus of encounters—repeated excursions through plague-ridden London that establish a “risky intimacy,” to use Peter DeGabriele’s provocative description, not only with the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which causes the symptoms and conditions that constitute the plague, but with the experience of plague both on the scale of the singular plague sufferer (i.e. Solomon Eagle or John, the waterman) and on the scale of mass social and organismic death. To modulate the critical preoccupation with H.F.’s narrative authority as tied to his perceptive individuality, he is more accurately an accumulation of different exposures to the plague. H.F.’s narrative parallels what will ultimately become contemporary immunology’s model of immune response: through an encounter, deliberate or unintentional, with an antigen (i.e. a virus), the adaptive immune system triggers an immune response. During this response, the body generates “memories” of that encounter with microbial threat, what we now call antibodies, which then recognize and help defend the body against future infection. If H.F.’s immune body is constituted by this series of encounters with the dying and the dead, immunity can be understood then as an extended process of memorialization insofar as that it becomes impossible to “separate the dead, as waste matter, from the living” (Gee 119).

Defoe risks a traumatic remembering of the plague to consider what English social body has been constituted after the destruction of the visitation and the subsequent Great Fire of London in 1666. Following Peter DeGabriele’s assertion that “Defoe treats the plague as simultaneously a time of great peril for the nation of England and the community of London and a moment of horror out of which a more stable and more modern form of national community is created,” we might think of this community as one produced by the plague’s biological and social upheaval and composed of individuals like H.F. who have survived or avoided infection (DeGabriele 9). Produced by the plague’s biological and social upheaval is a new English social body composed of individuals like H.F. who have survived or avoided infection. If, as Priscilla Wald phrases it, “communicability configure[s] community,” English citizens are bound by their mutual experience of having been “touched” by the plague (12). Contagion, derived from the Latin con (with) and tangere (to touch), is literally about contact and interaction between bodies. The immunitary impulse to intensify quarantine legislation that compulsively marks out bodies, objects, and other nations as infected derives from a fear not just of contagion and its potential incorporation but its possible presence already within the English social body. Variolation, as a Turkish practice, was feared precisely because of its status as an import from a potentially decadent Eastern culture, as well as its premise involving foreign matter being “ingrafted” into an otherwise pure English body. Yet as H.F.’s uncanny ability to stay “yet alive” repeatedly demonstrates, immunity depends on the deliberate exposure to the other. Urgently writing in response to the epidemics of the early 1720s and the possibility for another great visitation, Defoe revives this earlier episode from the Restoration to both question an ideal of perfect immunity in which the English national body can be entirely cleansed of threat and to reevaluate exclusionary policies like quarantine that seemed detrimental to the nation and ultimately futile. [14]

Defoe’s Journal, as critics have long noted, is undeniably permeated by an unruly corporeality: sick and decaying bodies ever threaten to consume both H.F.’s comprehension of the epidemic and the very pages of the Journal itself. Recently, Sophie Gee has interpreted the figure of the corpse as Defoe’s attempt to imagine “what it means for a culture to retain its residues”:

The text is filled with remnants and leftovers: the bodies lining the city streets, the spectacle of the plague pits, still lying beneath the thriving capital of Defoe’s day; the bills of Mortality and population statistics; the lists of parishes and drawings of astrological charts—remainders make up the fabric of Defoe’s narrative. (125)

As H.F. repeatedly laments, there were simply not enough living to bury the dead at all, let alone with proper burial rites. The figure of the mass grave becomes the locus of H.F.’s fascination because the four hundred corpses that fill the pit are but a small fraction of the hundred thousand bodies devastated by the plague. These “remnants and leftovers,” quite literally lying beneath and constituting the very foundations of London itself, serve as haunting [15] reminders of whom medical men, priests, and parliamentary officials failed to save and cannot so simply forget despite the continuation of a new London in the 1720s. These bodies are thus Defoe’s attempt to memorialize, “antibodies” reanimated by Defoe as H.F.’s recollections. As Elana Gomel writes, H.F. is not so much “an individual body susceptible to the disease but an incorporeal voice speaking for the dying and the dead” (410).

Aside from these corpses, we discover that H.F., himself, is a living memory or “antibody”: he is the surviving remainder of a visitation barely fifty years old and a member of Defoe’s own genealogical past. In seemingly digressional section, we learn that H.F. is actually already dead:

Besides this, there was a piece of Ground in Moorfields, by the going into the Street which is now call’d Old Bethlem, which was enlarg’d much, tho’ not wholly taken in on the same occasion.
N.B. The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground, being at his own Desire, his Sister having been buried there a few Years before. (181)

Like the novel’s conclusion, these short paragraphs are notable for their deviation from the rest of the work. Prior to this moment, there have not been any editorial notes of this kind. This note is particularly bizarre for two reasons: the editorial voice interrupts H.F. in media res, and interrupts to indicate specifically where H.F. is buried. Why is this detail so important that the editor needs to mark it with an imperative nota bene? [16] I suggest that the references to the “Moorfields” and “Old Bethlem” are not simply throwaway geographical markers. “Bethlem” refers here to Bethlem Royal Hospital, founded in the thirteenth century. In 1675-6, nearly a decade after the 1665 visitation and the 1666 Great Fire of London, a new, larger Bethlem Hospital was erected in the Moorfields north of London. This charitable hospital, more colloquially referred to as Bedlam, was well-known in both its earlier and later incarnations for its housing of extremely poor patients, but also patients suffering from mental illnesses and disabilities. Such pathologized bodies were grotesquely spectacularized through their public display to paying viewers—much like the corpses thrown carelessly into the plague pits. By invoking the crumbling walls of “Old Bethlem,” Defoe underscores that the new England erected in the wake of the visitation is constituted by these bodies too often interred and forgotten. H.F., revealed to be already dead, is reanimated through the novel to prevent what Defoe sees as a cultural amnesia about the legacy of a “National Infection,” which lives on through the bodies of its citizens (Defoe 32).

Recent studies of contemporary biopolitics have tracked the manifold ways that disciplinary power has insidiously “diversified and metastasized to thrust sinewy webs of control across the society” (Wacquant 121). The discussion, as Richard Barney and Helene Scheck identify in their introduction to their Rhetorics of Plague special issue, comes down to the “difficult question of whether biopolitics—conceived as the mutual articulation of biology or ‘life’ and politics—inevitably reinforces what Foucault called ‘biopower,’ the ability of political authority to consolidate and extend its normative control over biological forces” (16). Political philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have offered two contrasting visions of biopolitics in response to Foucault’s ambiguous articulation of this concept: [17] Agamben’s “negative” biopolitics assumes that sovereignty always bears the power “to reduce bios, the life of communal or sociopolitical relations, to zoe, the ‘simple fact of living’ or ‘bare life,” while Esposito’s “positive” biopolitics conceives of a politics of life that exceeds the sovereign’s power over it (Barney and Scheck, 16-7). Historicizing this immunitary paradigm, which characterizes a biopolitical modernity for both Agamben and Esposito, reveals how the period just before the cooptation of immunity into biomedicine potentially offers models resistant to this totalizing vision of biopower. Defoe’s H.F., as a body made of repeated exposures with the contagious other yet still remains immune, embodies what contemporary disability studies scholars have espoused as a vital interdependence between self and other that promotes “a politics that is no longer over life but of life” (Gilman 11).

University of Pennsylvania


NOTES

[1] Richard Rambuss, in his essay on the Journal’s generic instability, suggests that “perhaps even more interesting than the question of why A Journal of the Plague eludes generic classification is the question of why the Journal so self-reflexively demands genre-classification at all” (129).

[2] Nadja Durbach, writing on the Victorian anti-vaccination movement in Bodily Matters, claims that, despite its relative neglect in standard histories of Western medicine, it was the single greatest movement against the medical establishment in all of Western history (5).

[3] See Paul Slack’s The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England for an extended history on the plague’s effects on English government and society (114-133).

[4] Maximilian Novak notes that Quarantine Act of 1721 added to the “feeling of terror” during these epidemics as it included “three clauses which ordered immediate death for anyone sick who attempted to leave a house that was quarantined, or for anyone well who attempted to leave after coming in contact with anyone in such a house” (245).

[5] As Graham Hammill writes of early modern plague discourse, “quarantine laws initiated a debate over the means by which the state should preserve and safeguard the existence of its population” yet “this debate far exceeded the question of how to manage and contain a communicable disease; it shaped early modern English understandings of national community [and] sovereignty” (86).

[6] Kari Nixon’s recent essay echoes the connection between Defoe’s work with immunity: “Nevertheless, the concept of inoculation—taking a bit of the threatening other into the self as a prophylactic measure against a complete takeover by this other—clearly influenced Defoe’s views in handling the practical effects of the plague after the 1721 smallpox outbreak” (69).

[7] See essays by Margaret Healy and Everett Zimmerman for readings of Defoe’s Journal in the greater context of Protestant writing.

[8] Foucault situates his discussion of panopticism in Discipline and Punish through the anecdote of a plague visitation in which power becomes increasingly diffused through citizen’s bodies regulated by disciplinary measures (195-228).

[9] See Raymond Stephanson’s “‘Tis A speaking Sight’” for a reading of the plague pit in terms of visuality and his “The Plague Narratives of Defoe and Camus” for a discussion of how plague constricts the imagination.

[10] See Jennifer Cooke’s Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (16-44) and Stephanson’s “The Plague Narratives of Defoe and Camus” for examples of the disorienting power of the plague on the human faculties of imagination and perception. For an example of a recent epistemological reading of the Journal, see Nicholas Seager’s engagement with the history of statistics and the problem of facticity in the eighteenth century. Seager’s essay falls in line with the long-standing critical trend that attempts to delineate a “binary…between the anecdotal, subjective, and sympathetic account provided by the narrator, whom we known only as H.F., on the one hand, and the formal, objective, and cold records, purportedly hard facts, on the other” (640).

[11] For a now classic essay on Lockean perception, see Flynn’s chapter, “Dull Organs: The Matter of the Body in the Plague Year,” from The Body in Swift and Defoe (8-36). On the “New Science,” see Wayne Wild, who writes of Defoe’s Journal and Due Preparations as two “distinctly different… application[s] of New Science,” in which the Journal strategically has “his readers fully engaged in its verisimilitude, such that it becomes a historical document on which later texts can depend” (62). On theology, see Margaret Healy’s examination of the English plague treatises of Bullein, Nashe, and Dekker as precedents for Defoe’s writings in Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (50-122).

[12] The critical consensus has been that H.F. likely refers to Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, a saddler who lived in Aldgate. Louis Landa, in the introduction to the earlier Oxford edition of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, reminds us that “although we have no firm evidence, it is not unlikely that Henry Foe remained in London during the Plague and certainly not improbable that the youthful Daniel Defoe, aged fourteen when his uncle died, heard of his relative’s experiences at first hand” (270).

[13] Cooke treats the Journal’s form as a textual body, which reflects the symptoms of the plague (30-32). Kari Nixon also draws on the figure of the suppurating buboe to consider the problematics of borders and permeability in Defoe’s Journal (66). Such symptomatic readings tend to move away from an engagement with medical history and practice in favor of thinking about the mimetic relationship between plague and narrative. The Journal’s instability is a reflection of the plague’s disorienting and jarring power.

[14] Cooke comments that “it is as though Defoe were ‘saying it to keep it from happening,’ to steal the title of one of John Ashberry’s poems: a writing of the plague that would function to ward off the disease, the deployment of plague discourse as preventative medicine” (25).

[15] Jayne Lewis links the bodily remnants in Defoe’s Journal to “historical remnants in and of themselves” and discourses of apparitions and ghosts popular in the eighteenth century (83).

[16] Flynn has commented on this editorial note: “Defoe’s editorial interruption insisting upon H.F.’s own rotting state not only disturbs his reader’s sense of fictional coherence, but reveals a contemporary fear of the dead body itself, particularly the urban body and the way it could threaten the living” (21).

[17] See also Timothy Campbell’s succinct overview of Agamben’s and Esposito’s theories of immunity in his critical introduction to Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (vii-xlii).


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Killer Kisses: Queering Intimacies in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

Jarred Wiehe

For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.
Lee Edelman, No Future

DANIEL Defoe’s 1722 historical novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, renders London as a terrifying landscape during the Great Plague of 1655. Bodies are not what they appear to be, and contagion is everywhere. Defoe’s city is populated with images of swollen sores, suffering patients, and fearful child-bearing. Defoe also illustrates several vectors of disease ranging from raving, naked men on the street to kind kisses within the conjugal family. The reproductive family becomes an anxious unit under assault by disability, disease, and even domestic intimacies. Using Lee Edelman’s conceptualization of “reproductive futurism,” I read Defoe’s Journal as a site for queer renderings of intimacies during epidemics. Take, for instance, a description given by H.F., Defoe’s narrator, concerning the “dreadful Cases [that] happened in particular Families every Day” (69). H.F. reports “[p]eople in the Rage of the Distemper, or in the Torment of their Swellings, which was indeed intolerable, running out of their own Government, raving and distracted” (69). Within “particular Families,” people become at odds with their own bodies and autonomy, and H.F. notes how the site of the family becomes colored by suicidality: “People […] oftentimes laying violent Hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out at their Windows, shooting themselves, &c” (69). Clearly, the plague confronts a person’s relationship with the limits of their own future, but it also fundamentally reshapes the workings of the family:

Mothers murthering their own Children, in their Lunacy, some dying of meer Grief, as a Passion, some of meer Fright and Surprize, without any Infection at all; others frighted into Idiotism, and foolish Distractions. (69)

Based on H.F.’s description, the site of any given “particular” family becomes a site that confronts the limits of parental-child intimacy, able-mindedness, and able-bodiedness.

H.F.’s description dramatizes several key points I hope to draw out from Defoe’s Journal. The novel makes intimacy—especially conjugal intimacy— monstrous, as the plague acts as a queer, disruptive force. Even more monstrous, however, is the way that the plague produces queer relations: relations that are unaccountable, threatening, and anti-futurist. In H.F.’s characterization, mothers murder their own children, which, under H.F.’s logic, must be “Lunacy,” since those with sense would never enact such anti-child/anti-futurist violence. Defoe’s text reveals how disease revises logics of emerging compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. [1] As a caveat: in arguing for the plague as queerness and a producer of queer relations, I do not mean to make the plague into a metaphor; on the contrary, my goal is to illustrate how Defoe’s Journal participates in and undergirds a long tradition of queering bodies during plague times and the effects of disease in reshaping “straight” socialities. [2]

Although Edelman is concerned with modern political figurings of queerness, this antisocial mode of queer disruption parallels Defoe’s notable concerns with the way plague frustrates socialities in early modern England. Specifically, scholars read the Journal as a text that is concerned with sociality. In theorizing Defoe’s response to the threat of “disorder” in his city (and by extension, nation), Maximillian E. Novak examines the ways that the Journal negotiates the constant possibility of “a complete breakdown of communal and political organization” (241). Novak turns to moments where Defoe places the family unit first, arguing that “the main impulse behind A Journal of the Plague Year was a demonstration of human pity and fellowship in the worst disasters” (248). In Novak’s reading, Defoe reaffirms a social ordering “by showing a London in 1665 in which family love frequently triumphed over the drive for self-preservation” (248). Although not a queer project, Novak’s essay reveals the tension between a family-first ethos and the antisocial plague. Under the logics of reproductive futurism, H. F.’s actions attempt to solidify a homosocial ordering in a city that is coming apart at the seams. Scott J. Juengel’s work on corpse imagery explicitly ties the plague to social disruptions, writ large. The plague corpses “present a radical threat to cultural systemization; as a result, the integrity of social order is preserved only through the effective management of this tragic human waste” (140). Defoe’s narrative, then, enacts the type of regulation and meaning-making required to shore up a crumbling social order. Taking Juengel’s argument further, I would add that “the integrity of social order” is pointedly the integrity of the homosocial order built on family, marriage, and patrilineality. Thus, although a distinctly queer critique of the Journal has yet to be written, the scholarly conversation concerning the plague and sociality suggests that Defoe’s project is attending to queer threats.

Queer threats to sociality also call into question one’s relationship to fantasies of embodiment since a body’s ability to socialize is dependent on how others read and know it. Under plague time, the body’s status as “knowable” is increasingly important, and policing the boundaries of embodiment becomes a crucial, social act. Defoe’s discursive production (and policing) of knowable bodies places the Journal within a literary history of disability, health, and able-bodiedness. This essay takes as its starting place the fragmentary nature of embodiment, rather than assuming able-bodiedness as an à priori condition. [3] As Helen Thompson’s work on Robert Boyle, corpuscular philosophy, and plague reveal, “a ‘bounded subject’ is not the starting point for a medico-corpuscular episteme in which, as we have seen, normative persons are porous” (157). Although not a disability studies critique, Thompson’s essay unsettles ableist fictions that would give able-bodiedness an invisible position as the baseline for measuring corporeality. In Defoe’s text, queerness likewise exposes gaps in fictions that would consolidate able-bodiedness.

I am interested in the structures of the social that Defoe’s rendering of disease seems to queer. Children, cross-sex desire, and able bodies are threatened and made threatening within Defoe’s plagued London. For instance, the attention Defoe pays to pregnant women characterizes the plague as queerness; the plague threatens the child and enacts anti-futurist queer violence on that which would symbolize safety and cross-sex coupling. Even more threatening, though, is the way the plague produces queerness—mothers turn infanticidal, cross-sex kisses are deadly, and fictions about legible abled/disabled bodies are disavowed. Defoe reflects on moments where parents become “walking Destroyers,” killing their families while thinking they were healthy (159). Ultimately, Defoe’s text reveals the limitations of the reproductive, conjugal family as built upon seemingly unassailable familial intimacy and able-bodiedness.

No Futures: Defoe’s Plague as Queerness

My engagement with queerness is most in line with J. Halberstam and Edelman. Following Halberstam, I understand as “queer” practices in time and space that exist outside the “frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6). Queer temporality has a long history of being tied to illness and epidemics; plague time/queer time demands that straight ways of being reassess their investments in family and futurity. [4] Scholars of the eighteenth century employ the term “queer” to signify those bodies, lives, and material practices that lay outside of binary frameworks. For instance, Susan S. Lanser sees “queer” as “a resistance to all categories, especially but not only those of male/female and gay/lesbian; an attack on rational epistemologies and classificatory systems in favor of the disorder, or the different logic, of desire” (21). George E. Haggerty suggests that Horace Walpole’s queerness emerges when we embrace the fact that he rests outside “neatly structured categories we have for defined sexual identity” (560). Eighteenth-century queerness, then, destabilizes easy identity categories by resisting and working outside such temporal and spatial regulations and disciplines that develop in the century—some of which might include the rise of the egalitarian family, the discursive production of a common good maintained by the newly created public sphere, and the consolidation of gender naturally following a prediscursively produced sex. [5]

In a more anti-social strain of contemporary queer theory, Edelman explores the language of “fighting for the child,” a rhetoric which creates an impossibly one-sided position—since what kind of monster would not be fighting for the child, and all the innocence, futurity, and hopes that the symbolic Child bears? Edelman claims that this rhetoric is built on “reproductive futurism”:

terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations (2).

Communal relations and social relations (and the organizing principles like futurity, childbirth, and the family) are central to Edelman’s formulation of queerness since “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” (3). Queerness is “the place of the social order’s death drive” (3). The disruption and negativity in queerness is resistant to and starkly against confirming one’s place in the social and social reality. This antisocial turn in queer theory marks a radical critique of the “fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain [the social]” (7) such as reproductive futurism, the child, teleology, and even—although not part of Edelman’s project as such—curative futurism (a fantasy of eradicating disease and disabilities).

As Paul Kelleher articulates, many of the fantasies of the social that sustain heterosocial ordering are a consequence of eighteenth-century fictions. Specifically, Kelleher maintains that

eighteenth-century literature and philosophy fundamentally rewrote the ethical relationship between self and other as heterosexual fiction, as the sentimental story in which the desire, pleasure, and love shared by man and woman become synonymous with the affective virtues of moral goodness. (8)

Given the importance of heterosocial affective ties (secured in marriage, conjugal love, and sentimental literature), Defoe’s plague time stands out as especially queer in its negation of sentiment, heterosociality, and moral order. The heterosexualization process is irrevocably intertwined with sentimental fiction, since, in Kelleher’s characterization of the era, “sentimental discourse played an instrumental role in deepening forms of sexual subjugation and normalization and, concomitantly, devaluing the messier, less sanitized, more unruly—at times, queerer—experiences of everyday life” (7). What marks Defoe’s Journal as filled with queer renderings of the social is that the novel confronts readers with the messy, less sanitized, unruly, and queer experiences of life under plague times. In contrast to a consolidated conjugal family intimacy, enabled by heterosocial fictions, the Journal demonstrates the nightmarish gaps in such consolidations.

