Beyond Apology: A Spy Upon the Conjurer and Eliza Haywood’s Attack on Credulity

Sally Demarest

 

ELIZA HAYWOOD’S A Spy Upon the Conjurer: A Collection of Surprising Stories, with Names, Places, and particular Circumstances relating to Mr. Duncan Campbell, commonly known by the Name of the Deaf and Dumb Man; and the astonishing Penetration and Event of his Predictions (1724) is an epistolary text about Duncan Campbell, the famous “deaf and dumb” fortune-teller who lived and worked in London in the early eighteenth century.i The text’s fictional narrator, Justicia, says that she wants to convince her reader, an unnamed lord and friend of hers, that the real-life Campbell is legitimate—that he is not a fraud. The few scholars who have studied A Spy Upon the Conjurer have interpreted it as a hack publicity piece meant to support Campbell’s business and reputation, also suggesting that Haywood herself believed in Campbell as a fortune-teller who had second sight.ii As Felicity Nussbaum puts it, “Haywood’s attitude [towards Campbell] is largely one of respect, admiration, and celebration” (Limits 51). However, while Haywood’s narrator clearly admires Campbell, numerous rhetorical and narrative elements of the text suggest a distance between Haywood as author and Justicia as narrator—a distance that creates tension between Justicia’s claims about Campbell and what Haywood seems to suggest the reader should, in the end, believe about him. This tension invites readers to be skeptical of Justicia, a fictional, first-person narrator who fails to meet standard conventions of reliability, and this invitation ultimately shifts authority away from the dubious narrator onto the reader. This shift foregrounds problems of judgment by enlisting the reader to determine truth even as the text, which undermines the trustworthiness of both sensory perception and testimony, creates skepticism about one’s ability to do so. Critics have recognized the ambiguity and skepticism of supernatural narratives written by other writers such as Daniel Defoe; however, they have not recognized the same qualities in A Spy Upon the Conjurer.iii Nevertheless, attention to the text’s narrative authority (or lack thereof) and its portrayal of failed empiricism reveals that it moves beyond an apology for Campbell and, in fact, challenges the credulity upon which such a defense would depend. With this argument, I do not mean to deny that Haywood intended to use her narrative to make money by publicizing Duncan Campbell; as Patrick Spedding notes, there is evidence that Campbell may have sold copies from his house and even loaned them out to promote his reputation (141). However, such facts do not necessarily imply that Haywood believed in him, and, in fact, many aspects of the text suggest that perhaps she did not.

In this fictional narrative, Haywood uses Campbell as a case study to signify the limits of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century empiricism, which John Waller characterizes as “‘sensible evidence’ provided by credible witnesses” (24). Although members of the Royal Society who championed empiricism claimed to take an objective, skeptical approach to science, they were also concerned about the dangers of extreme skepticism that they thought might threaten not only natural philosophy but also religious belief and various types of knowledge making, including history. As a result, they, at times, defended credulous positions and attacked skeptical ones, especially regarding supernatural or preternatural concerns, such as witchcraft, apparitions, and second sight (Waller 30, Shapin 244). Haywood’s text about Campbell and his second sight challenges and even satirizes anti-skeptical writers, such as Joseph Glanvill, Richard Baxter, and, especially, William Bond, writers who privileged credulity over skepticism in their attempts preserve the legitimacy of empiricism and testimony. A Spy Upon the Conjurer’s response to these credulous texts places it firmly in the skeptical tradition of the Enlightenment—a tradition from which Haywood is typically excluded—and it shows that rather than being a straightforward advertisement for Campbell, Haywood’s text is a genre-bending work that satirizes anti-skeptical narratives while offering a significant contribution to eighteenth-century fictionality. Although Haywood’s skepticism might not reflect the extreme philosophical skepticism that rejects one’s ability to know anything at all, she does demonstrate extreme anxiety about the difficulty of determining truth as well as the real-life consequences of the failure to do. As a result, in A Spy Upon the Conjurer, she engages with and challenges traditional systems of knowledge making, and she migrates conventional epistemological questions and problems from male-centered dialogue about science and God to the realm of individuals’, and especially women’s, daily lives and relationships.