Family-first, Child-first rhetoric circulates within Defoe’s London, and this rhetoric begins to shape notions of the plague as against heterosocial affective ties. For instance, in The Late Dreadful Plague at Marseilles (1721), the title page announces that the author seeks to preserve “all Persons who may at any Time be, where this terrible MARSEILLIAN infection may reach.” On this same page, the author imagines that the text will be “kept in Every Family to be ready at Hand” in case of Infection, and, since this book is “purely for the Publick Good,” it will be given away for free. The text’s framing device employs the fear of contagion against family-first rhetoric, which falls in line with the discourse of public good. In the dedicatory letter to Hans Sloane, president of the College of Physicians, the author highlights the horror of the plague and its disruptions: “The PLAGUE puts to flight the dearest Friends: The Husband abandons the Wife, the Wife the Husband: The Parent the Child, and the Child the Parent” (A1). Although obviously the plague is dangerous because of the real potential loss of life, the author’s rhetoric ties the threat of plague to sexuality. The appeal to the College works because of the horrific sundering of families, which goes hand in hand with public good. Heterosexual unions are abandoned, and the imagined Child is left without parents. Thus, the rhetoric of protecting the Child and preserving heterosexual orderings circulates in Defoe’s London.

In A Journal of a Plague Year, the plague serves as a queer entity because of its threat to the conjugal family, futurity, and other social structures. A major concern for the first part of the Journal is the practice of shutting up houses, hoping to make the house a hermetically sealed space. The plague, of course, does not allow that, and it rather reveals that the home and the private are more mythic than real. Defoe’s narrator, H.F., reports that

the Infection generally came into the Houses of the Citizens, by the Means of their Servants, who, they were obliged to send up and down the Streets for Necessaries […] it was impossible but that they should one way or other, meet with distempered people, who conveyed the fatal Breath into them, and they brought it Home to the Families, to which they belonged. (63)

Defoe figures servants’ bodies as vectors of disease, which highlights the class divisions and speaks to the nuclear family’s solidification as middle-class. [6] The tone also shifts, starting with a more objective “Houses of the Citizens” to a more sympathetic “Home to the Families.” Defoe’s novel foregrounds a rupture in fantasy-making: nothing, not even the home, is safe.

As the author of The Late Dreadful Plague promised, the plague tears apart conjugal families. In a perverse impulse, H.F. wants to see a mass grave, a pit full of plague corpses in a church yard, and the sexton allows it. H.F. confesses, “I could no longer resist my Desire of seeing it [the pit], and went in” (54). Defoe’s use of “Desire” shapes this moment of witnessing corpses as an act of sensuality, as informed by a sort of death drive. Ernest B. Gilman remarks, “H.F. seems impelled by a like desire to join (or rejoin) the dead,” which suggests Defoe’s narrator and the death drive have a latent connection (235). After priming readers with H.F.’s desire to look, Defoe introduces a mysterious suffering man into the anecdote: “[W]hen they came up, to the Pit, they saw a Man go to and again, mufled [sic] up in a brown Cloak, and making Motions with his Hands, under his Cloak, as if he was in a great Agony” (54). The man and his gesticulating body call into relief how emotions and grief are enacted on and through bodies during plague time. H.F.’s narration reveals that the man is a grieving husband, following the dead on a cart, who “having his Wife and several of his Children, all in the Cart,” is mourning “in an Agony and excess of Sorrow” (54). H.F. notes, “He mourned heartily, as it was easy to see, but with a kind of Masculine Grief” (54). The selection of detail reveals that this mourning is tied to gender, and Defoe is conscientious in shoring up the man’s masculinity, assuring readers that while excessive, the grief is still gender normative. This is a moment that reifies heterosexualizing sentimentality.

The man’s relationship to masculinity changes, however, when he bears witness to the treatment of his wife and children’s bodies:

but no sooner was the Cart turned round, and the Bodies shot into the Pit promiscuously, which was a Surprize to him, for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in […]; I say, no sooner did he see the Sight, but he cry’d out aloud unable to contain himself; I could not hear what he said, but he went backward two or three Steps, and fell down in a Swoon […]. (55)

H.F.’s anecdote demonstrates three ways the plague acts as queerness: destroying the family, disavowing “decent” burial, and refiguring the relationship between gender and body. First, by having the husband grieve for his family, Defoe invites audiences to mourn for the conjugal family under siege. By juxtaposing the “promiscuous” manner of “Bodies shot into the Pit” with expectations of “decent” burial, Defoe highlights the ways the lost family is memorialized in plague times: it is reckless, haphazard, and indecent (although the sexual connotations of “promiscuous” will not come into vogue until the nineteenth century). Finally, in bearing witness, the man loses the ability to “contain himself,” which is an undoing of the fantasy of masculine autonomy and a masculine control of one’s own body. Thus, not only does the plague enact a queer destruction of the conjugal family and patrilineality, it allows for the type of sociality that devalues memorialization and reverence, especially of conjugal intimacy, in burial; as such, the plague revises a worldview that would hold dear ties between husband, wife, and children. The sight of this hetero-social disorder undoes the man’s “Masculine Grief” and sense of autonomy, which reveals how the plague (and its attendant revisions to the social) engenders queer relations to others and oneself.

The plague enacts more queer destruction as the plagued body produces a type of pleasure in anti-futurism. Defoe, in writing about the pains of the neck or groin sores, states, “when they grew hard, and would not break, grew so painful that is was equal to the most exquisite Torture; and some not able to bear the Torment threw themselves out at Windows, or shot themselves, or otherwise made themselves away” (65). The phrase “made themselves away” stands out as the complete negation and rejection of the social, and it disavows any sort of curative futurity. Because of the pathology of the plague, such negations of the social are tied to sexuality. The sores grow in the groin and cause “exquisite torture”—a phrase which carries with it erotic associations. The plague manifests itself on erogenous zones and is felt through bodies, which in turn, causes people to disavow futurity. [7] The psychic-sexual life of the plague and its sores continue to develop as H.F. narrates the way pain and visual spectacle turn the London streets into a sort of erotic burlesque. H.F., in his walks around the city, reports that

in these Walks I had many dismal Scenes before my Eyes, as particularly of Persons falling dead in the Streets, terrible Shrieks and Skreekings of Women, who in their Agonies would throw open their Chamber Windows, and cry out in a dismal Surprising Manner; it is impossible to describe the Variety of Postures, in which the Passions of the Poor People would Express themselves. (69)

H.F.’s observations synthesize death and sexuality in order to make sense of the aural and visual disruptions of the streetscape. H.F. needs to invent a word—“skreekings”—to describe the noise, which speaks to the plague’s disruption of knowable categories of suffering. Furthermore, by asking audiences to imagine women in agony bursting out of windows, Defoe’s text invites connections between suffering and public spectacle. Carol Houlihan Flynn maintains, “The contorted ‘postures’ of the participants in the countless ‘dismal Scenes’ suggest the necessity of the public spectacle of private grief” (33). To further her point, I read the word “postures” as a word that carries with it erotic possibilities, which highlights the sexual nature of public spectacle. [8] The eroticism may even mirror the erotics of the theatre; the women, framed in windows, are suffering in a variety of postures, which models the relationship between spectacle and spectator in the playhouse, especially with the popular genre of the she-tragedy. [9] No one answers the cries of these women, since, as H.F. reflects, “nor could any Body help one another” (69). Defoe leaves readers with images of plagued bodies that mix suffering with sexuality, all within an isolating, antisocial London.

Defoe dramatizes failures of conjugal intimacy and sentiment, which ruptures a larger trend of eighteenth-century heterosexualizing sentiment. Defoe appeals to the sentimental mode, writing that

it would make the hardest Heart move at the Instances that were frequently found of tender Mothers, tending and watching with their dear Children, and even dying before them, and sometimes taking the Distemper from them, and dying when the Child, for whom the affectionate Heart had been sacrified [sic], has got over it and escap’d. (98)

The language of moving hearts, tender mothers, and dear children heighten the affective appeal, and H.F.’s rhetoric participates in a child-first sentimentality. However, Defoe quickly ironizes the sentiment by having the child live, despite (or in spite) of the affectionate Heart’s sacrifice. The result is a darkly comic irony that exposes the limits of fighting for the Child. The threat to the child continues as breast feeding, even from one’s own mother, becomes a vector of disease: “Not starved (but poison’d) by the Nurse, Nay even where the Mother has been Nurse, and having receiv’d the Infection, has poison’d, that is infected the Infant with her Milk, even before they knew they were infected themselves” (97). Defoe’s language wrestles with the slippage between “infect” and “poison.” “Infect” is about transmitting disease, but it also carries a moral connotation as it suggests tainting or corrupting (OED); “poison” feels more deliberate as in “to harm” or “to administer poison” (OED). The terror of the lurking plague under the seemingly uninfected body marks this moment of breastfeeding as particularly anxious; Defoe casts seemingly abled maternal bodies as untrustworthy and even insidious.

In one of the most striking reframings of maternity, sentiment, and futurity, H.F. casually remarks, “I could tell here dismal Stories of living Infants being found sucking the Breasts of their Mothers, or Nurses, after they have been dead of the Plague” (97). Alongside infants breastfeeding on corpses, Defoe then presents a pathetic image of the hetero-reproductive family ruined by the plague. A man, whose house had been shut up, acted as his pregnant and plagued wife’s midwife. Unfortunately, he “brought the Child dead into the World; and his Wife in about an Hour dy’d [from the plague] in his Arms, where he held her dead Body fast til the Morning” (98). A Watchman came with a nurse, and they “found the Man sitting with his dead Wife in his Arms; and so overwhelmed with Grief, that he dy’d in a few Hours after, without any Sign of the Infection upon him, but merely sunk under the Weight of his Grief” (98). Defoe’s imagery, which relies on audience’s affective response to such a pitiable imagery, ultimately suggests a queer undoing of the family, which suggests there is no future under the grief of losing conjugal intimacy.

Plaguing Heterosexuality: Reshaping Cross-Sex Desire

More pointedly, A Journal of the Plague Year uses the plague to reframe cross-sex desire as threatening. Under the regime of the Great Plague of 1665, pleasure was fraught. Take, for instance, Gilman’s reading of Samuel Pepys’ “plague dream.” Gilman reads Pepys’ journals during 1665 alongside Defoe’s novel in order to examine the ways both authors negotiate plague, secularism, and religious faith. Although Gilman does not attend to the erotic possibilities of Defoe, he does foreground the way that plague reshapes pleasure for Pepys. Pepys dreams of a pleasurable “dalliance” with Lady Castlemayne, but then turns to reflect on the grave:

But that since it was a dream and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeare resembles it), we could dream and dream but such dreams as this—that then we should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague time. (191)

Gilman reads this moment as a “form of compensation […] for the terrors of the plague” (219). The dream is made the more sexually pleasurable since “the fear of death casts its retroactive shadow on, and intensifies the erotic pleasure of, the remembered dream” (220). I would suggest that while Pepys’ passage demonstrates the way plague time reinvigorates erotic fantasy, it also highlights that cross-sex sex is harder to have when everyone fears death. Plague history is a history of desire and desire frustrated.

Similar to Pepys’ personal experiences, Defoe’s reimagined London during the Great Plague is filled with moments that connect desire and death. In one instance, a young gentlewoman is walking down the street, only to be sexually assaulted by a man. H. F. begins by characterizing the man: “He was going along the Street, raving mad to be sure, and singing, the People only said, he was Drunk; but he himself said, he had the Plague upon him, which, it seems, was true” (128). From the narration, audiences see the crisis of identifying able-mindedness and able-bodiedness based on exteriority since drunkenness, madness, and infection become hard to tell apart. The man meets the young woman and threatens to kiss her. Defoe writes, “[S]he was terribly frighted as he was only a rude Fellow, and she run from him, but the Street being very thin of People, there was no body near enough to help her” (128). Defoe sets up a terrifying scenario: a young woman in a sparsely populated area is chased down by a raving man from a lower class. In part, because the plague caused isolated streets, plague time creates a social space for this type of assault. The woman fights back but to no avail. H.F. reports that

when she see he would overtake her, she turn’d, and gave him a Thrust so forcibly, he being but weak, and push’d him down backward: But very unhappily, being so near, he caught hold of her, and pull’d her down also; and getting up first, master’d her, and kiss’d her; and which was worst of all, when he had done, told her he had the Plague, and why should not she have it as well as he. (128)

Through the word choice of “overtake” and “master’d,” Defoe is framing this as a sexual assault, which makes men’s access to women’s bodies horrific. The sexual assault quickly becomes an assault on the healthy body, too, since the man tells her she is now infected with the Plague—probably. Defoe makes the transmission of disease suspect:

She was frighted enough before, being also young with Child; but when she heard him say, he had the Plague, she scream’d out and fell down in a Swoon, or in a Fit, which tho’ she recover’d a little, yet kill’d her in a very few Days, and I never heard whether she had the Plague or no. (128)

This confrontation is queer because it renders cross-sex desire as perverse, monstrous, and a threat; the affective response is doubled with the narrative choice to throw in a surprise pregnancy. The strange irony is that H. F. is not even sure if the plague was actually present or not; the “seems was true” and “whether she had the plague or no” exposes the monstrosity already lurking beneath cross-sex desire.

While the previous encounter is predicated by sexual assault and public access to women’s bodies, Defoe’s later characterization of the conjugal family likewise renders cross-sex intimacy as a threatening force. Unlike the street, the home increasingly becomes a site of fantastical unassailability. As Thomas A. King argues, the right to privacy and a conjugal family became the way that fantasies of gender concretized in the eighteenth century. [10] In tracing the shift from masculinity being built on the super- and subordination of other men-as-property, the eighteenth century “ideals of egalitarianism, domesticity, and companionship” was created by “privacy” (117). The public sphere makes masculinity a seamlessly innate and natural gender performance, and this fantasy works because of an interior, private life of male-bodied individuals located in the conjugal family and gender complementariness (King 117). In other words, privacy, ostensibly made possible by the construction of a public sphere where private, male-bodied individuals (secure with a home life thanks to gender complementariness) could meet as equals to think about public good, did not just make a gendered split between public and private/ woman and man—it, instead, made gender possible. H.F. participates in the “virtual space of discourse,” reifying an imagined parity between men, since so much of his writing is concerned with the public good and the public order. Barbara Fass Leavy maintains that “Civic duty” remained “a very important concept in the Journal” (7). As Defoe’s title page announces, the Journal is concerned with “OCCURRENCES, As well PUBLICK as PRIVATE,” which suggests an investment and awareness in the ways public discourse constitutes private spaces.

Through the oppositional public and private spheres, according to King, the private home and conjugal family hold such an important place. They are important because they produce the fantasy of autonomy. Defoe’s text exploits this fantasy through the images of “seemingly sound” male plague carriers who infect their homes, children, and wives through their intimacies. H.F. identifies

fathers and Mothers [who] have gone about as if they had been well, and have believ’d themselves to be so, till they have insensibly infected, and been the Destruction of their whole Families: Which they would have been far from doing, if they had the least Apprehensions of their being unsound and dangerous themselves. (158)

Defoe’s construction of the sentence reveals the underlying pathos and morality that surrounds protecting the conjugal family—no one would think of deliberately being anti-family. However, the plague creates an illegible body that rejects readings based on visible markers of health or sickness. The result is an infectious, non-autonomous, queer body that threatens the conjugal family.

Defoe develops the images of destruction further and with more pathetic language. By mourning the unconscious or “insensible” destruction of the conjugal family, Defoe ultimately reflects on issues of contagion, legible abled-bodies, and the home. He states that

it was very sad to reflect, how such a Person as this last mentioned above, had been a walking Destroyer, perhaps for a Week or Fortnight before that; how he had ruin’d those, that he would have hazard his Life to save, and had been breathing Death upon them, even perhaps in his tender Kissing and Embracing of his own Children. (159)

This mourning happens along gendered lines: the walking destroyer is male. The temporality of the scene is also interesting because it suggests the unknowability of a body’s health in a chronological organization. Defoe’s logic pointedly directs the threat to the bearers of patrilineal futurity, “his own Children” who the man would die to protect. The overt sympathetic affect that the image solicits ultimately frames this as a tragedy, though it opens up the question of whether fathers might not unknowingly be on the side of those not fighting for the children. The myth of the unassailable home and its right to privacy crumbles under the plague.

“Seemingly Sound”: The Limits of Able-Bodiedness

Besides the immediate, unseen threat to the family, Defoe’s consideration of killer kisses ends by questioning the ability to know an able, healthy body. As such, the Journal can be read as a text that interrupts the ongoing Enlightenment project of making and knowing the difference between an abled and disabled body. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum suggest that the disabled body is a site of mystery in the eighteenth century because of its obfuscated and confused epistemology: “deformity’s origins were more various—it could be man-made, accidental, or occur naturally—and a debate ensued concerning the amount of slippage possible between categories” (2). Such slippage is compounded by the “variability” of bodily experience in the eighteenth century, predicated on “capacity, capability, and encounter” in lived experiences of the era (Mounsey 18). As evidenced by disability’s slippery epistemology, there seems to be a larger cultural anxiety in the eighteenth century about how to keep distance between the abled and the disabled body. As David M. Turner reveals, the Enlightenment’s incitement to discourse was prolific and was carried across different spheres like satire, medical writing, and moral philosophy. In terms of disease, lameness, and other disabling moments, Turner depicts a worldview that valued “restoring ‘sick and lame’ to productivity through medical and moral disciplining” (58).

In Defoe’s text, H.F. is pointedly aware of the crisis of epistemology and disease. He asks, “[I]f then the blow [of infection] is thus insensibly stricken; if the Arrow flies thus unseen, and cannot be discovered, to what purpose are all the Schemes for shutting up or removing the sick people?” (159). He then puts pressure on the limits of visual proof: “those Schemes cannot take place, but upon those that appear to be sick, or to be infected; whereas among them, at the same time, Thousands of People, who seem to be well, but are all that while carrying Death with them into all Companies which they come in to” (159). This is a crisis of intelligible, read-able bodies. [11] Defoe reflects on the epistemological ordering of bodies as heathy/diseased, and by extension abled/disabled. The plague blurs the boundaries that would regulate and organize bodies, and Defoe’s connecting this reflection to the threat to the family suggests a connection between disability and queerness: both threaten the able bodied, hetero-reproductive family unit under the nightmare of plague London.

The aftermath of the epistemological instability of cross-sex sex acts, cross-sex intimacy, and able-bodiedness undercuts stable reifications of heterosexual social orderings. Compulsory able-bodiedness is a project of reification—taking a fictively naturalized body and centralizing it as the hegemonic norm. As Robert McRuer writes, “But precisely because these systems depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never quite be contained, able-bodied heterosexuality’s hegemony is always in danger of collapse” (31). In Defoe’s rendering of London, queer/disabled bodies can never be contained, and thus heterosexuality’s hegemony is collapsing. A Journal of a Plague Year forecloses a body’s knowable status as “safe” or “abled” (or, by extension, as safely “heterosexual”). H.F. acknowledges “that the Danger was as well from the Sound, that is the seemingly sound, as the Sick: and that those People who thought themselves entirely free, were oftentimes the most fatal” (164). Defoe’s syntax works to destabilize solid binaries of Sound/Sick with the qualification of “seemingly sound.” The very image of soundness—that which is free from disease or injury—becomes contested. In fact, it becomes unknowable. The effect is that the fantasy of stable able-bodiedness, which relies on having a clear differentiation from disability/infection, is an impossibility in Defoe’s text. This refusal of intelligible able-bodiedness happens on a microbial level. After reflecting on how killer kisses in the conjugal family destroyed an entire household, H.F. contemplates “how to discover the Sick from the Sound” (159). A friend who was a doctor suggests looking at someone’s breath under a microscope, and he imagines “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” (159). The idea of making the sound body intelligible becomes a project of micromanaging the body and examining its minutia. H.F. scoffs, “But this I very much question the Truth of” (159). In Defoe’s text, readers are left with an epistemological crisis: soundness, as a concept and as an embodiment, is unknowable, even on the micro level.

Conclusion

I suggest that the queer-disabled possibilities that emerge in Defoe’s world would have had an anxiety-producing effect for readers in 1722. While Defoe’s project is one of meaning-making and reestablishing social orders, the crises that are left unresolved circulate in readers’ imagination. With cases of smallpox occurring in London in 1721, the bubonic plague on the continent, and Defoe’s text telling readers that there is no way to know one’s status as “sound,” then what early eighteenth-century reader is engaging in intimacy without anxiety? [12] Scholars have noted the “psychic horror” that Defoe explores within the Journal (Nixon 64). Juengel calls attention to the impact of the Journal “on the citizenry and collective psyche of early modern London” (140). Following these claims, imagine how readers would respond to being told that each and every one of them could be only seemingly sound. Moreover, how are readers feeling, since Defoe’s text undermines and shifts sentimentality and fiction? Through the images of plague victims and plagued bodies, Defoe’s Journal contests the very idea of the social. The Journal ruptures fantasies of a naturalized cross-sex desire and able-bodiedness. The disease renders bodies queer in the sense that futurity and its symbols (the Child) are attacked. The disease also reframes cross-sex desire as a perverse or infectious act. If at this time is when heterosexuality is becomingly fictively naturalized, then Defoe’s Journal takes natural disease and provides a counter-discourse to natural heterosexuality. Finally, by considering the ways intimacy becomes killer in the conjugal family, Defoe’s text frustrates the fantasies of naturalized, autonomous men, revealing the crisis of unintelligible bodies. A Journal of the Plague Year demonstrates the limitations of the reproductive, conjugal family as built upon seemingly unassailable familial intimacy and able-bodiedness.

University of Connecticut


NOTES

[1] I draw from Adrienne Rich’s formulation of “compulsory heterosexuality” as an often invisible and “pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness,” all of which seek to secure men’s unquestioned access to women and their bodies. The result is that heterosexuality remains the baseline for measuring sexualities (640). Robert McRuer’s “compulsory able-bodiedness” echoes Rich. McRuer hopes to denaturalize able-bodiedness as the invisible norm since, “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things” (1).

[2] Following the legacy of Susan Sontag and her work on metaphorizing disease, shame, and stigmatization, I want to stress that queerness is not a metaphor in my reading. It is an actual disruption to the consolidation of heterosocial and heterosexual kinship and intimacy. I see these disruptions as part of a longer history of plague writing and sociality. For example, René Girard theorizes plague narratives, writ large, as narratives of disorder, confusion, and antisociality: “Political and religious authorities collapse. The plague makes all accumulated knowledge and all categories of judgement invalid” (136-7). Since cross-sex desire becomes such a pointed force of political and social organization, it is easy to read Girard’s characterization in terms of sexualities. If “plague epidemic can bring about a social collapse,” then plague epidemic also brings about a hetero-social collapse (Girard 137).

[3] See Lennard J. Davis’ claim that fantasies of wholeness in corporeality (and the binaries of abled/disabled and whole/incomplete that this fantasy creates) work to cover up the fact that bodies are never fully abled or whole: “The divisions of whole/incomplete, able/disabled neatly cover up the frightening writing on the wall that reminds the whole being that its wholeness is in fact a hallucination, a developmental fiction” (130). Defoe criticism also reminds us that able-bodiedness is not an option in Journal. Following Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, Kari Nixon demonstrates how bubonic sores and the plagued body serve as powerful reminders that hermetically sealed bodies, which would protect an early modern “self” from the threatening and infectious “other,” are an impossibility (66).

[4] Halberstam sees queer time as a product of the AIDS crisis: “Queer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth-century, from those within gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic” (2). The critical genealogy of queer theorists responding to AIDS, temporality, and futurity notably includes Leo Bersani. Amidst the AIDS epidemic, Bersani queries, “But if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal […] of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death” (29).

[5] Jürgen Habermas writes that the “political task of the bourgeois public sphere was the regulation of civil society” (84). This relates to the rise of the egalitarian family, since part of the bourgeois public sphere rests on the fantasy of the privatized, “enclosed space of the patriarchal conjugal family” that, in part, needs “the lasting community of love on the part of two spouses” (46). Cross-sex (i.e. heterosexual) community-making lies at the heart of the public sphere and its attending to common good. On the family, see Randolph Trumbach.

[6] For a larger consideration of servants and their roles in the family, see Kristina Straub’s Domestic Affairs. Straub writes, “In the eighteenth century, the gendered and sexual relations that we, from our modern perspective, usually associate with privacy and the family tended to overlap with contractual agreements and labor relations that we more comfortably associate with the public sphere” (2). Defoe was very concerned about educating servants and keeping evil and corruption out of the family unit. Under a sort of eighteenth-century family-first rhetoric, Defoe and others wrote often about the ways servants could corrupt the children (9).

[7] While I am tying this type of psychic-social disavowal of futurity to Edelman’s work, I think Lauren Berlant and Edelman’s work on “non-sovereignty” in Sex, or the Unbearable resonates with Defoe’s rendering of bodies, autonomy, and feelings of pleasure/pain. By investigating sex as a practice and field outside of optimism, self-mastery, and productivity, Berlant and Edelman “see sex as a site for experiencing this intensified encounter with what disorganizes accustomed ways of being” (11).

[8] Posture-masters, who will later be called contortionists, were very popular carnival entertainers in the early eighteenth century, as Tonya Howe demonstrates. Howe even traces the erotic potential of viewing posture-masters, especially since one could pay for private performances, even in one’s own home. See Howe’s “‘All deformed Shapes’: Figuring the Posture-Master as Popular Performer in Early Eighteenth-Century England.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12.4 (Fall 2012): 26-47. See also John Cleland’s use of “posture” later in the century in Fanny Hill: “[Barvile] directed the rod so that the sharp ends of the twigs lighted there so sensibly that I could not help winching and writhing my limbs with smart; so that my contortions of body must necessarily throw it into an infinite variety of postures and points of view, fit to feast the luxury of the eye” (emphasis mine 186).

[9] For more on she-tragedies and the erotics of women in pain on stage for visual pleasure, see Jean I. Marsden.

[10] As Judith Butler argues, gender is a performative artifice, and one that is always approximating itself and failing (192). Following Butler’s theories of performative gender, King demonstrates the performativity of an emergent eighteenth-century masculinity, based on privacy, writing, “Increasingly, an innate masculinity vested the natural group of men as private subjects with common rights, obligations, and interest linker to their alleged equivalency within the public domain” (117). King’s argument is clear that this process of making masculinity seem innate, natural, disembodied, and equal is a fiction.

[11] Many critics identify the problem of unknowability in Journal. Juengel writes, “Defoe’s narrator consistently represents the plague’s mysterious transmission as a threat to epistemological stability” (143). Leavy writes, “Physicians and careful observers had discovered that asymptomatic persons could be harboring the disease, dying even before its visible signs appeared,” and this realization “was particularly frightening” (27).

[12] Nixon contextualizes her reading of the Journal and trade with smallpox epidemics in 1721 (67).


WORKS CITED

Berlant, Laura and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Paula Backscheider. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

Deutsch, Helen and Felicity Nussbaum. “Introduction.” Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Eds. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 1-28. Print.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Print.

Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.

Girard, René. “Plague in Literature and Myth.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15.5 (1974): 833-50. Reprinted in “To double business bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Print

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Haggerty, George E. “Queering Horace Walpole.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 46.5 (Summer, 2006): 543-62. Print.

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

Howe, Tonya. “‘All deformed Shapes’: Figuring the Posture-Master as Popular Performer in Early Eighteenth-Century England.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12.4 (Fall 2012): 26-47. Print.

“Infect.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Web. 5 April 2016.

Juengel, Scott J. “Writing Decomposition: Defoe and the Corpse.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 25.2 (1995): 139-53. Print.

Kelleher, Paul. Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Print.

King, Thomas A. The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750: The English Phallus. Vol 1. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Print.

The Late Dreadful Plague at Marseilles. London: Printed by H. Parker, 1721. Print.

Lanser, Susan S. “‘Queer to Queer’: The Sapphic Body as Transgressive Text.” Lewd & Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Katharine Kittredge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 21-46. Print.

Leavy, Barbara Fass. To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Print.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.

Marsden, Jean I. Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660-1720. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Mounsey, Chris. “Variability: Beyond Sameness and Difference.” The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Chris Mounsey. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 1-27. Print.

Nixon, Kari. “Keep Bleeding: Hemorrhagic Sores, Trade, and the Necessity of Leaky Boundaries in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14.2 (2014): 62-81. Print.

Novak, Maximillian E. “Defoe and the Disordered City.” PMLA 92.2 (1977): 241-52. Print.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of CA P, 2000. Print.

“Poison.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Web. 5 April 2016.

Straub, Kristina. Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servant and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2009. Print.

Thomson, 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. 54.2 (2013): 153-67. Print.

Trumbach, Randolph. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Academic Press, 1978.

Turner, David M. Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

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On Discovering Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year in the American Archive: Tobler’s Almanack, 1762

Kelly L. Bezio

FINDING eighteenth-century abridgments of A Journal of the Plague Year in the American archive didn’t seem to have much to do with love—at first. Instead, motivations behind its republication seemed distinctly commercial. Roughly sixteen pamphlet-pages worth of material from the original 287-page novel appeared in various contexts from the mid-1700s to the early 1800s. The abridgment appeared first in an almanac, [1] several times as a stand-alone pamphlet, once as a part of collections of religious tracts, and as an appendix to what was essentially a news report (also in pamphlet form) on how Philadelphia fared during a particularly virulent outbreak of yellow fever in 1793. [2] In each case, a printer was hoping to make money. Whether capitalizing on an annual market for almanacs, Protestant religious sentiment amongst denominationally-diverse inhabitants of the eastern seaboard, or a macabre fascination with contagion, each appearance of the Journal in the American public sphere was calculated to result in financial gain. The adaptability of this abridgment to these several potentially-lucrative contexts intrigued me: how was this narrative crafted in such a way that it found purchase, even at long intervals, in American print culture during the second half of the eighteenth century? [3] After undertaking what we might refer to as the “editorial forensics” necessary to uncover how the first abridgment was created, it became clear that someone loved Defoe’s now-iconic plague narrative and that the textual object that can be found in archive today should be interpreted in light the editor’s deep admiration for Defoe’s words.

I use the word “love” here at the outset to account for, somewhat playfully, the editorial work that went into producing the American abridgment of the Journal. The editor strove to maintain Defoe’s prose throughout the abridgment while, at the same time, drastically reducing the amount of material reprinted. We don’t know who this editor is, where she or he was from, or what her or his interest in the Journal was. What we have is the abridgment itself and what it reveals about the editor: a person who knew the novel so well that she or he was able to use the original’s own passages to create a textual homage. Occasional paraphrasing or editorializing aside, nearly all of words we find in the original abridgment were penned by Defoe, which appears in John Tobler’s The Pennsilvania Town and Country-Man’s Almanack (printed in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1762 by a man identified as “C. Sower”). What is notably different about the Almanack version is the organization. To fit everything that the editor found compelling about the novel, while also creating a narrative trajectory unique to the abridgment, she or he disregarded the order in which material appears in the Journal, assembling a new version that is both undeniably the work of Defoe and something nearly entirely new—a work of art in its own right.

The Almanack abridgment of the Journal adds a new dimension to what we already know about transatlantic print cultures: the part that editorial admiration plays in making possible cultural work. Making sense of why some stories of British origin have had lively careers in America has often come down to answering how they cultivate identities in a new national setting. And Defoe’s literary oeuvre has been crucial to developing these scholarly conversations. Narratives in the style of Robinson Crusoe, or what are known as “Robinsonades,” as well as an illustrated children’s edition and American imprints of the novel, helped to construct American identities. For instance, how someone understood what it meant to be an American woman or man or child was, arguably, a result of their readerly relationship to Defoe’s shipwreck novel in whatever form they encountered it. [4] What stands out about this body of scholarship is its attention to how circulating tropes do cultural work. In the case of something like a “Robinsonade,” such a focus is obvious since tropes (rather than actual prose) provide the commonality between the original text and its “remake.” To a certain extent, the abridgment of the Journal and its appeal as a religious, medical, or edifyingly entertaining artifact depends on the cultural work it does in each context. Below I unpack, as an example of such work, how the Almanack version of the Journal developed a narrative of faith amid the dangers of outbreak suitable to the pan-Protestantism of American almanacs. [5] Available in the Almanack abridgment, however, is more than the mechanisms of culture.

With an editorial hand that is abundantly clear (and intricately deployed, as we will see), it becomes possible to attend to how the creator of the abridgment set out to maximize Defoe’s rhetorical power. Such attention to craft (as well as disseminating resonant content) is a defining feature of this example—and perhaps others—of transatlantic reprinting. Which is not to say that other scholars have neglected editorial invention as an area of investigation, although it has not been foregrounded to the extent to which an example such as the Almanack abridgment demands. Dramatic reduction of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela for publication in America, for instance, incites Leonard Tennenhouse to deplore how these novels have been “[s]tripped of their literariness” (44). In their paring down to one-tenth of their original length, the narratives depict flat heroines rather than the richly-depicted individuals that come across in the originals’ epistolary form. According to Tennenhouse, an editorial decision to cut the feminine interiority captured by personal letters matters to how British fictions cultivate a peculiarly American sentimental imagination. In the case of Defoe’s Journal appearing in Tobler’s Almanack, such interventions come sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph. The abridgment is not so much a paring down to a few key pages, but rather a careful interweaving of ideas, phrases, and anecdotes from all across the Journal. This essay hopes to model, then, what might be gained in tracing the minutiae of editorial intervention (in cases in which it is merited like the Journal) when analyzing the broader significance of texts that circulate transnationally.

The Pennsilvania Town and Country-Man’s Almanack:
Transforming the Journal

Studying the American print history of Defoe’s Journal isn’t a recovery project along the lines of the attribution battles that have been waged in recent decades about this major author’s canon. [6] The name “Daniel Defoe” may not be printed next to the abridgment from the Journal, but there’s no question that its prose is lifted from the 1722 novel, which is why library catalogues and digital databases have been able to attribute these printings to Defoe. Whatever “bibliographic forensics” were needed to identify Defoe as the author took place some decades ago. Moreover, to focus instead on “editorial forensics” is to attend to how the text—not the author—mattered in eighteenth-century print culture. In other words, an intriguing tension emerges between “who?” and “what?” when one undertakes to do this work. On the one hand, it is no doubt true that Defoe’s place within the British canon today—that is, who he is—creates the necessary scholarly “market” for this kind of research into transatlantic reprinting. On the other hand, the abridgment’s intellectual value arises from its life as a textual object that circulated because of what it said and, more importantly, how its editor made it say it. Indeed, whether or not the editor was an admirer of the author Daniel Defoe (as well as his written work) remains unknown. We can parse what she or he found compelling in the Journal. When to engage in such interpretive work is the question.

The first clue that something editorially intriguing is afoot in the Almanack abridgment emerges when we consider beginnings. Reading from the first page of Tobler’s almanac through the beginning of the material that is excerpted from Defoe, certain shared themes regarding bodies, belief, and divine power become evident across these two texts. Arguments regarding the Journal’s cultural work burgeon on the tip of the tongue as a result of this intertextuality. It may be tempting to read the abridgment only in terms of its thematic continuities. However, where these two beginnings converge conceptually also draws attention to how, in the crafting of each, divergent objectives were at stake. For example, the Almanack seeks to curate readers’ experience of the year to come through useful data, something we might expect of the abridgment as well. But conspicuously absent are the bills of mortality that are a strikingly modern feature of Defoe’s prose. Instead, the editor seemingly set herself or himself the task of creating a version of the Journal that, fittingly, given its topic of epidemic disease, could “spread” more easily than a full-length novel. This section explains how certain features of the abridgment’s first paragraph make this goal self-evident and, therefore, invite analysis that focuses on editorial intervention.

The Almanack’s curatorial role can be approached as a balancing act. It must provide information that will be useful throughout the year (found in its first four pages), as well as data specific to each month (found in its subsequent 24 pages). It must emphasize facts germane to farming, finance, and health while also leaving room for some material that is entertaining. Whereas it was “C. Sower” who in the autumn of 1762 printed the almanac for the coming year, the lawyer John Tobler was identified as its author because he provided (presumably) the data regarding the number of days in a month, length of days, weather, rising and setting of the sun and moon, high tide, and various other details that comprise the bulk of information that compels consumers with concerns about their crops, for instance, to buy an almanac in the first place. Other information helps the opening pages of the almanac to establish its year-long utility. Purchasers can find within the first few pages’ tables about the value of gold and silver coins in regards to Pennsylvania currency, interest rates for loans of 20 to 100 shillings at 6 and 7 percent, and human anatomy in light of the influence of twelve constellations. Leftover white space amongst these handy references allows the Almanack to be entertaining as well as religiously edifying. Each month of the year takes up two facing pages and includes under the heading listing the month (e.g. January I Month, February II Month, etc.) the stanzas from an untitled poem that imagines God’s creation of the world. After February, no more interest rate tables appear, and even more white space becomes available. It is in March, therefore, that readers first encounter the abridgment of Defoe’s Journal. It continues month after month until the “year” concludes, and then the narrative continues for another 9 pages. A year in miniature that spans work and play, the Almanack is fairly bursting with promises for a profitable and spiritually-enriched 1763.

The fact that obvious thematic linkages exist between the other content of the Almanack and the abridgment suggests that cultural work motivated its selection as appropriate filler for the available white space. For example, the poem that bridges the months of the year exults in divine power by exclaiming “praise th’ Almighty Sovereign of the Skies!” (Tobler, “January”). This sentiment echoes in the opening sentence of the abridgment:

Amongst the many Calamities with which the Almighty, in his infinity [sic] Mercy and Love, is pleased to visit the Children of Men, in order to reduce them to a just Sence of their own Weakness and entire Dependance upon him, there is scarce any that are more productive of true Penitent Humiliation and of a Sight of what is really good and truly Evil, than those contagious Distempers which, an offended God, sometimes, suffers to rage amongst the People. (Tobler, para. 1)

The idea of epidemics’ divine efficacy creates further coherence between the poem, the abridgment, and a medical table regarding the anatomy of man as governed by constellations. Human bodies, their disorders, and God’s omnipotence—all gestured to in the first few pages of the almanac—merge in the very first words of the abridgment. Its cultural work, therefore, reinforces how quotidian experiences of embodiment are signs of God’s power as are the workings of the natural world observed by average individuals. This work might have been all that was available to eighteenth-century readers, but as twenty-first century scholars with access to the text from which the abridgment was drawn, we are capable of parsing deeper layers found in this introduction.

The abridgment’s introduction gestures to editorial objectives beyond those associated with selling almanacs to religiously-minded colonists. When we dissect the work that went into constructing the abridgment, we begin to see that the editor set out to create a much-shortened version of the novel that makes religion its main focus. This editorial work makes it possible for the abridgment to reinforce the Christian values suffusing the Almanack as a result of the religious poem appearing, stanza by stanza, throughout the “year.” Initially, this work is accomplished by the introduction of an editorial voice that can be distinguished from that of H. F. (the novel’s narrator). The first sentences of the abridgment are one of the few times that such a voice is used instead of Defoe’s prose. As these two subsequent sentences show, it served to introduce the religious purpose of the narrative that follows:

In the year 1665 the City of LONDON was sorely visited by the Plague: An Account of the Progress and Effects of that Visitation was kept by a Citizen who remained there during the whole time of the Sickness, and appears to have been candid and judicious in his Remarks thereon. I trust my Readers may, in a short Discription [sic] of that memorable judgment, meet with such Lessons of best Wisdom, which nothing can so effectually produce, as a close and serious converse with Death and the Grave. (Tobler, para. 1)

The differentiation between “a Citizen” who wrote “An Account of the Progress and Effects of that Visitation” of the plague and the “I” who speaks directly to her or his “Readers” underscores that these are the words of an editor who offers a text to others for their religious edification. The worldview that God sends plagues to inspire “true Penitent Humiliation” clearly belongs to the editor whereas she or he positions the experience of “a close and serious converse with Death and the Grave” as what the “Account” gives to readers. Editorial framing is necessary, in other words, for readers to glean the appropriate religious message from the text that follows. An important hint, moreover, that the editor may have done more than just frame the “Account” in order to bring to light its religiosity.

Without access to the original novel, it would have been difficult for readers to discern precisely when the editor’s words ended and the novel’s prose began, highlighting the editorial work that is being undertaken and prompting us, as scholars, to ask what might be the consequences of that work in terms of the narrative’s religious meaning. Indeed, it seems as if the editor went to great lengths to foster the illusion of erasing any ambiguity between her or his voice and that of “a Citizen” only to slip imperceptibly into material from the original text without noting the shift. Although this material functions as an introduction to the narrative in the abridgment, it is not pulled only from the beginning of the Journal. Material from later in the novel is also included and edited to have the narrative begin with the outbreak, which is not how Defoe began his novel. When we put the opening paragraphs of the Journal and the abridgement next to one another, the contrast in terms of content and narrative structure is striking. The first paragraph of the Journal emphasizes the loose, word-of-mouth networks that connect Londoners to other parts of the world, bringing news of outbreak before the disease itself:

It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return’d again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Roterdam, in the Year 1663, whither they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It matter’d not, from whence it come; but all agreed, it was come into Holland again. (Defoe 3)

Defoe’s novel begins, intriguingly, with a timeline that moves backwards: instead of beginning in 1665, it references 1664 in which gossip about the epidemic’s origin in Holland proliferates, leading readers even further in the past to 1663 when the disease had been “very violent” and gesturing to even-earlier, unidentified dates when outbreaks would have started to spread from unidentified nations. Defoe begins, in other words, with endless deferral. In contrast, the editor of the abridgment eschews such uncertainty in favor of a clear outbreak narrative (anticipatory of how emerging infection come to be recounted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries): [7]

The Introduction of this Contagion in LONDON was by some Goods imported from HOLLAND, which had been brought thither from the Levant. It first broke out in the House where those Goods were opened, from whence it spread to other Houses. In the first House that was infected there died four Persons: A Neighbour who went to visit them returning home gave the Destemper [sic] to her Family, and died with all her Houshold. The Parish Officers who were employ’d about the sick Persons being also infected, the Physicians perceived the Danger, and upon narrow Inspection assured, that it was indeed the Plague with all is [sic] terrifying Particulars, & that it threatened a general Infection. The People began now to be allarmed all over the Town; the usual Number of Burials within the Bills of Mortality for a Week were generally about 240 to 300, but from the 27th. to the 24 Jan. the printed Bill was 474. However this went off again, and the Frost continuing very severe, till near the End of February the Bills decreased again and People began to look upon the Danger as good as over; but in May the Bills greatly encreased, and the Weather becoming hot, the Infection spread again, in a dreadful Manner. (Tobler, para. 1)

This introduction emphasizes a clear geographic trajectory: the disease spreads from the Levant to Holland and then to London, facilitated by the exchange of goods. The contagion narrative repeats when readers learn of the goods finding their way into a specific house, resulting in the deaths that raise public alarm. The editor has deliberately chosen a spatial thematic over a temporal one as rhetorically more effective. Such an editorial move makes sense given the religious message the editor wants to construct out of Defoe’s words. This spatial narrative emphasizes the people who died (neighbors, family members, parish officers, etc.) and therefore reinforces what the editor finds so compelling about Defoe’s story: its potential as a conversion parable. The editor reduces the gap between the “Readers” in whom she or he hopes to cultivate divine inspiration and those individuals who suffered through the plague by literally decreasing the amount of narrative space between them and Defoe’s chilling account of those who died during the early days of the outbreak.