Haywood generally has not been included in studies about skeptical writers of the eighteenth century. In fact, such studies have focused primarily on male writers. Seminal studies by Michael McKeon, Eve Tavor Bannet, Fred Parker, and James Noggle, for example, focus on male writers. Some exceptions include books by William Donoghue, Christian Thorne, and Sarah Tindall Kareem, which include discussions of women writers. However, Donoghue’s study of skepticism and fiction does not mention Haywood, despite having a chapter titled, “Skepticism, Sensibility, and the Novel.” In Thorne’s study of skepticism in the Enlightenment, he gives significant attention to Aphra Behn’s drama but only briefly mentions women novelists. His discussion of Haywood (which spans just a couple of pages) characterizes her, along with Behn and Jane Barker, as an author of “anti-romances,” which he frames as “love stories that never get off the ground” and that “are the death-rattle of an aristocratic culture of courtly love” (270).iv Rather, it is Defoe’s Roxana, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy that receive the bulk of Thorne’s attention in his chapter called “Skepticism and the Novel.” More recently, Kareem, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder, has included Jane Austen and Mary Shelley alongside male writers such as Defoe, Hume, Fielding, Walpole, and Raspe, but Haywood goes unmentioned.

When skepticism in Haywood’s work is neglected, important elements of her texts are overlooked. In fact, King states in the epilogue to her political biography on Haywood that

insufficient attention has been paid to Haywood’s representation of lies, secrecy and hidden lives and to her imaginative attention to a cluster of Enlightenment themes: skepticism, credulity, collective delusion on the part of an easily infatuated public, the power of print to represent and misrepresent. (198)

Earla Wilputte is one of a few critics who have examined skepticism in Haywood’s work, especially in texts such as The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) and Dalinda; or The Double Marriage (1749).v However, Wilputte states that Haywood’s skepticism does not begin until the 1740’s with The Female Spectator (1744-1746), arguing that it develops in response to nine months of “broad-bottom” government (“‘Too ticklish’” 136). In contrast, I suggest that Haywood’s skepticism starts much earlier and that, with A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood is demonstrating a skeptical aesthetic and also engaging with the broader intellectual culture of the early eighteenth century.

Haywood’s book about Campbell is in direct conversation with the first book written about him, which was published in 1720 and written by William Bond (although it was formerly attributed to Defoe and, even as late as 2005, to Haywood).vi Bond also co-wrote The Plain Dealer with Aaron Hill, and, with Martha Fowke Sansom, who was part of Aaron Hill’s coterie, Bond co-wrote The Epistles of Clio and Strephon (1720) and The Epistles and Poems of Clio and Strephon (1729). In addition, Sansom wrote verses to Duncan Campbell that Bond included in the introduction to his “history” of the fortune-teller. This means that Bond likely would have had contact with Haywood through Sansom or Hill around 1720. However, by the time Haywood published her narrative about Duncan Campbell, she was estranged from the Hillarian Circle. To some degree, this timeline should lead us to consider more carefully implications or claims that, when Haywood published A Spy Upon the Conjurer, she and Campbell, not to mention she and Bond, were part of the same “literary set.”vii

Bond’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell serves as a biography of sorts, as well as an apology, for Campbell. Within the limited scholarship on the relationship between Bond’s and Haywood’s texts, Rebecca Bullard contrasts them, but rather than focusing on the tension between credulity and skepticism, she studies the texts’ different approaches to curiosity (171). Jason S. Farr considers the two texts together as part of what he calls “the Duncan Campbell Compendium,” but he focuses on the portrayal of deafness as natural and normal, commenting little on how either text features debates about credulity and skepticism, and he ultimately argues that Haywood builds on Bond’s earlier work and thinks her readers would be “enlightened” by it (72). Farr does not explore how Haywood’s text challenges Bond’s, and in terms of Campbell’s status and legitimacy, Farr does not make a clear distinction between the attitudes of the author (Haywood) and those of the narrator (Justicia).

Riccardo Capoferro does address skepticism in his discussion of Bond’s and Haywood’s texts, and he recognizes that, like apparition narratives, their texts “bridge the gap between empiricism and the beliefs it implicitly calls into question” (140). He also admits that A Spy Upon the Conjurer offers a “developed example of ontological hesitation,” but, oddly, he argues that it does not “directly engage with epistemological problems” but rather “presents itself as a form of pure entertainment.” He writes,

In most of these anecdotes, Duncan’s powers are described as a source of uncertainty for his customers, although they are ultimately verified. A shift from hesitation to certainty also informs the first chapter, in which the narrator herself stages her first encounter with Duncan.