The work undertaken to create this first paragraph involves a combination of various editorial strategies. The editor uses paraphrasing to either put her or his own spin on the information or more concisely communicate facts or ideas. There is also the rearranging of sentences into an order that creates an unambiguous narrative trajectory and the editing down of lengthy sentences to make the sequence of events clear and crisp. The editor often deletes extraneous details. We can see in Table 1 a visual representation of this editorial work. Material in orange indicates the editorial voice and its paraphrases. Material in blue indicates wording that has been moved to another location in the paragraph. Strikethroughs indicate material that has been deleted. Material in black was retained from the original text. Page numbers identify where the passages can be found in Louis Landa’s edition of The Journal of the Plague Year, which was published for the Oxford World’s Classics series:

Table 1: Sample of Editorial Work in the Almanack Abridgment
PARAGRAPH 1
Amongst the many Calamities with which the Almighty, in his infinity [sic] Mercy and Love, is pleased to visit the Children of Men, in order to reduce them to a just Sence of their own Weakness and entire Dependance upon him, there is scarce any that are more productive or true Penitent Humiliation and of a Sight of what is really good and truly Evil, than those contagious Distempers which, an offended God, sometimes, suffers to rage amongst the People. In the Year 1665 the City of LONDON was sorely visited by the Plague: An Account of the Progress and Effects of that Visitation was kept by a Citizen who remained there during the whole time of the Sickness, and appears to have been candid and judicious in his Remarks thereon. I trust my Readers may, in a short Discription of that memorable Judgment, meet with such Lessons of best Wisdom, which nothing can so effectually produce, as a close and serious converse with Death and the Grave. [PAGE 167] The Introduction of this Contagion in Manner of its coming first to London LONDON was by some proves this also, (viz.) by Goods imported brought over from Holland HOLLAND, which had been brought thither from the Levant.; the It first broke breaking of it out in a the House in Long-Acre where those Goods were carried and first opened, from whence it; its spreading from that House to other Houses. ,by the visible unwary conversing with those who were sick, and the infecting the Parish Officers who were employed about the Persons dead, and the like; these are known Authorities for this great Foundation Point that it went on, and proceeded from Person to Person and from House to House, and no otherwise: In the first House that was infected there died four Persons. : A Neighbour, who hearing the Mistress of the first House was sick, went to visit her them, and went returning home and gave the Diestemper to her Family, and died, and with all her Houshold [sic]. The Parish Officers who were employed about the sick Persons dead being also infected, A Minister call’d to pray with the first sick Person in the second House, was said to sicken immediately, and die with several more in his house: Then   the Physicians perceived the Danger began to consider, for they did not at first dream of a general Contagion. But the Physicians being sent to inspect the Bodies, they assur’d the People that it was neither more or less than the Plague and upon narrow Inspection assured, that it was indeed the Plague with all its is [sic] terrifying Particulars, and & that it threatened an universal general Infection, so many People having already convers’d with the Sick or Distemper’d, and having, as might be suppos’d, received Infection from them, that it would be impossible to put a stop to it. [PAGE 3-4] The People shew’d a great Concern at this, and began now to be allarmed all over the Town;, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664, another Man died in the same House, and of the same Distemper: And then we were easy again for about six Weeks, when none having died with any Marks of Infection, it was said, the Distemper was gone; but after that, I think it was about the 12th of February, another died in another House, but in the same Parish and in the same manner. [PAGE 5] Besides this, it was observ’d with great Uneasiness by the People, that the weekly Bills in general encreas’d very much during these Weeks, altho’ it was at a Time of the Year, when usually the Bills are very moderate. T the usual Number of Burials within the Bills of Mortality for a Week , was from were generally about 240 or thereabouts, to 300, but from the 27th. to the 24 Jan. the printed Bill was 474. . The last was esteem’d a pretty high Bill; but after this we found the bills successively increasing, as follows:—
Buried. Increased.
December the 20th to the 27th               291       …
       ”     ”     27th   ”     3rd January       349       58
January the 3rd   ”   10th   ”           394       45
       ”     ”     10th   ”   17th   ”           415       21
       ”     ”     17th   ”   24th   ”           474       59
This last Bill was really frightful, being a higher Number than had been known to have been buried in one Week, since the preceding visitation of 1656. [PAGE 5-6] However, all this went off again, and the Weather proving cold, and the Frost, which began in December, still continuing very severe, even till near the End of February, attended with sharp tho’ moderate Winds, the Bills decreased again, and the City grew healthy, and everybodyPeople began to look upon the Danger as good as over; only that still the burials in St Giles‘s continued high. From the Beginning of April especially they stood at 25 each Week, till the Week from the 18th to the 25th, when there was buried in St Giles‘s parish 30, whereof two of the Plague and eight of the Spotted-Feaver, which was look’d upon as the same thing; likewise the Number that died of the Spotted-Feaver in the whole increased, being 8 the Week before, and 12 the week above-named. [PAGE 7] B but in May the Bills greatly encreased, and the those were trifling Things to what followed immediately after; for now the Weather set in becoming hot, and from the first Week in June the Infection spread again, in a dreadful Manner, and the Bills rose high; the Articles of the Feaver, Spotted-Feaver, and Teeth began to swell: For all that could conceal their Distempers, did it to prevent their Neighbours shunning and refusing to converse with them; and also to prevent Authority shutting up their Houses; which though it was not yet practised, yet was threatened, and People were extremely terrify’d at the Thoughts of it.

A drive to tell a better version of Defoe’s story—one more religiously efficacious—defines this editorial project. To achieve this goal in the beginning of the abridgment means blatantly stating the editor’s desire that readers interpret epidemic disease as God’s way of convincing humanity of its “Weakness and entire Dependance upon him” (Tobler, para. 1). It also means reinforcing this idea with a narrative structure that emphasizes the inevitable spread of disease across even vast geographical distance. But most importantly, it means using prose from the Journal whenever possible (or slight paraphrases of it). It may seem odd, for instance, that the editor would go to the trouble of pulling material from much later in the narrative regarding the disease’s origin in Holland just to be able to place Defoe’s own words in front of the details about the outbreak in London (details which come from the first several pages of the original novel). Why not just state the facts about goods arriving from Holland? Why retain the phrase “infecting the Parish Officers who were employed about the Persons dead” and place it later in the paragraph (with small alterations) (Tobler, para. 1)? But this is precisely the point: someone saw in the novel a religious narrative that needed to be drawn out with a careful editorial hand. This hand doesn’t shy away from making changes, such as deleting the fact that parish officers “were employed about the Persons dead” to emphasize instead that they were infected in such work (Defoe 167). A sentence about disease transmission—“its spreading from that House to other Houses, by the visible unwary conversing with those who were sick, and the infecting the Parish Officers who were employed about the Persons dead, and the like” (Defoe 167)—becomes instead “The Parish Officers who were employ’d about the sick Persons being also infected, the Physicians perceived the Danger, and upon narrow Inspection assured, that it was indeed the Plague with all is [sic] terrifying Particulars, & that it threatened a general Infection” (Tobler, para. 1). The editor produces a sentence focused solely on infection, again establishing a better conceptual link to the idea that God sends “contagious Distempers” to punish humankind. The Journal becomes the clay for the editor’s masterwork, one that has strong appeal in American contexts.

A text such as the Almanack abridgment stands at a crossroads of sorts, always gesturing to its editorial past at the same time that it points to its future cultural work. Analyzing the editorial work that went into its creation, in other words, concentrates our attention on a particular moment in this text’s history: after it was made and on the cusp of public circulation. It is here that we can perceive a stutter or a syncopation within a textual object’s cultural work. A kind of extra “beat” that makes perceptible the editor’s objectives—that is, her or his cultural aims. Only as far as the text itself will allow, of course, but enough so that their distinction from the cultural work done through dissemination in print becomes clearer. Editorial intentions may not be fully evident. Editorial interventions mark two kinds of cultural work the abridgment accomplishes, however seemingly incompatible that work might be. Tracing these two kinds of work in relation to American Protestantism is the subject of the next section.

Seeing Double: Untangling the Almanack Abridgment’s Cultural Work

The editorial work that goes into creating the Almanack abridgment complicates how we perceive its cultural work. When we know the effort that went into crafting each paragraph of the new version—when we come to appreciate the editorial admiration inherent to the resulting text—then we must account for a certain multiplicity that contributes to our parsing of its religious work. Without access to the editorial element of this text, determining its cultural work would undoubtedly be restricted to the Almanack’s intertextuality: how it fits into the religious work of other texts of its kind. T.J. Tomlin’s recent book, A Divinity for All Persuasions: Popular Print and Early American Religious Life, provides just the answer we need to this question. He argues that almanacs “fostered a distinctly pan-Protestant sensibility” (3). That such a sensibility proves discernible in the Almanack abridgment, however, becomes significant to our understanding of its cultural work when we consider two other aspects of its religious work. There is, on the one hand, what the editor hoped to achieve with the religious narrative that she or he wrought. On the other hand, there is what the Journal accomplishes in terms of conveying religious meaning and how those ideas remain present when Defoe’s words are repurposed. Because of the Journal’s allegiance to Dissenter worldviews and because of the editor’s commitment to maintaining as much of the novel’s prose as possible, the Almanack version, too, embraces Nonconformity. Paradoxically, the abridgment’s cultural work is therefore double: it disseminates Dissenter values while simultaneously articulating religious themes generally enough to qualify as “pan-Protestant.” These heterogeneous, potentially divergent forms of cultural work become available to our analysis only through concomitant interpretations of editorial work.

In the foregoing unpacking of the Almanack abridgment’s introduction, this text’s pan-Protestant sensibility has already been made visible. To frame an outbreak narrative with “an offended God” seeking to punish his wayward flock envisions a non-denominational Christian audience. Regardless of what church one might attend or how one might weigh in on doctrinal debate, the theme of God punishing sin with epidemic disease has broad appeal. Therefore, the editor chooses to include passages such as the one in Table 2 about public worship in order to underscore this common religious experience:

Table 2: Example of the Almanack Abridgement’s Pan-Protestantism
PARAGRAPH 6 (partial)
[PAGE 26] But I must also not forget, that the more serious Part of the Inhabitants behav’d after another Manner: The Government encouraged their Devotion, and appointed publick Prayers, and Days of fasting and Humiliation, to make publick Confession of Sin and implore the Mercy of God, to avert the dreadful Judgment, which hung over their Heads; and it is not to be express’d It was also worthy of Observation as well as fruitful of Instruction, to observe with what Alacrity the People, of all p Persuasions, embraced the Occasion; Oppertunities they had of attending upon the publick Worship, and other appointed Times of Devotion, as Humiliations Fastings and publick Confession of Sins to implore the Mercy of God GOD to and avert the dreadful Judgment which hung over their Heads. how they flock’d to t The Churches and Meetings, and they were all so thronged, that there was, often, no coming near, no, not to the very Doors of the largest Churches.

We can see that the editor is keen to retain from Defoe’s text the phrasing and ideas such as “implore the Mercy of God, to avert the dreadful Judgement” and “People of all persuasions” (Defoe 26), while also taking the opportunity to push her or his own view that these details should be “fruitful” in the religious “instruction” of readers (Tobler, para. 6). Together, these elements of the paragraph promote a pan-Protestant sensibility by narrating a moment of non-denominational union in the face of crisis.

Even the portion of the abridgment that concerns the split between the Church of England and Nonconformists fits within pan-Protestant discourse, if we’re reading just in terms of its content. [8] This history in the Almanack appears as one paragraph, in contrast to its discussion at multiple points in the Journal. Like the previous example, it also emphasizes how disease causes people to disregard religious difference:

It was also a Time of very unhappy Breaches amonst us, in Matters of Religion, Divisions & separate Opinions prevailed; the Church of ENGLAND was lately restored, and the Presbyterians & other Professions had set up their Meetings for worship, apart, in which they were frequently disturbed, the Government endeavoring to suppress their Meetings. But this dreadful Visitation reconciled the different Parties and took away all Manner of Prejudice and Scruple from the People. The Dissenters who had been deprived of their Livings, and with uncommon Prejudice had separated from the Church of ENGLAND, were now not only suffered, but invited to officiate in the Churches, while they on their Part freely comformed to that Worship which they did not approve of before; and the People flock’t without Distinction to hear them; but after the Sickness was over, that Spirit of Charity subsided, and Things returned to their own Channel again. Here we may observe, that a nearer View of Death would soon reconcile Men, of good Principles, to one another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy Situations in Life, and our putting these Things far from us, that our Breaches are fomented, and that there is so much Prejudice and want of Christian Charity and Union amongst us. A close View and Converse with Death, or with Diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the Gall of our Temper, remove our Animosities, and bring us to see with different Eyes. On the other Side of the Grave we shall all be Brethren again. (Tobler, para. 4)

While the editor preserves the historical specificity of the religious climate of the 1660s—the fact that there were “very unhappy Breaches”—the narrative flow of the paragraph takes advantage of how the “dreadful Visitation reconciled the different Parties” in order to paint a picture of Protestants coming together in times of need. Something good, in other words, came out of the epidemic: it encouraged “Christian Charity and Union.” Half threat, half promise, the paragraph concludes with its implicit pan-Protestant argument that, after death, everyone “shall all be Brethren again.” Worldly squabbles about different forms of worship are subtly condemned as petty, and greater things are imagined as possible for humanity, if it could just set aside its prejudices. “Brethren,” not “breach,” this paragraph implies, should be the thematic lesson taken from the great plague of 1665.

And yet, from the perspective of editorial intervention a different narrative unfolds, one about preserving this history of Dissent. Table 3 shows the same paragraph in terms of the editorial work that was undertaken to construct it:

Table 3: Dissenter Content in the Almanack Abridgment
PARAGRAPH 4
[PAGE 24] It was, indeed, also a Time of very unhappy Breaches amonst us, in m Matters of Religion,: Innumerable Sects, and Divisions , and & separate Opinions prevailed; among the People; the Church of England ENGLAND was restored, indeed with the Restoration of the Monarchy, about four Years before; but the Ministers and Preachers of and the Presbyterians , and Independents, and of all the & other Sorts of Professions, had begun to gather separate Societies, and erect Altar against Altar, and all those had set up their Meetings for W worship, apart, in which they were frequently disturbed as they have now but not so many then, the Dissenters being not thorowly form’d into a Body as they are since; and those Congregations which were thus gather’d together, were yet but few; and even those that were, the Government did not allow, but endeavoring ur’d to suppress them and shut up their Meetings. But the this dreadful Visitation reconciled them again, at least for a Time, the different Parties and took away, all Manner of Prejudice at or and Scruple from the People. The Dissenters who had been deprived of their Livings and with an uncommon Prejudice, had broken off separated from the Communion of the Church of ENGLAND, were now many of the best and most valuable Ministers and Preachers of the Dissenters, were not only suffered, but invited to officiate in to go into the Churches, while they on their Part freely comformed [sic] to the Worship which they did not approve of before where the Incumbents were fled away, as many were, not being able to stand it; and the People flockt without Distinction to hear them; preach, not much inquiring who or what Opinion they were of: B but after the Sickness was over, that Spirit of Charity abated subsided, and every Church being again supply’d with their own Ministers, or others presented, where the Minister was dead, Things return’d to their old Channel again. [PAGE 150-151] Nor was it without other strange Effects, for it took away, all Manner of Prejudice at, or Scruple about the Person who they found in the Pulpit when they came to the Churches. It cannot be doubted, but that many of the Ministers of the Parish-Churches were cut off among others in so common and dreadful a Calamity; and others had not Courage enough to stand it, but removed into the Country as they found Means for Escape; as then some Parish-Churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the People made no Scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few Years before depriv’d of their Livings by virtue of the Act of Parliament called The Act of Uniformity to preach in the Churches, nor did the Church Ministers in that Case make any Difficulty of accepting their Assistance, so that many of those whom they called silenced Ministers had their mouths open’d on this Occasion and preach’d publickly to the People. [PAGE 151] Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it, that a near View of Death would soon reconcile Men, of good Principles, one to one another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy Situation in Life, and our putting these Things far from us, that our Breaches are fomented, ill Blood continued, and that there is so much Prejudices, Breach of and want of Christian Charity and of Christian Union so much kept and so far carry’d on amongst us. , as it is: Another Plague Year would reconcile all these Differences, a A close View and Converse conversing with Death, or with Diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the our Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differenting Eyes., than those which we look’d on Things with before; as the People who had been used to join with the Church, were reconcil’d at this Time, with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them: So the Dissenters, who with an uncommon Prejudice, had broken off from the Communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their Parish-Churches, and to conform to the Worship which they did not approve of before; but as the Terror of the Infection abated, those Things all returned again to their less desirable Channel, and to the Course they were in before. I mention this but historically, I have no mind to enter into Arguments to move either, or both Sides to a more charitable Compliance one with another; I do not see that it is probable such a Discourse would be either suitable or successful ; the Breaches seem rather to widen, and tend to a widening farther, than to closing, and who am I that I should think myself able to influence either one Side or other? But this I may repeat again, that ‘tis evident Death will reconcile us all ; o On the other Side of the Grave we shall be all Brethren again. :In Heaven, whither I hope we may come from all Parties and Perswasions, we shall find neither Prejudice or Scruple; there we shall be of one Principle and of one Opinion, why we cannot be content to go Hand in Hand to the Place where we shall join Heart and Hand without the least Hesitation, and with the most compleat Harmony and Affection; I say, why we cannot do so here I can say nothing to, neither shall I say any thing more of it, but that it remains to be lamented.

To begin to understand how the Almanack abridgment retains Dissenter sentiment at the same time that it also contributes to pan-Protestant discourse, it is helpful to consider how Defoe depicted Nonconformists in the original Journal. When we take note of editorial interventions, we learn that the editor was particularly interested in the material from two parts of the novel, one from early on in the text (around page 24 in Landa’s edition) and one from near the end (pages 150-151). In these portions of the Journal, Dissenters are pivotal figures in England’s past, its pestilent present, and its future. In particular, Defoe rejects the idea that “uniformity” would overcome the breaches occasioned by Nonconformity. While Defoe does not rehearse in depth the history of different dissenting groups, he acknowledges their diversity, a multiplicity that he suggests Parliament tried to disavow with its “Act of Uniformity” (150). As its title evinces, this law was specifically designed to target Dissent in its many forms. And yet, the present moment of the plague did more than this law to achieve uniformity, so much so that the narrator declares that “[a]nother Plague Year would reconcile all these Differences” (151). This rather macabre uniformity created by “Diseases that threaten Death” may produce Dissenters who “conform to the Worship which they did not approve of before,” but it is untenable (151). As the narrator notes, not only did everything return to “the Course they were in before,” but he feels compelled to point out that debate about these issues will continue into the future: “the Breaches seem rather to widen, and tend to a widening farther” (151). The story of plague in 1665 naturally has a conclusion, but Nonconformist history (as H.F. perceives it) continues.

The role of Dissenters in British history may be vastly reduced in the abridgment, but it is not entirely expunged. As a result, it, too, functions as a Dissenter text, although in ways that diverge from the Journal. The Almanack focuses on creating a Dissenter “type.” On the one hand, this type helps to represent humanity’s tendency to get caught up in its petty “Animosities,” losing sight of “Christian Charity” (Tobler, para. 4). On the other hand, even though this figure of the Dissenter cannot achieve religious “Union” in the sense desired by the British crown, it does demonstrate a different kind of “conformity” in this story of sectarian breach (Tobler, para. 4). By choosing to delete phrases, such as “Innumerable Sects, and Divisions, and separate Opinions prevail’d among the people,” and colorful depiction of doctrinal quarrels, such as “Altar against Altar,” the editor mutes the narrative of inevitable fracturing within British religious society that Defoe’s more definitively Dissenter text promulgates, leaving room for another kind of narrative to form in its place (Defoe 24). Common calamity makes a space in which Nonconformists and those with whom they disagreed can compromise in order to succor one another in a shared time of need:

The Dissenters who had been deprived of their Livings, and with uncommon Prejudice had separated from the Church of ENGLAND, were now not only suffered, but invited to officiate in the Churches, while they on their Part freely comformed to that Worship which they did not approve of before; and the People flock’t without Distinction to hear them. (Tobler, para. 4)

At the level of content, the editor has drawn out how a wronged group (who were “deprived of their Livings”) overcomes their feelings of “uncommon Prejudice,” conforming to a form of “Worship which they did not approve of before.” Similar shedding of biases comes to define the congregation as well. Importantly, this tidy narrative about people turning a blind eye to differences in faith that separated them before had to be constructed—almost word by word—to bring together these figures on the page. If we look at the editorial work, we find that the editor combined paraphrasing and re-placing of phrases from other parts of the Journalto maximize the rhetorical potential of Defoe’s original text, as Table 4 shows:

Table 4: Detail of Dissenter Content
PARAGRAPH 4 (partial)
The Dissenters who had been deprived of their Livings and with an uncommon Prejudice, had broken off separated from the Communion of the Church of ENGLAND, were now many of the best and most valuable Ministers and Preachers of the Dissenters, were not only suffer’d, but invited to officiate in to go into the Churches, while they on their Part conformed to the Worship which they did not approve of before where the Incumbents were fled away, as many were, not being able to stand it; and the People flockt without Distinction to hear them.

Ultimately, Nonconformists come to exemplify what the editor positions as “our” collective problem of divisiveness, whether the “we” in question belongs to the Church of England or not. They represent how to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers.

No mere slash-and-chop job aiming at quickly getting the interesting bits of a plague story ready to sell as a piece of ephemera, the edited version of the Journal supplies aesthetic and intellectual value on par with its textual sire. In its own context, Defoe’s novel is a deep study of an English interiority brought to light by catastrophe at home. Transoceanic trade, exploration, and colonization, which took British ships to plague ports in the Mediterranean and beyond, returned with something other than what imperial objectives sought to obtain: pestilence. Published at a time when England worried whether a bubonic plague outbreak that began in Marseilles, France in 1721 would make its way across the Channel, the Journal captures in narrative form the kind of national introspection that emerges when an epidemic threatens. [9] In the context of its reprinting, the Almanack abridgment likewise aims to cultivate deep study, this time in regards to the religious self. In this case, an editor wanted to spark that spiritual introspection with the aid of a well-wrought text. The editor set out to inspire readers as much as Defoe (or any other writer) did. But she or he used that special skill that only some have: the ability to look at someone’s work and see within the distilled, refined version that will have most impact. That this editor set out to make her or his vision of Defoe’s text a reality is a boon to scholars. It enhances how we understand cultural work within the public sphere and challenges us to ever-more-nuanced readings of how texts make meaning as they circulate in the world of print.

Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi


NOTES

[1] A search in the English Short Title Catalog lists the 1722 and 1754 London imprints of the full text followed by the printing of the almanac in Germantown, PA, with no intervening publication.

[2] For the sake of clarity in the ensuing analysis, the almanac version of the Journal will be identified in parenthetical citations and the Works Cited by its author’s name: John Tobler. Since the Almanack lacks page numbers, citations will refer to paragraph numbers. Full citations for the other versions of the abridgment (not analyzed in this essay) can be found in the Works Cited list under Defoe’s name. Thanks to a Grant-in-Aid award from Oberlin College, I was able to spend time consulting the Defoe holdings at the Library Company of Philadelphia—and special thanks is due also to Jim Green, who generously gave his time to discuss these print objects with me and suggested valuable resources. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Digital Defoe, who provided thorough readers’ reports that helped significantly improve this essay.

[3] Versions of the Journal appeared in the years 1762, 1763, 1767, 1773, 1774, 1784, 1793, 1797, 1799, 1800, 1803, and 1810. For more on Defoe and America, see Todd, Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Works, particularly chapters 23 and 24, and Loar, particularly chapter 3.

[4] On “Robinsonades” and Robinson Crusoe in the American public sphere, see Thompson, Stevens, and Sánchez-Eppler. On the reprinting of other texts by Defoe, see Griffin. On the reprinting of British texts in the United States see McGill and Tennenhouse. For an introduction to the history of printing in the middle colonies (including the reprinting of European books), see Amory and Hall, chapters 1, 6, and 8.

[5] On American almanacs’ pan-Protestantism, see Tomlin.

[6] Some of the key resources on Defoe attributions include Rogers, Furbank and Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe and “On The Attribution of Novels to Daniel Defoe,” Novak, “Whither The Defoe Canon?” and “A Narrative of the Proceedings in France: Reattributing A De-Attributed Work by Defoe,” and Marshall. For a discussion of attribution as a cultural phenomenon, see Vareschi.

[7] For a definition of the outbreak narrative, see Wald, particularly the Introduction.

[8] For more on Defoe’s Dissenter parents, see Novak, “The Education of a Dissenter,” chapter 2.

[9] As Elizabeth Porter has argued, disease in the novel helps to “consolidate emerging ideas of the Londoner in the newly modern metropolis” (122). See also Thompson 154. For discussions of how narrating epidemics produces national self-fashioning through “imagined immunities,” see Wald, chapter 1.


WORKS CITED

Amory, Hugh and David D. Hall, editors. A History of the Book in America, Volume One: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Cambridge UP, 2000.

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

—. The dreadful visitation in a short account of the progress and effects of the plague, the last time it spread in the city of London in the year 1665 extracted from the memoirs of a person who resided there, during the whole time of the infection: with some thoughts on the advantage which would result to Christianity, if a spirit of impartiality and true charity was suffered to preside amongst the several religious denominations, &c. Germantown, PA, 1763.

—. The dreadful visitation: in a short account of the progress and effects of the plague, the last time it spread in the city of London, in the year 1665; extracted from the memoirs of a person who resided there, during the whole time of the infection: with some thoughts on the advantage which would result to Christianity, if a spirit of impartiality and true charity was suffered to preside amongst the several religious denominations, &c. Philadelphia, 1767.

—. The dreadful visitation: in a short account of the progress and effects of the plague, the last time it spread in the city of London, in the year 1665. New Haven, CT, 1773.

—. “The dreadful visitation, in a short account of the progress and effects of the plague, the last time it spread in the city of London, in the year 1665, extracted from the memoirs of a person who resided there during the whole time of that infection.” A Collection of Religious Tracts. Philadelphia, 1774.

—. “A short account of the progress and effects of the Plague, the last time it spread in the city of London, viz. in the year 1665.” A Collection of Religious Tracts. Philadelphia, 1784.

—.  A short account of the plague, the last time it spread in the city of London, in the year 1665. New-London, 1793.

—. “A Short Account of the Plague in London, 1665. (Written at that time.)” An Account of the rise, progress, and termination of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia: Briefly stated from authentic documents. Philadelphia, 1793.

—. Pathetic history of the plague in London in 1665. Whereof three thousand died in one night, and an hundred thousand taken sick. [Charlestown], [1797?].

—. “Appendix: containing an account of the plague in London; and some extracts from the writings of pious and eminent men, against the entertainments of the stage, and other amusements.” The power of religion on the mind: in retirement, affliction, and at the approach of death: exemplified in the testimonies and experience of persons distinguished by their greatness, learning, or virtue. New Bedford, MA, 1799.

—. The history of the plague in London, in 1665. Philadelphia, 1800.

—. A Pathetic history of the plague in London in the year 1665: to which is here added, An account of the surprising revivals of religion in a number of towns in the New England states, and also in Nova Scotia. Worcester, MA, 1803.

—. Pathetic history of the plague in London, in the year 1665. Whereof three thousand died in one night, and an hundred thousand taken sick. Charlestown, 1810.

Furbank, P. N., and W. R. Owens. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. Yale UP, 1988.

—. “On The Attribution of Novels to Daniel Defoe.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 2-3, 2010, pp. 243-253.

Griffin, Robert J. “The Text in Motion: Eighteenth-Century ‘Roxannas.’English Literary History, vol. 72, no. 2, 2005, pp. 387-406.

Loar, Christopher F. Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750. Oxford UP, 2014.

Marshall, Ashley. “Beyond Furbank and Owens: A New Consideration of the Evidence for The ‘Defoe’ Canon.” Studies in Bibliography: Papers of The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, vol. 59, 2015, pp. 131-190.

McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. Pennsylvania UP, 2003.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Works. Oxford UP, 2003.

—. “Whither The Defoe Canon?” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 9, no. 1, 1996, pp. 89-91.

—. “A Narrative of the Proceedings in France: Reattributing A De-Attributed Work by Defoe.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 97, no.1, 2003, pp. 69-80.

Porter, Elizabeth. “A Metropolis in Motion: Defoe and Urban Identity in A Journal of the Plague Year.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, vol. 7, no.1, 2015, pp. 119-131.

Rogers, J. Pat W. “A Bibliography of British History (1700-1715): Some Additions and Corrections.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 69, 1975, pp. 226-237.

Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Over A Century of Shipwrecks: American Child Readers and Robinson Crusoe.” The Materials of Exchange between Britain and North East America, 1750-1900, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Robin Peel, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 117-142.

Stevens, Laura M. “Reading The Hermit’s Manuscript: The Female American and Female Robinsonades.” Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, edited by Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher, Modern Language Association of America, 2005, 140-151.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Princeton UP, 2007.

Thompson, Helen. “‘It Was Impossible to Know These People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 54, no.2, 2013, pp. 153-67.

Thomson, Shawn. The Fortress of American Solitude: Robinson Crusoe and Antebellum Culture. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009.

Tobler, John. The Pennsilvania [sic] town and country-man’s almanack, for the year of our Lord 1763. Germantown, PA, 1762.

Todd, Dennis. Defoe’s America. Cambridge UP, 2010.

Tomlin, T. J. A Divinity for All Persuasions: Popular Print and Early American Religious Life. Oxford UP, 2014.

Vareschi, Mark. “Attribution and Repetition: The Case of Defoe and The Circulating Library.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 36, no.2, 2012, pp. 36-59.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, And The Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP, 2008.

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Queen Anne and the Arts, edited by Cedric D. Reverand II. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2015. Pp. xiii +320. $100. ISBN: 978-1611486315.

Queen Anne, Patroness of Arts, by James Anderson Winn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Pp. xxi + 792. $39.95. ISBN: 978-0199372195.

Reviewed by Paula Backscheider

These two books will permanently change our conception of Queen Anne and, incidentally, the decade of her reign. The adjectives most used to describe and characterize Queen Anne have been “fat,” “sluggish,” “dull,” and “preferring women.” In fact, she was, in James A. Winn’s words, “a popular and successful monarch” under whose reign England became a major power, a monarch who established England as a Protestant nation. The aim of these books is to demonstrate that she was a formidable, discerning patron, consumer, and performer of the arts while bolstering the case for her skill in governing. The books are somewhat related. With knowledge that Winn’s Queen Anne was nearing completion, Anna Battigelli and Cedric Reverand gathered other scholars for a stellar panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2012) that grew into the collection of essays, Queen Anne and the Arts, edited by Reverand with a wide-ranging lead-off essay by Winn that concludes that “her practice and appreciation of the arts…helped give Queen Anne the moral and intellectual vitality that sustained her throughout her remarkable reign” (38).

There is unusual variety and energy in the essays. Sharing Winn’s distaste, bordering on contempt, for King William, Reverand starts the book off with this observation: “The main original contributions to English culture under Dutch William were a craze for tulips; a fashion for collecting blue-and-white china, including, especially, china tulip holders (‘tulipiere:’); and a passion for a popular Dutch beverage, gin” (2). Some of the liveliness of the collection comes from the unrivalled expertise of some of the contributors. Barbara Benedict, for instance, knows more about collectors and collecting than any other scholar, and her learned “The Moral in the Material: Numismatics and Identity in Evelyn, Addison, and Pope” takes us on a tour of this culturally telling “national passion” that does not seem to include tulipiere.

A theme in the collection is the opinion that 1702-1714 has also been considered one of the most uncreative periods in English history. Abigail Williams asks, “What was everyone reading while waiting for Pope, Gay, Swift, or Wortley Montagu?” (119). Working with miscellanies as varied as Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry and Poems on Affairs of State and Tonson’s prestigious Poetical Miscellanies, she demonstrates the eclectic taste of readers of that time and the lasting influence of this first major gathering of post-Restoration poetry. Many of the essays suggest that it was a decade of gathering, assessing, and perhaps launching. Although I do not agree with Brian Corman that George Farquhar has been neglected, his compilations of new comedies and close work with the grouping that Shirley Kenny described as “humane” comedy are exceptionally valuable and a model of how to analyze the repertory of a distinct period. Now as eighteenth-century drama specialists have added major attention to Cibber, Centlivre, and Steele, he shows us that this generation of playwrights had come to understand “the [English] rules and principles of comedy” (157). Cumulatively, lists of artistic, literary, musical, and architectural achievements scattered through these two books indisputably refute the idea that it was a fallow decade.

Winn’s biography breaks from conventional biographical practice, even from the form of “thematic” biography. Although historical and biographical events and landmarks trace Anne’s life, the reading experience is more like immersion in the Culture of her life (I am using the common distinction between Culture, culture and Kultur), and some of the interpretations of Anne’s feelings strike me as more speculative than is common in biographies not openly willing to use “versioning” as a methodology. Each chapter of the biography begins with a culture-rich event. In the first place, this strategy makes the book a delightful read. For all its scholarly depth and sophistication, it is smooth and accessible. Second, the chapter beginnings are an arresting and sober portrait of Anne’s life as one marked by funerals. Even those that begin with a birthday celebration are heavily tinted by grim politics (who will not come or acknowledge it) or what we know is coming (an impending death). The first chapter is built around the performance of John Crowne’s Calisto by the princesses Anne and Mary and a collection of court women and girls (Charles’s illegitimate progeny and at least one mistress, plus some 90 professionals). Winn uses this event masterfully to demonstrate the inappropriate and sexually charged culture in which the young Anne lived and also her training, enjoyment, and skill in dancing, playing musical instruments, acting, and judging art. This firm foundation serves throughout the book.

Perhaps the most unexpected, but also masterful, is chapter 9, which begins with the 1710 trial of the Reverend Henry Sacheverell. Winn begins by telling us that no less than Christopher Wren was employed to construct additional seating to enable 2000 people to get tickets to watch in Westminster Hall, somewhat ironically the location of coronations. Sacheverell actually turned it into a coronation with triumphant royal progress at the conclusion. It is appropriate in this architecturally structured book that the final chapter, with its perfect title, “All a Nation Could Require,” begins with Anne’s funeral, with rich accounts of scenes, poetry, children’s choirs, and processions, and concludes with her final action, taking the White Staff away from Oxford.

If Winn’s Anne is deeply cultured and finding great pleasure throughout her life in theatrical performances, excellent au courant poetry, and fine music, she is also a poignant figure. Treated badly, even insultingly, before she became queen, her formerly athletic and graceful body distorted and racked by pregnancies, unable to reward or even keep her beloved friends around her even when queen, she endured a long, increasingly expensive war and the splintering of her country into two violent political parties. Her religious practices were sustaining and pleasurable for her, yet religion was the major source of conflict. People clung to their opinions and their resentments. Her declarations of support for the Church of England delighted and terrified her subjects. The Sacheverell trial nearly tore the nation apart, and in the essay collection, Williams points out that there were four volumes of poems commenting on the trial (some reprinted for years).

Perhaps it is a measure of Defoe’s own importance—or notoriety—in his own time that both books discuss, at least briefly, his relationship with the queen. During her reign, he was one of the most persistent and annoying men to engage her on the subject of religion. He had an unusual amount of contact with Queen Anne. He exasperated her when she joined the Privy Council in interrogating him in 1703, and she pardoned him twice, once in 1704 and again in 1713. Upon his arrest in May 1703 for seditious libel for publishing The Shortest Way with Dissenters, he was taken immediately to Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham. Defoe had been declared an outlaw and had been a fugitive for four months and now would be confined in Newgate Prison. He was suspected of being part of the group formed at the end of William’s reign that had influenced dissolving the parliament and was now allied with “a set” of powerful Whigs who opposed the growth of a High Church party. Even after he was tried and sentenced to the pillory, efforts to extract information continued. The Queen had been apprised about Defoe’s case on a nearly day-by-day basis, and on 21 July he was taken to Windsor where Queen Anne joined the Privy Council in questioning him. He exasperated the Queen, and, according to Nottingham, she was ready to have “Mr. Fooe” stand in the pillory immediately.

Winn and Nicholas Seager in his essay, “‘She will not be that tyrant they desire’: Daniel Defoe and Queen Anne,” realize the significance of The Shortest Way with Dissenters in setting the tone for Anne’s infant reign. Taken together and read closely, Winn’s and Seager’s narratives reveal a change that, sadly, occurred in Anne’s reign. We know far less about her first two years as queen than we do about the middle and last years of her reign, and Winn offers some useful additional information. He makes clear how quickly Anne tried to reward those who had been loyal and, especially, kind to her during her years as a snubbed princess. One of those people was Nottingham, about whom we usually hear negative descriptions or nothing. Winn points out that he was one of the secretaries of state from 1689 to 1693 and that he occasionally “sneered” at Queen Mary, who thought him “not true to the government” (161-62, 172). Anne was godmother to Nottingham’s son in 1691. In 1703, he was a leading opponent of occasional conformity and wanted Defoe prosecuted. That he could persuade Anne to interrogate (and terrify Defoe) when she was still a new queen gives a glimpse of the active, energetic woman Anne had been and the good, trusting relationship she then had with her Privy Council. Seager’s essay takes up the narrative of Anne and her Privy Council, for he concentrates on the years near the end of her reign when partisan fury, conniving, and elaborate schemes reached an unprecedented height. Anne’s struggle to manage her Privy Council and wrest power away from those she believed wrong-headed and detrimental are in sharp contrast to the relationships of 1703.

Seager argues that Defoe’s strategy for influencing Anne (and shaping opinions about her and her government) was to portray her as “a nonpartisan queen” and the willing guarantor of the Protestant Succession and the Toleration Act (43). He insisted that she had given “Her Royal Word” to support toleration. With such characterizations, he hoped to make it difficult for her to do otherwise, and as Seager argues, he begins to instruct the Queen in how to govern, specifically recommending that she take more explicit stands against both the Jacobite threat and religious extremism. This urgency began with the Sacheverell events and escalated as Anne’s health became alarmingly bad. Defoe portrayed the Queen as committed to her pledge and the terms of the Union that included the Act of Settlement. Seager does admirable close readings in the morass of Defoe’s publications, even making a case that Defoe did write Memoirs of the Conduct of her Majesty, a propaganda piece I have never been convinced was his. Seager could have strengthened his case by reminding us that Defoe had a life-long history of instructing his monarchs, even drawing on the ancient genre advices to the king. When he died, with King George in mind, he was writing “Of Royall Education,” a survey of the education and behavior of English kings.

Winn and the essayists are so knowledgeable that they can create deep, even detailed, immersion and collectively produce a revisionary view of Anne and her time—and Defoe’s time. For the serious Defoe scholar, these books are poignant reminders of the world Defoe did not live in. He walked by Wren churches, saw and read about ceremonial processions, and even had a portrait of himself done by Jeremiah Taverner (not mentioned in either of these books). Opera, opening night at the Royal Theatre with Anne present—no, instead there is the solitary figure dressed in a slouch hat and jocky-cut, wool coat riding in the rain around England in 1705 and a few years later on the long road to Edinburgh in what he believed to be important government service. These books are also reminders of how Queen Anne lived in Defoe’s world, caught up in the same swirling, threatening political maelstrom, and she, like his contemporaries, could not ignore his flamboyant efforts to interpret and shape opinion with titles such as And What If the Pretender Should Come? (1713).

Paula R. Backscheider
Auburn University

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Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832, by Rivka Swenson

Reviewed by Robert Crawford

For anyone interested in Defoe, or in British fiction and politics between the 1603 Union of the Crowns and the Great Reform Act of 1832, this book is full of stimulating ideas. In some ways it delivers more than its title suggests, because it deals not just with Scottish writing but also with work by Defoe and Francis Bacon. Though it concludes elegantly, it is marred, especially in its early pages, by stylistic awkwardness. Nevertheless, readers willing to put up with some of Swenson’s quirks of style will find that the rewards of the book far outweigh its demerits.