Capoferro’s brief discussion of Haywood’s text ignores the ongoing challenges to Campbell’s legitimacy that thread throughout the work. He also conflates the narrator with the author and neglects to note Justicia’s questionable reliability or the fact that her designated reader, the unnamed lord, is a skeptic who doubts Campbell’s powers and who does not believe in the supernatural. Essentially, Capoferro overlooks or dismisses the “epistemological problems” that dominate A Spy Upon the Conjurer.

In texts about Campbell, epistemological questions about his second sight are compounded by his claims of deafness. Not only does Campbell claim to have knowledge that others with all five senses do not, but even his deafness cannot be proven through empirical methods such as “ocular demonstration” or experimentation. Among his contemporaries in London society, skeptics doubted not only whether he had second sight, but also whether he was actually deaf—neither of which they found easy to prove true or false. In A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Justicia recounts stories about people who tested Campbell’s deafness and muteness by performing tricks and “jests.” For example, Justicia recounts tales of doctors who mistreated Campbell in order to get a verbal reaction, assailants who attacked him in bars just to provoke him to speak, and a woman who smashed his fingers in a door in an effort to elicit cries of pain (140-150).viii

Debates about Campbell’s deafness have continued even into the twenty-first century. Nussbaum finds the evidence “compelling that Campbell was truly hearing-impaired though he may have had a modicum of hearing” (Limits 45), while Lennard J. Davis calls Campbell a “huckster who only pretended to be deaf and who made his money by duping people” (176n32). R. Conrad and Barbara C. Weiskrantz argue that Campbell could not have been totally deaf, despite stories that he never spoke—not even when he was drunk. Commenting on the memoir that Campbell allegedly wrote, they say,

It is hard to believe from the language that they are the unedited writing of a congenitally deaf man. Rather, they suggest a naïf or a charlatan. The memoirs contain no reference at all to deafness, but consists [sic] of a collection of essays on occult phenomena, together with testimonial letters from admirers. (329)

Conrad and Weiskrantz also point out that Campbell is said to have played the violin and to have tuned it “by putting the neck of the violin between his teeth,” which they say suggests that he possessed “bone conduction of sound” (329). Finally, they refer to him as the “despised Campbell” and claim that Campbell, despite his fame, inspired ridicule among his contemporaries. Certainly, Campbell was (and still is) a subject of debate. For my argument, however, what matters most is not whether Campbell was truly deaf, but rather the debate itself—and how A Spy Upon the Conjurer presents Campbell as a signifier for a variety of epistemological questions that seem impossible to answer.

Bond addresses many such epistemological questions in his history of Campbell, including not only questions about Campbell’s deafness and second sight, but also general questions related to apparitions, witchcraft, and other supernatural or preternatural mysteries. In fact, after a dedicatory epistle and the introductory verses by Sansom, Bond’s text begins with a story called “A Remarkable Passage of an Apparition. 1665.” Although the apparition story, which does not feature Campbell, might seem irrelevant to the history, for Bond, any story affirming the legitimacy of supernatural or preternatural events is support for his defense of Campbell. In Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740, McKeon specifically addresses the kind of supernatural episodes or “apparition narratives” that are included in and, in many ways, constitute Bond’s text, placing them firmly within the tensions that existed in the early eighteenth century between optimistic empiricism and more dubious skepticism that called all knowledge into question (83-89). The legitimacy of these apparition narratives relied heavily on the credibility of the original sources of the perceived experiences. In other words, the reliability of the tales greatly depended on who was doing the telling. Glanvill, writing about witchcraft in 1681, observes, “Now the credit of matters of Fact depends much upon the Relatours, who, if they cannot be deceived themselves nor supposed any ways interested to impose upon others, ought to be credited” (qtd. in McKeon 85). As a result of this dependency on the “relatours,” such narratives focus heavily on the authority and credibility of those who tell the stories about apparitions, genies, and witches. However, Glanvill is also claiming that, if there is no obvious reason to discredit the “Relatour,” then he ought to be trusted. As Steven Shapin points out, members of the early Royal Society sought “a golden mean between radical skepticism and naïve credulity” but they were “marginally more worried by illegitimate skepticism than by illegitimate credulity” (244). In general, Shapin says, gentleman were to be trusted unless they gave good reason not to be, and as Barbara Shapiro notes, until the eighteenth century, testimony of reliable witnesses was considered a form of superior evidence (28). Writers of these narratives therefore employed common conventions to establish credibility and fend off skeptics. As Jayne Elizabeth Lewis puts it, “In the interest of compelling readerly belief, apparition narratives made conscious efforts to verify the good character of living witnesses to the phenomena they described” (88).