At the core of Essential Scots is an argument that a sense of resolute Scottish identity underpins or at least persists in prose texts that deal with Scotland or Scottish characters even as the political union between Scotland and England gathers pace. Though Swenson’s title uses the word “literature,” in practice she has very little to say about poetry and nothing at all to say about drama. So she considers in some detail Francis Bacon’s consideration of the politics of Union, but ignores Shakespeare’s treatment of Scotland in Macbeth and most of the poetry of Robert Burns. For Swenson, Bacon at the start of the seventeenth century and Defoe around the start of the eighteenth are “authors of unionism” who knew and furthered a narrative culture that had at its heart “the trope of e/migratory Scottishness” (27). Drawing on the work of the historian David Dobson and others, Swenson relates actual Scottish emigration to literary and cultural imaginings of it, beginning with the move southwards of King James VI of Scotland in 1603. Though it ignores the Latin culture important in the era of James VI, Swenson’s research is thoroughly grounded in readings of Anglophone political pamphlets, related non-fiction, and contemporary iconography: repeatedly in fiction and in non-fictional prose, we encounter the Scots as travellers leaving Scotland, sometimes to return and sometimes not, but discovering in themselves a residue of Scottish identity that persists below or beside an assumed Britishness. To some audiences, this persisting Scottishness is a reassurance, but to others it can appear a menace. Not the least of this book’s pleasures is its reproduction of a number of a number of drawings and cartoons; in one of these, Richard Newton’s 1796 “A Flight of Scotchmen,” an airborne swarm of kilted Scots with bagpipes is shown descending on the rooftops of London like a Caledonian aerial bombardment.

Swenson shows how thoroughly Defoe was engaged in the debates around the Union of Parliaments in 1707. While she acknowledges that his writings were often intended to act as unionist propaganda, she sees them as rather more complicated than that and detects in them also concerns about the instability of the emergent British union. In the Scottish section of Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Swenson demonstrates convincingly how “the diction, the grammar, conveys the threat of a ‘traveling’ Scottish essence” that has the power to disrupt any smooth narrative of British union (64). Provocatively, she argues also that it was Defoe’s engagement with debates about union within the island of Britain which helped condition the narrative structure of his fictions about that islander Robinson Crusoe. In her view, “the Union, and unionism, is the source for the Crusoe story, formally as well as substantively” (52). So, for instance, Swenson sees the first half of Crusoe’s Further Adventures as “an allegory of unionist fantasy. Crusoe jubilates over bringing the island, the story, into the pale of his ‘narrow compass’” (57). However, just as for the Defoe who writes about British political union, doubts concerning the creation of a stable political “whole” emerge in written narrative, so in Crusoe’s Farther Adventures “the dream does not last,” and the text comes to “encode the failures rather than the successes of Anglo-British incorporation.’” Swenson’s subtle interrogation of Defoe’s texts and her relating Defoe’s writings on unionism and “the whole island” of Britain to Crusoe’s endeavours on his rather different island are not the least impressive aspect of her book.

This examination of Defoe prefigures persuasive readings of Smollett’s Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker. The former is seen as deploying a version of “what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘strategic essentialism’” as the hero Roderick, an emigrant Scot in England, discovers “a submerged essential identity that connects him to other Scots” (81). Humphry Clinker is read as “primarily…a Scots-Welsh novel that imagines an alternative union-within-Union” (116). This is an astute reading and sits well alongside Smollett’s interest in ancient British identities, but it may play down too much the importance of England in Humphry Clinker. Similarly, Swenson’s reading of Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland is very shrewd when it comes to identifying Johnson’s stress on Scotland’s actual (as distinct from poeticized, Ossianic) ruins, but she fails to articulate just how hostile Johnson’s repeated stress on Scotland as ruined becomes, especially when one takes into account (as Swenson does not) that Johnson is writing at the height of one of the most glorious periods in Scottish intellectual history—the period that we now term the Scottish Enlightenment. The selectivity of Johnson’s gaze—his ignoring of most of Scotland’s Enlightenment glories and his minimal treatment of her principal intellectual centers (Glasgow and Edinburgh) in favour of a repeated focus on ruins and ruined places such as St Andrews and Elgin—is in line with his spiritedly Scotophobic and anti-Presbyterian remarks elsewhere. Certainly Johnson can be generous to aspects of Scottish culture, such as the Scottish Latinity of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston (ignored by Swenson), but his selective focus tells its own revealing story. Swenson tends to miss that.

More convincingly perceptive is the treatment of the novels of Susan Ferrier in the fourth chapter of Essential Scots. Alert both to literary theory and to the nuances of language in Ferrier’s work, this chapter shoes how Ferrier’s best known novel, Marriage, “distinguishes itself by endorsing the progressive rehabilitation of a nascently modern, British, national whole and by nurturing the rise of an articulated individuation within it” (147). Yet Swenson shows, too, how the heroine of that novel remains attached to markers of Scottish identity which may have become “clichés” yet which continue to matter. The final chapter of Essential Scots deals with the way in which the bestselling writer Robert Mudie in The Modern Athens and elsewhere chronicled the 1822 visit by King George IV to Edinburgh. This is one of the most original parts of Swenson’s intellectually stimulating book. Several recent writers, most notably Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Ian Duncan, have written about the spectacular excesses of the 1822 extravaganza. It was substantially stage-managed by Walter Scott and was the first visit to Scotland by a British monarch for centuries. No one has written about the visit as a media spectacle as thoroughly or perceptively as Swenson. She does not simply settle for a blow-by-blow account, though she does quote amusing details from the reportage: “peaches, pine-apples…apricots, currants, raspberries, of which the King partook…The water and cream ices produced were most exquisite, and pleased his Majesty very much, as did also some orange chips” (213). Rather than just citing such choice details from Mudie’s account, Swenson draws on previously unpublished illustrations as well as on a range of published sources to demonstrate how all this spectacular unionism collapses under its own weight. Though she does not use the phrase, this is risible unionism. In his effort to turn Scotland’s “locations of belonging—and their symbols—into the subnational enablers of prismatic Britshness [sic],” Mudie produces work which enjoyed for a short time considerable commercial success but which now seems embarrassing and ridiculous (180). His Account, with its “take-home totems” is itself, Swenson argues, “a meta-fetish that both anticipates capitalist realism and instantiates the emergence of consumer nationalism” (215). Swenson is admirably restrained in her description of the sheer daftness of the 1822 events and their reporting, but it is hard for readers to peruse her chapter on Mudie without smirking. Essential Scots concludes with a short but fascinating ‘coda,’ which glances at several texts by Walter Scott, particularly his fine stories “The Two Drovers,” “The Highland Widow,” and “The Surgeon’s Daughter,” hinting that in these can be detected continuing energies which may disrupt attempts at neat political narratives of Britishness.

Mentioned on occasion, and ghosting Swenson’s text throughout, are recent developments in Scottish politics which have led commentators to pay fresh attention to narratives of Scotland, England, and “Britishness” across the centuries. Devolution in the 1990s and the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 (in which 45% of Scottish voters voted for Scotland to become once more an independent country), accompanied by the perhaps unstoppable rise of pro-independence parties in Scottish politics, have operated alongside cultural developments, including works of literary criticism. It is a pity that Swenson does not take all of these into account. Though it is clear from her footnotes that she was working on Essential Scots until the summer of 2015, awkwardly her book makes no mention of Christopher Whatley’s widely reviewed The Scots and the Union (2006; second ed., 2014) nor of Robert Crawford’s Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014, which was published in January 2014.

Such omissions are all the more striking because Essential Scots confirms Swenson as an important contributor to modern debates about literature and Scottish, British, and English identity in literature—debates that are as alive today as they were in the era of Daniel Defoe. In her next, book Swenson should abjure all epigraphs and parentheses. Essential Scots is addicted to both. It makes endless clunky references to its own epigraphs; its chapter titles are over-ornate; and there is too much grad-school prose of the sort that helps atrophy the power of the humanities in the wider world:

Likewise, if the developmental individual (and Bildung model for narrativity and identity) Franco Moretti finds in later nineteenth-century literature has little relevance to the eighteenth-century narrative imagination, I show how essential Scottishness in early nineteenth-century Scottish writing both resisted and contributed to the naturalization of a seemingly de-politicized literary unionsism [sic] (a function of ‘national realism’) and to the codification of the developmental individual whose transformation from flat ‘character’ Deirdre Lynch has elegantly illuminated. (12)

Too many sentences like that risk limiting the audience for this book—which is unfortunate because it is repeatedly shrewd and insightful in its readings of canonical and little-read writers from Bacon and Defoe to Ferrier, Mudie, and Scott.

Robert Crawford
University of St Andrews

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Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World, by James V. Morrison

Reviewed by Evan R. Davis

The focus of James V. Morrison’s Shipwrecked is encapsulated in its subtitle: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World. Drawing upon The Odyssey, The Tempest, and Robinson Crusoe, Morrison identifies a set of recurrent features—a storm, the characters’ ignorance of their location, the possibility of a divine epiphany, the creation of a new civilization—as he pursues his main contention, that “authors of literary shipwrecks are continually exploring the identities and potential new roles of survivors” (4). Despite a few exceptions, the story Morrison tells is largely an optimistic one: shipwrecks are increasingly the condition for salutary transformation, and the closer he comes to the present—the last page presents the author’s own photograph of waves on the Saint Lucia beach—the more sanguine the analysis becomes.

Morrison devotes a chapter to each of his exemplary texts, showing how characters respond to opportunities for personal transformation. In The Odyssey, Morrison finds a story of opportunity rejected: the Nausicaa episode of Book 5 and the Calypso episode of Book 12 each show Odysseus rejecting the temptation to abandon his role as husband and king. Shipwrecks are “obstacles to his ultimate desire to reclaim his identity as Odysseus, king of Ithaca” (32), but they are obstacles that Odysseus triumphantly overcomes as his identity remains constant. The Tempest, for Morrison, is a more multifaceted shipwreck narrative: “it is truly remarkable how many possible ‘reinventions of the self’ are contemplated” (45). The key word here is “contemplated,” for Morrison argues that by the end of the play, few of the potential transformations have actually come to fruition. Though Ferdinand and Miranda are now married, Ariel is a free spirit, and Prospero is the recognized Duke of Milan; neither Sebastian nor Ferdinand has become the king of Naples; Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban have not killed Prospero and become king and viceroys of the island; and Stephano has not become Miranda’s husband. It is a play, then, that toys with the transformation of identity but that ultimately endorses something closer to the status quo. Robinson Crusoe, Morrison argues, is the work that most fully embraces the possibility of transformation, first by giving Crusoe the opportunity to create a new civilization, and second by showing how Crusoe undergoes a spiritual transformation. Crusoe, Morrison writes, “has reinvented himself both physically and spiritually” (120). Though Morrison is justly wary of an overly teleological story about shipwreck narratives, he does suggest that attitudes toward the new identities shift over time: “Staying on a new island as a new home appears to be a more modern tendency” (43).

Individual chapters about The Odyssey and The Tempest are followed by chapters about their literary and cinematic adaptations (as well as a few precursors). From Homer, Morrison transitions to the Egyptian “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor” (c. 1900 BCE) and Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993) and Omeros (1990). From Shakespeare, he moves to St. Paul’s shipwreck at Malta, Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1968), and the film Forbidden Planet (1956). But it is Robinson Crusoe that is the most generative. Chapter Seven focuses on survival in Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 BCE), Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away (2000), and Rex Gordon’s First on Mars (1957). Chapter Eight, one of the most interesting in the book, compares treatments of Friday in Walcott’s play Pantomime (1980) and J.M. Cotezee’s Foe (1987). And Chapter Nine examines the post-shipwreck communities of Jules Verne’s 1874 The Mysterious Island (conflict resolved), William Golding’s 1954 Lord of the Flies (conflict exploded), and the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island (conflict restaged each afternoon). The emphasis on Crusoe makes sense, for while the shipwrecks in Homer frame individual episodes, they are less thematically important than the act of traveling itself, and in The Tempest, it is the encounter with the other more than the shipwreck per se that has captured the imagination of later writers. By contrast, a Robinsonade without a shipwreck—or car wreck, plane wreck, or spaceship wreck—would seem to be no Robinsonade at all.

Morrison employs his comparative approach to show how fundamental features of shipwreck narratives are subsequently developed, helping us “appreciate the vitality of the archetypal scene of a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements” (7). Given that the three central works have been adapted, imitated, parodied, and remade as often as any in the canon, it is inevitable that readers will find themselves wishing for the inclusion of their own favorites or looking for a fuller justification for his selection beyond the brief claim to value “innovations on the basic pattern” and “artistic quality and philosophical influence” (7). (With influential texts by Swift, Cowper, Wyss, Bishop, Tournier, Ballard, and Martel, among many others, going unexamined, is it churlish to wonder which of these criteria justifies the inclusion of Gilligan’s Island?)

In his acknowledgments, Morrison notes that he has “attempted to present these ideas in a manner accessible to the general reader, as well as college and university students” (vii). Shipwreck narratives have an appeal that, if not universal, is certainly widespread, and there is real value to a jargon-free book that introduces the theme in a wide range of texts. In the process of writing an accessible book, however, Morrison has chosen not merely to relegate scholarly debates to the footnotes, but more problematically to minimize interpretive controversies altogether, a choice that flattens the texts under consideration. To take just one prominent example, Morrison’s central claim about Robinson Crusoe is that the novel shows the power of a shipwreck to elicit a spiritual transformation. Unlike in The Odyssey and The Tempest, the protagonist of Defoe’s novel embraces the opportunity that the island has offered for him to create a new life. “The greatest change Crusoe undergoes after the shipwreck,” Morrison writes, “is arguably his religious conversion, a ‘spiritual rebirth’” (117). Unfortunately, Morrison does not pursue the word “arguably,” for as the history of responses to Crusoe illustrates, that rebirth has always been contested. At the time of the novel’s publication, Charles Gildon complained about Crusoe’s mercurial willingness to change his religious allegiances to fit his circumstances. Rousseau included the conversion in the “rubbish” that ought to be cleansed from the novel. Marx dismissed the religious dimension entirely: “Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation” (88). Subsequent critics—including Watt, Hunter, Starr, McKeon, and Richetti, just to name a few—have been similarly reluctant to take Crusoe’s religious claims as self-evident, instead situating them within contexts of emergent capitalism, Puritan autobiography, or casuistry. Repeatedly Morrison assures us that Crusoe has attained a “transformation” and a “new life,” but the nuances of what that life entails (or how it is upturned by the discovery of the cannibal footprint) are left virtually unexamined, diminishing the power of Defoe’s character and novel.

If the texts under consideration often feel flat, it is in part because of the way Morrison treats their relationship to history. His discussions of Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Walcott all include sections on historical contexts, a useful gesture that promises to explain how universal themes are refracted through the prism of history. Morrison treats history, however, as relatively inert. So, for instance, as he describes the contexts of The Tempest, he writes, “The historical background to The Tempest comprises broad topics, such as Renaissance society and naval explorations, as well as specific events (the 1609 shipwreck) and texts, such as Montaigne’s essay ‘On the Cannibals’” (67). After briefly alluding to a Renaissance society of social mobility, he treats the Bermuda shipwreck and Montaigne’s essay as specific influences or “triggers” that Shakespeare adapts. Though the connections are plausible, one is left with the impression that these literary works reflect history, but rarely that they actively participate in it.

In the final chapter, Morrison suggests three reasons for the ubiquity of shipwreck narratives: the canonicity of texts that establish a link between shipwrecks and transformation, the capacity of shipwreck narratives to explore human nature in a controlled environment, and the aesthetic appeal of a narrative structured by the waves of the ocean. Perhaps an additional reason that shipwreck narratives have been so fruitful is that they are marvelously difficult to pin down. Cast away, marooned, or lost, the protagonists of these texts are often isolated not only in their survival but also in their narration, and the stories they tell can be contested as much as they can be indulged. Shipwrecked offers non-specialists a useful, broad survey of works that adapt the plot features of The Odyssey, The Tempest, and Robinson Crusoe. If readers are inspired to return to the turbulent texts themselves, Morrison’s book will have served a valuable purpose.

Evan R. Davis
Hampden-Sydney College


WORKS CITED

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago: 1912. Print.

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Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder, by Sarah Tindal Kareem

Reviewed by Roger Maioli

Among the persisting legacies of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) is the notion that eighteenth-century British fiction reflected the disenchanting tendencies of the Enlightenment. Just as natural philosophy renounced the supernatural—the view goes—the realist novel renounced the wonders that had been the typical fare of romance narratives. Accounts of the novel’s rise since Watt have shown that romance and its wonders retained an important presence in eighteenth-century fiction, but even revisionist accounts still tend to define wonder as what happens when realism is turned off. To question this division and claim a place for wonder within both novelistic realism and Enlightenment discourse is the governing purpose of Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder.

According to Sarah Tindal Kareem’s insightful, complex argument, wonder never truly waned; instead, it was “reinvented” in increasingly sophisticated versions by eighteenth-century philosophers, aestheticians, and novelists, from David Hume and Joseph Addison to Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. In the absence of traditional sources of wonder such as superstitious belief or romance narratives, these authors discovered new sources of wonder in everyday experience, endowing both daily life and its representation in literature with a renewed power to solicit curiosity and admiration. Kareem’s account of these developments illuminates not only the persistence of wonder within the Enlightenment’s secular culture, but also a gradual shift in wonder’s functions—a shift with profound implications for the history of aesthetics. As Kareem shows in her remarkable first chapter, “Wonder in the Age of Enlightenment,” seventeenth-century thinkers like Descartes and Bacon regarded wonder as “an epistemological passion,” one that is able to “concentrate the attention as a means to an end: the acquisition of knowledge” (36). But wonder, they recognized, also has the capacity “to arrest attention, to delay recognition, and to suspend judgment,” which compromised its epistemic usefulness. According to Kareem, these particular features of wonder, which seventeenth-century philosophers considered from the point of view of epistemology, “become repurposed within eighteenth-century aesthetic theory” (37). While later theorists and fictionists continued to affirm wonder’s potential to inform the understanding, they also contended that wonder’s peculiar qualities could have another type of value—as a source of disinterested aesthetic experience.

Within the history of British prose fiction, the discovery of wonder’s aesthetic potential evolved in response to a new problem—the problem of how to preserve the attention of readers in the absence of striking novelty. As Bacon and Descartes had recognized, wonder about unfamiliar things fostered scientific curiosity or readerly investment. But “if critical attention requires wonder, which in turn requires novelty,” Kareem asks, “how can the mind critically attend to familiar objects?” Is it even possible to cultivate wonder towards the familiar, un-supernatural world that both philosophers and novelists were now making their province? According to Kareem it is, and a promising way of doing so emerged already in the seventeenth century, on three parallel fronts: the literature of travel, natural philosophy, and the Protestant doctrine of special providence. Each of these traditions sought to render the familiar world somehow strange, whether by looking at it through foreign eyes, or by examining the common objects of sense perception as if they were rare, or by drawing attention to ordinary facts as instances of God’s marvelous agency. Such defamiliarizing procedures, Kareem shows, reappeared with a vengeance in the context of eighteenth-century fiction, allowing novels to produce wonder even in the absence of supernatural marvels.

Retracing this complex story is the goal of the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, “Rethinking the Real with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume,” Kareem illustrates how defamiliarization could produce wonder in similar ways across the divide between philosophical and fictional discourse. She argues that both Defoe and Hume defamiliarize the world by revealing that features of it that we routinely take for granted are actually contingent; a realization of their contingency, in turn, generates a sense of wonder at the familiar. To show how this works, Kareem offers a compelling reading of Robinson Crusoe, giving special attention to the episode in which Crusoe discovers barley on the island. In narrating Crusoe’s discovery, Defoe initially refrains from using the term “barley,” describing the plant instead as “some few stalks of something green,” growing where no one would expect them, promising much needed sustenance. The novel thus frames that discovery not as a banal encounter with a well-known plant, but as a suspenseful realization of nature’s workings as signs of God’s providential presence. In Kareem’s words, “Crusoe’s delaying of the name ‘barley’ replicates his original ignorance as to what the plant was,” allowing readers to partake in the narrator’s own sense of wonder. By means of such narrative techniques, “Crusoe transmits his perception of bread as if it were miraculous to his readers” (101), awakening them to the remarkable dimensions of daily experience. Kareem reveals an analogous logic behind Hume’s skeptical crisis in A Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that Hume’s critique of induction reveals that natural processes we take for granted (such as the apparent connection between cause and effect) may instead be “a spectacular series of remarkable coincidences” (96)—a realization that makes the observable world a source of unceasing wonder. Like Defoe, Hume seeks to make this experience of wonder available to the reader by means of adequate narrative strategies. When describing the perplexity that attends on skepticism, he provides a vivid portrayal of himself as a shipwreck victim in a stormy sea. “The shipwreck metaphor,” Kareem argues, “does not merely figuratively render Hume’s own skeptically induced disorientation, but also acts upon the reader to produce the very disorientation it describes” (90). And it is disorientation not by traditional marvels but by the everyday world that grounds our phenomenal experiences.