Apparition narratives were still “ubiquitous in the 1720s” (Lewis 86), and Bond signals his text’s connection to this anti-skeptical tradition by incorporating apparition stories from Glanvill as well as Baxter, the latter of whom also wrote anti-skeptical texts, including one with the anti-skeptical (and formidable) title, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits and, Consequently, of the Immortality of Souls of the Malice and Misery of the Devils and the Damned : and of the Blessedness of the Justified, Fully Evinced by the Unquestionable Histories of Apparitions, Operations, Witchcrafts, Voices &c. / Written, as an Addition to Many Other Treatises for the Conviction of Sadduces and Infidels (1691). Like Glanvill and Baxter, Bond challenges the incredulous “free-thinkers” who doubt supernatural reports, suggesting they have no reason for skepticism other than their own native incredulity (80).ix He also uses rhetoric like Glanvill’s and Baxter’s to suggest that skepticism of reputable sources potentially undermines all knowledge. Anticipating naysayers who reject testimony about supernatural experiences, Bond writes, “In a word, if People will be led by Suspicions and remote Possibilities of Fraud and Contrivance of such Men, all Historical Truth shall be ended, when it consists not with a Man’s private Humour or Prejudice to admit it” (106). Bond’s text characterizes skepticism as a flawed personal disposition that threatens the collective enterprises of knowledge making and religious belief.

To establish his own credibility and support his claims about Campbell and other preternatural phenomena, Bond’s narrator regularly invokes the empirical evidence of sensory perception, as when, after his first apparition narrative, he writes,

These Things are true, and I know them to be so with as much certainty as Eyes and Ears can give me, and until I can be perswaded [sic] that my Senses do deceive me about their proper object and by that perswasion deprive my self of the strongest Inducement to believe the Christian Religion, I must as will assert, that these Things in this Paper are true. (31)

Throughout the text he cites case after case in which people have seen and heard—with “Eyes and Ears”—various spirits and apparitions. Bond’s emphasis on the reliability of his senses reflects a foundation of empiricism, but in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, there were also doubts about how trustworthy our senses really are. For example, even Robert Hooke, the curator of experiments for the Royal Society doubted the reliability of our natural, unaided senses. In the preface to Micrographia (1665), he expresses concern about the limitations of the senses, and he emphasizes the power of instruments—telescopes, microscopes, and other lenses—to rectify sensory failings. Margaret Cavendish challenged overreliance on the senses (as well as the use of instruments to enhance them), arguing that eyes and ears cannot show the “interior motions” of nature and its animals and objects, whether aided or not, and thus yield no “advantage” to man. She writes that “man is apt to judge according to what he, by his senses, perceives of the exterior parts of corporeal actions of objects, and not by their interior difference; and nature’s variety is beyond man’s sensitive perception” (115). Bond’s narrator, however, relies heavily on the trustworthiness of sensory perception in his defense of Campbell.

To enhance the credibility of his sensory evidence, Bond’s narrator, like those of apparition narratives, focuses on the sources of his evidence and tales, citing such specific and notable cases as those related by presumably authoritative and trustworthy relators, such as Socrates, Aristotle, King James, John Donne, and the Italian poet Tasso:

Men, who will not believe such Things as these, so well attested to us, and given us by such Authorities, because they did not see them themselves, nor any Thing of the like Nature, ought not only to deny the Demon of Socrates; but that there was such a Man as Socrates himself. They should not dispute the Genij of Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Marc Anthony; but avow, that there were never any such Men existing upon the Earth, and overthrow all credible History whatsoever. Mean while, all Men, but those who run such Lengths in their fantastical Incredulity, will from the Facts above-mentioned, rest satisfied, that there are such Things as Evil and Good Genij; and that Men have sometimes a Commerce with them by all their Senses, particularly those of Seeing and Hearing; and will not therefore be startled at the strange Fragments of Histories, which I am going to relate of our young Duncan Campbell . . . (101)