Defamiliarization, as these examples go to show, was thus able to reinsert wonder into the interstices of real life. But the resulting narratives, Kareem notes, were then faced with a second issue: “the problem of how marvelous content could have any effect upon an essentially skeptical subject” (51). The concern, here, is that the awareness that tales of surprising adventures might not be true would make readers immune to the appeal of wonder. According to Kareem, eighteenth-century fiction developed resources to address this issue as well. The seeds of the solution can be found in Addison’s defense of narrative probability. “In Addison’s account, probability tempers the marvelous and thereby maintains the reader’s assent by preventing wonder from slipping into incredulity” (51). Early eighteenth-century narratives promoted a similar alternation between skepticism and credulity by means of “dissonant truth claims”—Kareem’s designation for the way fiction “at once asserts and denies the truth of its representations” (56). Just as defamiliarization elicited a form of wonder akin to a sense of marvel (wonder at the contents of a narrative), dissonant truth claims elicited a form of wonder akin to curiosity (wonder about the narrative’s truth status). This second sense of wonder is fully at play in the cases of Defoe and Hume. Robinson Crusoe and A Treatise of Human Nature lead readers to wonder whether Crusoe’s and Hume’s ordeals in tempestuous seas were indeed real, or whether they were merely allegorical (in Crusoe’s case) or ironic (in Hume’s). Neither book offers a clear answer, and “this indeterminacy reproduces for the reader the epistemological uncertainty that Crusoe and Hume face, thereby illustrating the broader historical point that early eighteenth-century fiction’s vexed truth status solicits wonder” (31).

This, however, is not the only way in which wonder was reinvented for the new times. As novelists became more willing to acknowledge that their plots were untrue, the epistemological indeterminacy securing the new sense of wonder lost traction. According to Kareem, this placed wonder under renewed critical pressure. “How did fiction,” she asks, “solicit wonder when it could no longer play on the indeterminacy of its truth status?” (110). In addressing this question, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder makes one of its most daring critical moves, reading the eighteenth-century British novel in light of contemporary developments in German aesthetics. According to Kareem, mid-century novelists in Britain envisioned a “heterocosmic” model of fiction similar to the one proposed by Alexander Baumgarten and the disciples of Christian Wolff in Germany (111-14). A novel, on this model, is less a description of the real world than an autonomous, self-sufficient new world, and it responds only to the demands of internal consistency. A heterocosmic novel, Kareem argues, no longer invites wonder at its content or about its truth; instead, it solicits two other types of wonder that no longer depend on the narrative’s resemblance to the real world: “suspense as cultivated by the narrative’s gaps, and admiration for the organizing presence that orchestrates the unified creation” (110, 117-8; my emphasis).

Kareem illustrates this second stage in the eighteenth-century reinvention of wonder through parallel readings of Tom Jones and The Castle of Otranto. By cultivating but then dispelling readerly entrancement through metacritical chapters or moments of deliberate absurdity, Fielding and Walpole lead readers to oscillate between engrossed suspense (directed towards the plot) and reflective admiration (directed towards the author). The heterocosmic model thus “allows engrossment in fiction’s alternative world…to coexist with appreciation for the fictional world as a created entity” (155). It ensures “the reader’s disinterested engagement with the text as an aesthetic object” (150), thus completing the shift from “an instruction-driven model of aesthetics toward a pleasure-driven model” (155). At this point, fiction fulfills the potential for disinterested pleasure already incipient in Hume’s skepticism. “Just as Hume is able to enjoy miracles by treating them ‘as if’ they were true, readers are similarly able to enjoy the wonders they are reading about by treating them ‘as if’ they were true, through a willing suspension of disbelief” (31). In time, wonder’s emergence as a source of disinterested aesthetic pleasure paved the way for “a non-instrumentalist model of art, that is, a view of art as an end in itself” (155). Kareem illustrates this final stage in wonder’s aesthetic reinvention through a fascinating reading of Rudolph Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative (1785), an unconventional text for studies of the novel’s rise which is one of the refreshing surprises of Kareem’s book.

In her last chapter, Kareem brings us to the turn of the nineteenth century, describing one final turn in wonder’s metamorphoses. She proposes that the admiration for individual genius solicited by Fielding and Walpole becomes an object of critique in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both novels work by first encouraging readers to identify with the perspective of a skeptical character—whether Henry Tilney or Victor Frankenstein—and then undercutting that perspective by showing that too disengaged a skepticism may itself be a form of delusion. The alternative both novels promote is one in which critical disengagement allows room for the experience of wonder—wonder that can be enjoyed with proper critical awareness. Both novels promote the insight, central for Kareem’s thesis, that “disengagement, which at first appears to be the endpoint,” is instead “a way station en route to realizing a process of discovery through surprise that was also our point of departure” (13). This process, in which one overcomes credulous wonder through skepticism only to wonder again in a more reflective fashion, mirrors the movement of Humean skepticism: in the novel, as in Hume’s philosophy, the skeptic’s journey ends in a rediscovery of real life’s subtle marvels.

Kareem’s argument is in many ways more complex than my partial summary indicates. But even this brief survey shows that her genealogy of wonder’s mutations bears on a number of major critical fronts for eighteenth-century studies. To begin with, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder puts a new spin on the always healthy reminder that realism, while a useful category for historical analysis, should not be taken to define fiction’s fortunes in the wake of the Enlightenment. In Kareem’s version of this story, wonder persists not just in late revivals of romance such as the Gothic novel, but also within those realistic procedures that may seem predicated on wonder’s exclusion. Such a view also carries implications for the disenchantment thesis, as it shows that the old appeal of supernatural wonders was retooled by Enlightenment thinkers to new ends; once a sign of vulgar credulity, wonder became a sophisticated pleasure to be voluntarily enjoyed by the connoisseur. Finally, Kareem shows how conceptual categories usually associated with later stages in the history of aesthetics—“defamiliarization, narrative suspense, the willing suspension of disbelief, and the phenomenology of narrative enchantment” (5)—were already operative in eighteenth-century theories of wonder.

Kareem’s thesis, naturally, is not uncontroversial. For example, while I am persuaded by her account of wonder’s evolution, I am less compelled by the suggestion that novels came to be viewed as autonomous works of art already in the eighteenth century. Notions of aesthetic disinterestedness, it seems to me, gained currency much faster within German theoretical aesthetics than in British novel theory, where instrumental defenses of fiction remained dominant well into the nineteenth century. One might also question whether the book really avoids what Kareem calls “the typical ‘rise of the novel’ trajectory built around Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne” (28-9). The aestheticization of wonder, for Kareem, accompanies the rise of “fiction” as a conceptual category, and she follows Catherine Gallagher in proposing that fiction achieves conceptual status once the novel has moved from pseudo-historical narratives to avowedly fictional ones. Such a progression from “true history” to an explicit fictionality seems indeed clear if we consider the history of British fiction as one that runs through the Defoe–Richardson–Fielding axis (the examples that organize Gallagher’s “Rise of Fictionality”), but it becomes harder to recognize when we zoom out of the usual canon to consider the variety of avowedly fictional forms that predated and accompanied it. A version of literary history that took into account how readers responded to those forms—including romance, secret histories, oriental tales, and, in the final analysis, even narrative poetry and drama—might have different implications for fictionality’s conceptual genesis, and possibly for the history of wonder’s metamorphoses as well. Maybe what I am expecting from Kareem, as from theorists of fiction in general, is a reassessment of Gallagher’s thesis—a reassessment which is already being undertaken by scholars including Emily H. Anderson, Nicholas Paige, and Susan Lanser, and in which Kareem promises to be an important voice as well. I am personally looking forward to her further thinking on this issue.

It is possible that readers of this book will not share the few reservations I outlined above, or maybe will have reservations of a different sort. Whichever is the case, they will certainly find in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder an invaluable contribution to its ever lively field. Kareem’s scholarly range is impressive, she has a keen eye for subtle conceptual differences, and she displays at every turn a remarkable command of both her primary and secondary sources. Her book will hopefully become mandatory reading for students of eighteenth-century aesthetics and of fiction’s place within it.

Roger Maioli
University of Florida


WORKS CITED

Gallagher, Catherine, “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Print.

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Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Samara Anne Cahill

Reviewed by James Mulholland

This is a collection in search of a cosmology, to put it in the terms one of its editors, Kevin Cope, adopts in his “Conclusion.” There he claims that adaptability has been elevated to the level of the cosmological in the twenty-first century. In much the same way, this edited collection ranges widely, seeking for the constellation of subjects and issues that might help to explain how the notion of adaptation transformed from a sense of mere “fit-ness” (xxv) in the seventeenth century to universal approval and importance in the twenty-first.

It is a daunting task. While searching for that constellation, the book moves through an enormous number of examples, not all of which coexist in easily accessible ways. The collection’s individual essays are well documented and informative, but when used in its totality, the collection can seem to lack a unified set of concerns. Depending on the wishes of the reader, this may be an advantage or a disadvantage, and after reading this collection, I was more impressed than ever about the trouble of defining adaptability or adaptation, an idea I use quite frequently in my research. I realize now, for example, that the connotations I expect to be conveyed when I argue that Anglophone authors “adapt” English-language genres to the particularity of late-eighteenth-century India might not be as straightforward as I assume. I am sure I am not alone. Arguably, the majority of analysis in present-day studies of literature and culture depends on a notion of adaptation to identify change over time, whether it is the innovation in genres or the alteration of social forms, making this collection quite timely.

To produce an academic study of “adaptation” invites such troubles, of course, as the editors themselves make clear. Samara Anne Cahill warns from the outset that the contributors to the collection offer a “range of answers rather than a definitive or authoritative one” to the “complex awareness, pleasures, and frustrations that adaptation engenders” (xiii). Adaptation, she notes, is a “dynamic fidelity” (xiii) and one that eighteenth-century studies might be uniquely able to capture because it exists on “at the threshold of adaptation” (xiv).

Capturing the contradictory dynamism of fidelity is one central goal of the volume, as is assessing the connections between scholarship of the eighteenth century and the current social and political moment. This orientation toward the present is one of the most valuable qualities of the volume, and for Cahill, this revolves around crucial disciplinary questions that the volume can only partly resolve: is eighteenth-century studies more uniquely “at the threshold of adaptation” than other literary periods? If so, why? If not, how do we perceive change in history when it involves disparate notions of adaptation and innovation combined with conservation and tradition? How can scholars handle the vastness of the cultural and technological forces that contribute to adaptation, particularly when those adaptations are situated in a rapidly re-orienting world like that of the global eighteenth century?

The three sections of this collection—titled “Interdisciplinary Adaptations,” “Transnational Adaptations,” and “Gendered Adaptations”—reveal the always-rich (though sometimes strained) connections in the “range of answers” that Cahill admits. The first section, “Interdisciplinary Adaptations,” is representative; it includes Jessika Wichner’s chapter on the history of ballooning in the late eighteenth century and Gilles Massot’s account of his 2005 artistic installation, Valbelle, Myth of Fiction?, which repopulates the absent historical objects of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat’s estate using photography. Both essays pursue roundabout routes to comment on the rushing modernity of the eighteenth century, with Wichner explaining how ballooning experiments were public performances adapted to the changing reactions of its audiences, which shifted from avid interest to bored stagnation as ballooning became normalized and successful (30). These reactions are charted in her essay through an intriguing archive of newspaper accounts, histories, and poetry that reveal the “literary adaptation of the balloon” (30). Massot likewise seeks to “examine how human agency fails to adapt the external world to the stylized space of the esoteric garden” (3) by inserting photography into the landscape, an act he claims (incorrectly I think) reveals how Valbelle understood the “world was becoming an image” and that “twentieth-century Postmodernism wasn’t too far away” from its nineteenth-century Romantic precursors (7).

The second part, “Transnational Adaptations,” turns to the interactions of an insistently globalizing world. In her essay, Bärbel Czennia describes Chinese porcelain punch bowls as an example of intercultural “successful adaptation” (43). The punch bowls themselves are evidence of a new form of Western sociability: the conviviality and joy of gathering around a large drinking vessel (49). By examining punch drinking scenes in English fiction, she determines that punch crossed class lines and indicated the possibilities and anxieties of making the British into global citizens, often right at home over drinks. In this sense, punch bowls were an “alternate world history cast in porcelain” (46). In the spirit of alternate world histories, Shirley Chew brings eighteenth-century adaptability into close contact with the twenty-first century by assessing the adaptations of Jamaican poet Olive Senior. Adaptation of past cultural works is a strategy of postcolonial and decolonizing writing, Chew observes, citing the work of Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, and Senior herself (70). Senior’s poetry recasts William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, and its connections to the family’s Jamaica plantations and its slave population, as a “distinctive example” of this method.

The two essays of the third section, “Gendered Adaptations,” show the same interest in attaching eighteenth-century adaptations to twenty-first-century incarnations. Essays by Susan Spencer and Nhu Nguyen and by Kathryn Duncan engage in the difficult work of cross-national and multilingual eighteenth-century scholarship. The former essay combines an account of Romantic period British literature with an examination of two of Vietnam’s best-known eighteenth-century poets, whose verse circulated orally and in manuscript. Noting the multicultural (primarily Chinese) influences on this verse, and situating them in the violent political upheavals of Vietnam, Spencer and Nguyen propose a different kind of adaptability for eighteenth-century studies, one that accounts for disciplinary discussions that move across languages, nations, and regions. Most valuable here is their emphasis on linguistic translation of less-known archives as a method to push beyond the otherwise prevalent tilt in global eighteenth-century studies toward European empires.

Duncan examines the transformation of the anti-pirate rhetoric of the early eighteenth century into the “playful modern pirate iconography” of Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. She proposes that pirates, then as now, present problems of epistemology, of how one might identify a pirate (as opposed to, say, a privateer) (91). She offers evolutionary psychology’s idea of Theory of Mind as a way to understand how the assessment of the pirate as a “violent criminal engaging in illegal, reprehensible acts” could adapt into Johnny Depp’s lovable Jack Sparrow. Conceiving of pirates as “cheaters,” “defectors,” and “free riders,” as those who resist the reciprocal relationships of altruism, Duncan claims “evolutionary psychology explains the exaggerated angry response to pirates that we find not only in law but in print” during the eighteenth century (95, 96, 97). This evolutionary biological sense accords with the arguments of others, such as Daniel Heller-Roazen, who has noted that pirates have been seen as the “common enemy of all” since classical antiquity (16, 22). And Duncan’s account presents a provocative turn on recent scholarship that piracy, especially black piracy, was egalitarian and proto-democratic (as found in the writing of W. Jay Bolster, Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, and Kenneth Kinkor). Still, it seems odd to suggest that pirates have been entirely defused in the twenty-first century when the resurgence of interest in Somali piracy makes them the cinematic villains of films such as Captain Phillips (2013) and when piracy remains the only crime in which nations agree to universal jurisdiction.

As these descriptions of the collection’s contents indicate, there is an insistent relevancy to these essays. Such relevancy is the particular aim of the two anchoring essays of the collection, its “Introduction” on ecology and adaptation by David Fairer and its “Conclusion” on the crises of adaptability by Cope.

Fairer’s “Introduction” uses ecology to establish some wider principles about adaptation, and many of the other contributors cite it. Adaptation, he suggests, has “undergone significant shifts of meaning” from celebration of a “perfectly designed creation” to “life’s stable purposiveness or continual reshaping,” all of which “articulate contrasting views of creation” (xxvi). He humorously notes that our current notion of adaptation is “like the modern electrical adapter” in that it “assumes an element of modification and adjustment,” but its early modern origins, Fairer observes, emphasized “fit” more than “change” (xxv). It was not until the nineteenth century that the transitive sense of adaptation as modification becomes apparent in the English language, which Fairer attributes to the recognition of the “inherent tendency in all living things to adapt to their environment” (xxx).

These “subtle shades of meaning” of adaptation “moved, unevenly but inexorably” toward its modern notion that adaptation is a force “relative and responsive” that we might perceive as important to developments “not only in the concept of Nature but in our apprehension of human art, human designs, human adaptability” (xliii). Literary aesthetic and generic change plays a crucial role in this inexorable movement, and Fairer offers the georgic as an exemplum. The georgic was the literature of “a changing economy” in which “the earth challenges mankind to adapt to its shifting moods” (xxxiii). This is a lovely sense of the georgic and its role in our ideas of climate. It is one that is still relevant to how humans perceive the global ecosystem as possessing its own personality, evident in our twenty-first-century anthropomorphisms of Mother Earth or of Gaia complexes. Sadly for all of us in a time of rapid climate change, the Earth cannot be reasoned with, and its moods cannot be appeased, though our persistent imaginations of a sentient Earth seem to displace our own effects upon it.

This is a “dynamic,” Fairer argues, that “humanity shares with the natural world as a non-human agent of change,” but what is lacking in this essay is how our understanding of adaptability as it was shaped by eighteenth-century art, science, and literature might dislodge us from our constrained political debate over climate change. Such an answer might be impossible to provide, but Fairer does offer a well-informed sense of how our attitudes about changing Nature derives from the thinking of our predecessors.

Kevin Cope valiantly tries to address my concerns for contemporary relevancy in his “Conclusion.” Recalling the difficulties Cahill identifies in her “Preface,” Cope laughs that adaptation must be “one of the most adaptable words in international English” (127). For Cope, we inherit from the eighteenth century a sense that adaptation is about “revising the present so it might anticipate the better future” (129), but it is not clear to me that a period which celebrates neoclassicism is one that has a “unidirectional commitment to the future” and is “critical of the past,” as Cope suggests (129). More useful I think is his proposition that the eighteenth century “relished crisis moments” (129). This remains the prevailing orthodoxy of eighteenth-century studies: that adaptation to the period’s crises—whether the crises in authorship and authenticity that Susan Stewart notes in Crimes of Writing, or the crisis in epistemology that Michael McKeon describes in The Secret History of Domesticity, or the crises of the British empire debated by Nicholas Dirks and others, or the many other crisis we have still to discover—were pivotal to the creation of the modern world we still recognize.

Cope’s sense is that the adaptability of the eighteenth century has “set the stage for later eras including our own,” which he terms the “great era of adaptation” (147). Cope seems to lament the rapid alterations of our current era, unlike many of the other contributors, who seem enthusiastic that the artistic and cultural adaptions of those “citizens of the world” noted in the collection’s title demonstrated nimbleness, agility, and collaboration. Cope worries that in our current era of adaptation “anything might well be anything,” and “wavering identities whirl in a mix of happy class mobility and miserable personal confusion” (147). This seemingly not-great era has “raised adaptation to the level of…a cosmology,” organizing everything around it.

Cope is certainly right that we should we wary of a uniformly sanguine sense of adaptation at a time when it is most strongly aligned with champions of economic “disruption” and “innovation,” whose ideas have been critiqued by Jill Lepore and others. That still does not explain his conclusion’s grudge against the results of modernity’s robust aspiration to craft a better future through adaptation. Sure, cultural change can lead to what Cope calls “our fascination with con-men and impostors” and what he seems to think is a disturbing “enthusiasm for shows about sudden change of social status such as Britain’s Got Talent or The Next Food Network Star” (147). But con-men and impostors have been with us from the beginning. And while food shows might not be everyone’s favorite leisure activity, this collection demonstrates, with its wide range, that in science and literature, art and culture, humans have an almost overwhelming reservoir of examples of adaptability to draw upon and, being adaptable themselves, they most certainly will.

James Mulholland
North Carolina State University


WORKS CITED

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.

Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Print.

Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books, 2009. Print.

Kinkor, Kenneth. “Black Men under the Black Flag.” In Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. Ed. C.R. Pennell. New York: New York UP, 2001. Print.

Lepore, Jill. “The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong.” New Yorker 23 June (2014): n. pag. NewYorker.com. Web. Sept. 2016.

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Print.

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Print.

Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

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Reflections on Sentiment: Essays in Honor of George Starr, edited by Alessa Johns

Reviewed by Maximillian E. Novak

This collection of essays dedicated to George Starr concentrates on Professor Starr’s interest in the novel and the ways in which sentimentality impacted fiction during the eighteenth century. More particularly the essays spin off from an essay by Professor Starr, “Only a Boy,” published in Genre in 1977. That essay argued that the male protagonist of sentimental novels could not satisfy the requirement of the hero of the Bildungsroman, because he does not, indeed cannot, grow in any significant way. Professor Starr begins his discussion with Defoe’s Colonel Jack. He argues that Jack never grows out of regarding himself as a child and hence essentially innocent. Although the title of Professor Starr’s essay is based upon a moment in Huckleberry Finn, when the narrator escapes a dangerous situation by pleading his status as a child and hence not guilty of any act that might have been interpreted as evil, Colonel Jack makes similar pleas by way of excusing his actions. Professor Starr argues that Jack resembles the protagonist of the sentimental novel in this continuing naiveté, his blundering attempts at marriage, and his lack of any real growth. This pattern certainly plays its way into Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. As for Frances Burney’s Evelina, the female protagonist it shows to possess the characteristics of the hero of sentiment without problems, since some child-like qualities and complete sexual innocence were the ideals of the heroines of the sentimental novel.

Although only a few of the essays only touch peripherally on this particular essay, many deal with aspects of emotion and how emotion should be regarded in relation to character. For example, George Haggerty’s essay on William Godwin’s Caleb Williams treats the complexities of friendship as embodying a degree of hatred and danger. He makes use of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the complexities of friendship to demonstrate how Caleb’s desire for intimacy leads to the destruction of the relationship. And Simon Stern’s discussion of the sensibility involved in the Richardson-Fielding conflict interprets the ways in which Fielding could never entirely give up a degree of contempt that he had for Richardson’s epistolary method, reading into the end of Fielding’s famous letter to Richardson in praise of Clarissa something less than the wholehearted praise that Martin Battestin saw in that letter. In a subtle reading, Stern views Richardson’s unpublished response to Fielding’s praise a not entirely unwarranted anger toward the author of Tom Jones. And in the process, he provides an amusing reading of the adoring praise of Richardson’s work. James P. Carson’s “The Sentimental Animal” treats the ways in which animals play a mediating role in sentimental novels such as Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. No longer the Cartesian mechanism in a world that values feeling above thought, animals such as Yorick’s starling can communicate what the loss of freedom actually means. Carson sees the bird as affording Yorick access to his emotional life. And in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham sympathy for animals becomes the touchstone for distinguishing true from false sensibility. In Romanticism, sympathy for animals becomes part of the “pantheistic force that unites all beings.” In these final pages, Carson concentrates on a children’s story by John William Polidori, “A Story of Miss Anne and Miss Emma with the Dog—Carlo,” a work in which the dog’s speechlessness becomes a virtue and his emotions raise him to the level of a sentimental hero. One point mentioned but not developed in this complex essay is a relationship between the tableaux of the sentimental novel and the structure of pornographic fiction. Amy J. Pawl’s essay, “Only a Girl,” deals with Elizabeth Inchbald’s “A Simple Story” as a typical sentimental novel. She argues that Miss Milner’s liveliness in the first part should not be taken as admirable. Her passion for Elmwood is uncontrollable, and her disgrace and death reveals that. Her loving with “the passion of an mistress and the tenderness of a wife” is all wrong. On the other hand, her daughter, Matilda, is the perfect sentimental heroine. She marries Rushbrook at the end, but he is a weak and dependent figure. Her real love is for her father—a love approaching incest, as Pawl notes, recalling the old song, “her heart belongs to daddy.”

A fair number of essays deal directly with Defoe. Using an extensive number of contemporary books on servants, Barbara Benedict treats Amy in Roxana as Defoe’s example of a bad servant. She discusses the Amy-Roxana relationship as a form of joint insanity. Employing Defoe’s Family Instructor volumes and Religious Courtship, Alison Conway examines the notion of religious conflict in marriages between men and women of differing Christian beliefs. Acknowledging Defoe’s warnings against such marriages, she comes to the conclusion that Defoe puts an emphasis on sociability and communication. On the matter of sociability, she sees Defoe actually coming somewhat close to the advice of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Joanna Picciotto’s essay begins by demonstrating how Professor Starr’s reading of the pot in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe showed how limited was Virginia Woolf’s reading of Defoe’s work as being about a very real pot rather than the beauty of the ocean and the sky. But the rest of the essay, on Defoe’s use of detail to create a sense of reality, never entirely explains the nature of Defoe’s realist fiction.

Geoffrey Sill’s “‘Only a Boy’: George Starr’s ‘Notes on Sentimental Novels’ Revisited,” sees similarities between Huckleberry Finn’s excuse of being “only a boy,” and Colonel Jack’s excuses for thieving activities as a street urchin in London, but he disagrees somewhat on the question of whether Colonel Jack might be considered an early Bildungsroman. Sill sees considerable growth and change in Jack as by the end, he has a mature relationship with his wife, he has attained the kind of knowledge that, for Defoe, constituted the attainment of a true gentleman, and he has achieved a firm set of Christian beliefs. In Jack’s struggles toward these achievements, he is very different from the static, impotent protagonist of the sentimental novel. On the other hand, Professor Sill views Professor Starr’s arguments about the Sentimental hero as a significant alternative to Ian Watt’s arguments about realism.

The final essay, by John Richetti, recounts his experiences in approaching eighteenth-century poetry through oral recitation (“declamation”). In some ways, his approach represents an appeal to “authenticity” similar to that of some of the New Criticism. He argues for the importance of declamation in evaluating the excellence of verse—what sounds like genuine emotion and what not: Swift, Pope, Johnson, yes; Gray, no. Richetti has a brilliant analysis of Swift’s savage elegy on Marlborough, but while Swift conveys his anger and hatred with wonderful power, I never read it without being aware of Swift’s Tory leanings, his seeming personal pique, or that Marlborough helped to defeat Louis XIV, the persecutor of the Huguenots and the enemy of the liberties of surrounding nations. “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” Gray tells us movingly on a similar theme, and even Johnson (along with almost everyone else toward the end of the eighteenth century) felt that Gray’s musings on the role of the poor in history was effective poetry. Of course, Richetti’s main objection is to what he considers to be an excessively sentimental portrayal of the “poet” at the end of the Elegy. But whether one agrees with him or not, Richetti emerges as an excellent reader of poetry. And his essay is a splendid way to end this tribute to one of the finest modern scholars of eighteenth literature.

Maximillian E. Novak
University of California, Los Angeles

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Restless Men: Masculinity and Robinson Crusoe, 1788–1840, by Karen Downing

Reviewed by Nicholas Seager

Karen Downing’s study of masculine identity in colonial Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries identifies Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as an important reference point for both transported felons and voluntary migrants. “The promise of Robinson Crusoe—that a man could be both adventurer and settler, both wild and domesticated—was the promise made to men about the Australian colonies,” she writes (173). The promoters of colonization and emigration pushed this connection, aware that men who might be inclined to undertake the journey had been reared on Crusoe and stories like it. Sure enough, the men actually making the voyage embraced the identification with Crusoe and thought about their departure from Britain for the antipodes as an adventure akin to those undertaken by Defoe’s castaway. Convicts, too, could use the experience of Crusoe’s transition from slave to castaway to master of himself and his new world territory in order to come to terms with their situation.

As Richard Phillips states, in the nineteenth century “the Robinson Crusoe story was canonized as the archetypal modern adventure story” (25), and Downing’s study attests to a part of that larger process. Downing identifies “many echoes” of Crusoe in private writings by men of this era, men who were working out their masculinity in terms of a desire to roam and dominate, as well as to settle and domesticate. Accordingly, Downing finds that “Robinson Crusoe was…a conceptual framework or discourse or metanarrative which gave meaning to men’s actions and circumstances: it mediated the way men experienced the world and conceived of themselves as subjects” (173–74). And Crusoe, as a range of recent works of scholarship investigating its diverse cultural afterlives has demonstrated, provided a “framework” as malleable as it was durable and accessible (e.g. Fallon, Acquisto, O’Malley).

Downing’s book is, like Shawn Thomson’s The Fortress of American Solitude: Robinson Crusoe and Antebellum Culture (2009), a study of Crusoe as what Thomson calls a “topos of masculinity” (31). In his account of the United States from 1815 to 1861, Thomson establishes that Crusoe was a mainstay of boyhood reading, ubiquitous in libraries, and a reference point for numerous tales of solitary adventuring in the expanding nation. But unlike for Thomson’s account, one wonders whether Crusoe is absolutely necessary for Downing’s arguments. It is odd, for instance, that “Robinson Crusoe” appears in the book’s title but “Australia” does not. The book will interest literary scholars keen to know yet more about the uses to which Defoe’s novel has been put, but make no mistake, its main readership is historians of Australia in the half-century after HMS Supply landed in Botany Bay. Downing’s study addresses changing conceptions of manhood in relation to discourses of medicine, education, social rank, religion, and the family, as well as colonization. Crusoe evidently proved useful at this historical moment in this locale: men were thought about as naturally active rather than sedentary; they aspired to independence gained by land ownership and labor; they anticipated and experienced solitude, despair, and confrontations with indigenous peoples; they fretted about the enervating effects of civil society and the deleterious consequences of social mobility. Robinson Crusoe could help with all these matters as well as it could help the sedentary Gabriel Betteredge from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), for whom it was a “friend in need in all the necessities of life” (Collins 22). But Downing’s study—thankfully—is not confined to how this range of concerns was addressed by invocations of Defoe’s novel alone. In several chapters there are a few nods to Crusoe where an original source has obligingly mentioned it, but for large parts, Crusoe is incidental not intrinsic to the argument. It is testament to the power of the Crusoe myth that it has shaped a modern historian’s approach to Australian colonization, even at times when it has not (apparently) shaped the accounts left by the migrants themselves.

The direct references to Crusoe in the book’s primary materials are certainly important evidence of the reach of Defoe’s story. Here are some examples from Downing’s impressive trawl of the archives: “When Peter Cunningham described escaped convicts on Kangaroo Island as ‘Robinson Crusoes,’ when ex-convict settler James Munro’s newspaper obituary was headed ‘The Tasmanian Crusoe,’ and when John Morgan called ‘wild white man’ William Buckley ‘the real Crusoe’ in the published account of his life with Aborigines, it is not clear whether Crusoe is being invoked to highlight a solitary life, a settler’s life or an uncivilized life” (5). Of course, it is all three, and sometimes in overlapping ways: “It is this slipperiness of usage that underlines Crusoe’s success as a potent symbol—he and his story meant different things to different men, yet created a perception of a shared understanding of the character and his interactions with the world” (5). The agency in the final clause is a bit odd: Crusoe and his story created a shared understanding of his character. Actually the idea is that cultural contexts of migration and masculinity created this shared perception, and indeed the majority of the book is concerned with delineating the social conditions into which occasional Crusoe references are inserted. Downing moves between larger understandings of changing masculinity in the late Georgian period and more particular manifestations in Australian-related texts.

Restless Men comprises eight chapters. The first deals with social perceptions that civilization, politeness, and luxury had baneful effects on men’s health. The second examines travel and attendant ideas of self-discovery and maturation. The third moves to the education of boys and their becoming men, and chapter 4 tackles the place of seafaring in Australian-British national identity and how it intersected with masculine ideals. The fifth chapter considers attitudes to land ownership and independence in relation to migrants’ experiences, while chapter 6 turns to anxieties about social mobility, the feminizing effects of consumerism, and the difficulties of reading a person’s inner worth through contingent, extrinsic markers of social rank. Chapter 7 addresses “men’s ambivalent relationship with authority” (129); it examines convicts’ legal experiences at a time when the state was increasingly claiming a monopoly on violence that diminished individual autonomy. The final chapter considers attitudes to the family—increasingly central to ideas of adult manhood—as paradoxical, both “the reason for leaving and the reason for returning” (150). Throughout the book, Downing demonstrates a sure hand with the historiography and draws dexterously on contemporary conduct literature as well as private writings. The book is highly recommended to those interested in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sociocultural history, particularly of gender and empire. Scholars of Defoe will want to dip in at the very least.

Nicholas Seager
Keele University


WORKS CITED

Acquisto, Joseph. Crusoe and other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2012. Print.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Ed. Sandra Kemp. London: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Fallon, Ann-Marie. Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Global Theory and Transnational Aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Print.

O’Malley, Andrew. Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Philips, Richard. Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Thomson, Shawn. The Fortress of American Solitude: “Robinson Crusoe” and Antebellum Culture. Madison and Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009. Print.

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Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794, by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

Reviewed by Morgan Vanek

Recounting the pleasures of reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine Morland confesses that she finished the book in “two days—my hair standing on end the whole time” (77). For Jane Austen, Catherine’s tendency to confuse Gothic fiction with reality is a source of humor, and the engine that sets Northanger Abbey’s parody of romance and its readers in motion. For Jayne Lewis, however, Catherine’s description of her “hair standing on end” is as significant a demonstration of the real effects of atmosphere as any of Boyle’s experiments with an air pump (249). In fact, Air’s Appearance returns to this image of the reader so enthralled that she experiences a physical thrill over and over again, and like the eighteenth-century natural philosophers who made air visible by describing its effects on a rusting hinge or darkening flesh, Lewis conjures her research questions from the air around the subject she studies. How, she wonders, do the abstractions of fiction acquire the power to elicit a physical response? Where are we, really, when we spend time in fictional worlds? What, if any, is the difference between our encounters with fiction’s apparitions and our experiences outside of a novel?

Air’s Appearance argues that these imaginative experiences are real, even if the fictions that inspire them are not and that the literary atmosphere that holds the avid reader in its grip shares a great deal with the theories about the composition and effects of circulating at the time that it took shape. Distinguishing her work from what she calls the more “conventionally interdisciplinary” approaches of other ecohistorians of the long eighteenth century (including Alvin Snider, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Rajani Sudan, Eric Gidal, and Robert Markley), Lewis also argues that the close study of “literary experiments” with the effects of unseen forces offers a privileged view of the otherwise invisible mediating role of language in the history of air’s appearance (4). To inhabit a fictional world, after all, is to adopt a habit of mind that can make nothing feel like something—so the tools we use to interrogate these fictions, Lewis argues, are uniquely suited to analyzing the similarly elusive qualities of atmosphere.

To this end, Lewis presents two related eighteenth-century histories of air. In one story, scientists from Boyle to Priestley search for the words to distinguish each invisible and immaterial aspect of the air from the equally invisible and immaterial “aether” composed of all these airy parts; in the other, writers from Pope to Radcliffe examine the mediating effect of text that—like a mist over the world it describes—makes it easier to see otherwise transparent influences at work on the characters (usually women) at the center of their stories. By approaching scenes from the history of science as if they are also scenes from the history of reading, Lewis discovers that all of these characters are engaged in the same activity: from laboratory to library, these are stories about putting the air into words.

Starting with the scientists, Chapter 1 explores how the “composition” of nomenclature to describe the air is necessarily shaped by available theories of the “composition” of the air itself. As this argument suggests, Lewis’s style is often punning, trailing “clouds of association” around key words to draw patterns out of what appear to be coincidences (27). At one point, for instance, Lewis observes a parallel between the electricity a book transmits when struck by lightning and the fairies that enter the realm of imagination when a reader encounters a story about them. In each encounter, a book persuades us to believe in an invisible force—and this, Lewis concludes, is how words on the page become real. Chapter 2 repeats this pattern, pulling apart the multiple meanings that activate a pun to expose the aesthetic aspects of “spring,” or the elastic capacity Boyle identified as proof of the difference between “common air” and the “aether” in which it is suspended. Under pressure, however, Lewis finds that this distinction feels a lot like the difference Milton observes between the prelapsarian aether in which Adam and Eve exist and the strange substance (air) that closes in around them after the fall. By giving a name to “common air,” Lewis argues, Boyle has changed his readers’ state, too—both evicting us from the unknowing condition that made our atmosphere appear to be as uniform as it was invisible and yoking our awareness of the air around us to our comprehension of one particular medium (words in English).

Closing the chapter with a more literal relationship between air and articulation, Lewis notes that Boyle stutters. These biographical anecdotes sometimes seem at odds with the figurative language that drives so much of the book’s argument, but here Lewis treats Boyle’s stutter as an illustration of his own theory of “spring,” or an embodied response to the encroachments of “common air.” Invoking Jean-Louis Barrault’s theory of character in action, Lewis explains that for an actor, a stutter might be an “air” put on to make otherwise unseen, even unknowable, aspects of both a character and the world in which she moves more legible. By lingering over Boyle’s stutter, then, Lewis performs her own experiment with the elastic capacity of “the air,” stretching the concept to include the social mores that surround us as well as the stuff we breathe.

In Chapter 3, Lewis turns to the transparent literary artifice that makes these social airs apparent. Not unlike a mist cast over a god on stage, she suggests, which renders him invisible to those within the world of the play and visible only to those outside it, Pope’s sylphs “show the show,” revealing both the “air of probability” established by the poem’s demand that we accept them and the possibility that other unseen forces—not sylphs, but something—might also exist in the world outside the frame, clustering around real women in the same way sylphs gather around Belinda (85). It is these self-consciously fantastical features, Lewis argues, that make The Rape of the Lock such an important precedent for subsequent eighteenth-century writing about the illusions women cultivate to navigate social worlds in which appearances matter more than substance, and such a useful illustration of the similar operations of belief at work in both the world of the poem and the world it describes.

Chapter 4 further interrogates this operation of belief that transforms the mark on the page into the matter of the mind’s eye. Meditating upon the hygrometer, Lewis observes a parallel between technologies that measure humidity with paper exposed to air and the terms eighteenth-century weather-watchers developed to communicate atmospheric conditions across time and space. In both cases, air’s appearance is rendered with marks capable of conjuring the sensation of specific conditions, or ambiguous phrases such as “it is cold,” the subject of which is necessarily both the condition out of doors and the body of the writer. To understand these records, Lewis observes, readers must fill the gap between the cold and the body that feels it with the operation of our minds—and that willingness to believe in an atmospheric condition based on the record of its effects on the page is no less powerful when we engage with a fictional world. To demonstrate, Chapter 5 considers the equally powerful effects of writing about what might not be in the air at all: apparition narratives, among which Lewis includes Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Observing that eighteenth-century readers were less likely to conceive of apparitions as supernatural entities than as evidence of a problem with the eye’s ability to capture visual reality, Lewis approaches the genre as a textual record of an appearance, and thus a useful counterpoint to John Bender’s claim that the plain style of realistic fiction seems to “disappear” as writing (112). By simulating both the agent of perception and its object, Lewis argues, the apparition narrative both “perform[s] and trigger[s] an intricate mental process” by which the reader takes on the same role as the person who encountered the appearance, and the text thus makes it possible for others to “see” the apparition (120).

In Chapter 6, Lewis proposes that Tom Jones treats the same problem by exploring where we are when we spend time in a fictional world. By beginning each book with a chapter positioning the reader outside of the fictional world in which the rest of the story unfolds, Fielding both reminds the reader of the gap between the world of the story and our own and draws attention to the verbal art with which he has otherwise collapsed it. As a result, Lewis concludes, Fielding’s readers can only see through this verbal art by looking right at it. Chapter 7 considers the opposite side of this coin. In The Female Quixote, Lewis observes, Arabella is punished for failing to differentiate between fiction and reality, but she only comes to appreciate the consequences of her actions when she learns to see the appearance she presents to others. To draw out this similarity between the apparitions of fiction and the apparitions of social selves, Lewis considers the paradox of Arabella’s punishment alongside the work of Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and natural philosopher who posited standards of evidence for evaluating encounters with ghosts. If, as Glanvill suggests, there is no meaningful difference between imagining an encounter with an apparition and a real encounter with an apparition, Lewis posits that The Female Quixote is also a study in just how similar the world of Arabella’s fiction is to the social world she uses these stories to navigate: both, of course, are organized by mere appearances.

Returning to the laboratory, Chapter 8 finds Priestley working to identify the component parts of the seemingly homogenous subject Boyle called “common air.” For Lewis, Priestley’s project—transforming “the air” into a theater of airs—further illustrates the man-made dimensions of knowledge, or the extent to which the facts of air’s composition remain apparitional, upheld only by shared belief. Though Priestley gives each part its own name (“mephitic air,” “fixed air”), all share a common surname (“air”), a reference to the essential but indistinct quality this new nomenclature still cannot bring into focus—and a failure doubled by the fact that Priestley never quite managed to distinguish the life-sustaining function of “vital air” (now oxygen) from these other “factitious airs.” To accept Priestley’s theater of airs, Lewis argues, is therefore to embrace a view of ourselves “enthralled to a materially immaterial environment” we cannot ever really know (217)—and so it should be no surprise that, as Chapter 9 elaborates, this is precisely the same state of belief that Gothic authors, including Radcliffe, aim to cultivate in their readers. By withholding natural explanations for the terrors she describes, Radcliffe further affirms that the air of a seemingly supernatural encounter is no less real than the air of an unsettling encounter with something more straightforward, and proves, by extension, that the shiver we experience when reading Udolpho is no less real than any other kind.

By the time that Lewis returns, once again, to this image of the shivering reader, her own readers might find themselves in the position of the spectators in Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump: suddenly able to see, in the light of this two-headed history of science and letters, the air rising from the page to hold us in its thrall. When it comes to identifying the wider implications of the research that has cast this new light on literary atmosphere, however, Air’s Appearance is more suggestive than conclusive. For instance, though Lewis does not explicitly articulate the significance of the parallel she observes between the methods male scientists developed to explain the operations of the air and the anxieties swirling around the methods female readers developed to navigate similarly unseen social forces, the history she presents has exposed an important avenue for further research on how gender has shaped these debates. Likewise, though Air’s Appearance does not address itself to ecocritics, Lewis’s research on how the description of something seen only through its effects can acquire enough power to move a body certainly provides a useful model for writing about slow environmental catastrophe. Among the more surprising of these subtle suggestions arising from the book, furthermore, is the rebuttal Air’s Appearance offers to the rumored death of the humanities. At a moment when scholars across disciplines face a growing demand for objective standards to measure both the impact of their research and the outcome of enduring engagement with their primary sources, Lewis has leveraged studies in the history of science to demonstrate that the space scholars of literature invite students to inhabit while reading these old books is real and that the evidence we need to illustrate the effect of this reading is already in the air, as substantial as anything developed to maintain our belief in oxygen itself. If it is true, then, that the real influences of both air and writing are guaranteed by their effects on others, there is no need to worry about Lewis’s arguments disappearing into the aether: even without naming these political pressures, Air’s Appearance offers other scholars of literature the tools to explain how and why fictional worlds matter—and the words to make the effects of our work to illuminate those worlds more visible.

Morgan Vanek
University of Calgary


WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sandition. Ed. John Davie and James Kinsley. New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

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