Bond suggests that if we cannot accept testimony or sensory perception as evidence, we can have no “history” or “Christian Religion” since history and religion are based on these foundations. At times, Bond seems almost to elide “testimony of experience” with experience itself. Writers of the apparition narratives considered testimony from respectable people to be as reliable as a scientific experiment or a report about the existence of another continent. Waller notes that Glanvill, for example, suggested that testimony about witches from a reliable source was no different from testimony provided by someone who had seen Robert Boyle’s air pump (28). Boyle himself supported Glanvill in his fight to prove witchcraft was real, writing to Glanvill in 1672 with a “detailed report of an alleged Irish witch whose powers he had personally verified.”x Waller also notes that Boyle “discoursed at length on the alleged phenomena of ‘second sight’ . . . .” Bond’s narrator, being of a similar mind to Glanvill, rejects and dismisses skeptical readers, saying that “free-thinkers” and “unbelieving Gentlemen” should just “lay down [his] Book” and not “read one Tittle further” (121).

Four years after Bond’s work, Haywood published A Spy Upon the Conjurer, and the narrator, Justicia, asserts the same biographical and apologetic purposes as Bond’s narrator does. However, Haywood effectively subverts the role of the authoritative and trustworthy gentleman “relator,” replacing him with an unreliable female narrator. Whereas Bond’s narrator presents himself as an authorized biographer who is writing to a wide audience, Haywood’s narrator Justicia, as Bullard points out, is an unauthorized “spy” whose epistolary argument is directed to an audience of one: her friend, an unnamed lord (174). Although Bond’s narrator consistently asserts authority and credibility, Haywood’s narrator regularly interjects details that will likely lead readers to question her authority and credibility. To some degree, this self-deprecating approach is common for Haywood, and scholars have argued about the authority of other Haywood narrators, such as her Female Spectator and Invisible Spy. xi However, in those texts, the narrators do, at times, assert and defend their own authority, and at times, their credibility is affirmed even by other voices. In contrast, Justicia’s only claim to authority is her intimacy with Campbell, and even that factor is subverted by her position as a “spy.” Ultimately, in A Spy Upon the Conjurer, neither Justicia nor anyone else vouches for her credibility; rather, they only question it.

Early in the text, Justicia herself suggests that one of her reasons for presenting her epistolary episodes to her reader is that she, as a woman, is not fit to judge:

As I communicate my Thoughts of this Affair only to one whose good Nature and Friendship I am secure of, I deal with that Confidence which I take to be the most distinguishable Testimony of Sincerity. However, as Custom, and the natural Austerity of your Sex denies to ours those Advantages of Education, which alone can make either capable of judging, I shall submit to the Opinion of those whose Learning renders their Sentiments more to be relied on, and should esteem it as a prodigious Obligation if your Lordship would, at some leisure Hour, favour me with a Line or two on this Head. (18)

Justicia argues that because she, like all women, is denied the “Advantages of Education,” and is, therefore, not truly “capable of judging,” she is sharing her testimony with the lord, so that he can offer a final judgment about Campbell. Justicia thus assigns herself a very different role from Bond’s narrator, who proudly claims, “I take upon myself a very great Task; I erect myself as it were into a kind of a Judge: I will sum up the Evidences of both sides; and I shall, wherever I see Occasion, intimate which Side of the Argument bears the most Weight with me” (260). Although he acknowledges that his readers will function as a “jury,” he, unlike Justicia, confidently accepts the role of judge, and he never offers evidence that would contradict his credibility. Although Justicia tells her reader she cannot fully function as judge, her name suggests she embodies judgment and justice, and this irony creates tension. As a result, Haywood’s readers—not her narrator—truly are invited to be the judges and jury of Justicia’s claims. Because of the questionable credibility of the narrator, and because of the second-person “you” to whom she speaks, the position of “reader as judge” is more authentic with Haywood than with Bond, giving Haywood’s text a more skeptical and literary turn.

At one point, Justicia does attempt to assure her skeptical reader, the unnamed lord, that he can trust her judgment. This assurance is complicated, however, by the fact that, in the past, he has accused her of bias, and by the earlier claims made by Justicia, herself, acknowledging that she does not always trust her own judgment. Nevertheless, Justicia says,

I hope your Lordship will not believe me guilty of the least Partiallity or Bigottry, (as you once told me) since I faithfully assure you, I neither have, nor will, in the Course of these Memoirs, avouch any thing without consulting my Judgment, and first answering within my self, all the Objections that can possibly be made against it. (41)

The last sentence of this passage suggests that Justicia is claiming a commitment to a kind methodical doubt that requires one to suspend final judgment until all doubts have been replaced by certainty. By making this statement, she demonstrates a keen awareness of the value of such doubt when trying to ascertain and report truth and when trying to be perceived as a trustworthy source. Her claim is seemingly undermined, however, when, just a few lines later, she challenges one of Campbell’s customers who expresses doubt about a prediction that Campbell has written down for her: “Why, Madam, said I, as soon as I had read [the prediction], should you question the Truth of what is here set down?” (42). With this challenge, Justicia suggests that the customer’s doubt about Campbell’s prediction is unreasonable. Justicia’s question seems like a strange one to ask of a woman who is approaching fortune-telling with what might be considered reasonable skepticism, especially after Justicia has just acknowledged the necessity for thoroughly doubting such claims and pursuing “all the objections” that could be made against those claims.

In fact, Justicia, too, once believed Campbell to be an impostor and “was ridiculing every Body who seem’d to speak favourably of him” (3). As a convert, however, she now expects others to believe that his gifts are real, based merely on the evidence of a prediction that is written on a piece of paper, and it is the people who doubt his words whom she finds to be “blinded,” suggesting it is they, rather than the deaf Campbell, who have flawed or limited perception. Justicia’s expectation for unquestioning belief suggests that she operates from a place of bias and that, as such, her analysis of evidence cannot fully be trusted. In the above passage, she admits that the unnamed lord has in the past accused her of “Partiallity or Bigottry,” a trait that still seems to be firmly in place.xii Justicia, then, is hypocritical. She claims to engage in sufficient doubt before assenting to a belief, yet the evidence of her narrative suggests that she does otherwise. Jenny Davidson has examined “hypocrisy’s usefulness as a central topos for defining and contesting narrative authority” (112). Although Davidson focuses primarily on moral hypocrisy rather than logical hypocrisy, Justicia’s fallacious double standard also functions as an indicator of her narrative authority, or lack thereof.

Justicia’s hypocrisy perpetuates as she consistently fails to practice a method of doubt. In fact, just a few pages after her claim that she will consider all “objections,” she contradicts herself—and also echoes Bond’s narrator—as she expresses scorn for those who are too skeptical:

I do not think any thing can be more provoking, than to hear People deny a known Truth, only because they cannot comprehend. Some fancy themselves very wise, in affecting to ridicule all Kinds of Fortune-telling, and tho’ they do happen (which I confess is a Wonder) to meet with one really skilful in the Art, yet because they cannot imagine by what Means he came to be so, are willing to run him down as the most ignorant of the Pretenders.—How should he know—and—how is it possible he can tell us? are Words commonly us’d, even by those who are convinc’d by Experience that he can. (44)

Like Bond’s narrator, Justicia privileges sensory experience and credulity over doubt, but unlike Bond’s narrator, she is an explicitly flawed relator. At one point, she is even chastised by Campbell himself for the poor judgment that runs in her family; he says they all are easily duped by flattery (130). His criticism of Justicia’s judgment and her lack of skepticism serve to compound the reader’s uncertainty about her credibility—and, therefore, about Campbell, too. If readers are to believe Justicia when she says that Campbell has great “penetration” of others, then readers should trust Campbell when he says that Justicia’s judgment is flawed. However, if readers trust Campbell that Justicia’s judgment is flawed, then maybe they should not trust her judgment about Campbell, which would imply that maybe Campbell should not be believed when he says that Justicia does not always reason well. In this circular consideration of credibility and credulity, the reliability of relators becomes like a snake swallowing its own tail (or “tale,” as the case may be), and although it is unclear who can be believed, themes about belief and judgment are unquestionably in play. It seems clear that, if the first-person narrator is unreliable, as she certainly seems to be, one must consider the possible satire at work in the text along with the likelihood that Haywood’s authorial purpose (and her attitude towards Campbell) should not be equated with Justicia’s narrative one.

Although Justicia does not have all of the qualities of the unreliable narrators found in later fiction, she does have the kind of questionable reliability one sees in other early eighteenth-century texts. Tracing the history of the unreliable narrator, Ansgar Nunning says that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) is “one of the earliest instances in British fiction of a full-fledged unreliable narrator” (57). However, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers, including Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, created narrators with dubious reliability who require evaluation by readers. For example, Karen Bloom Gevirtz points out that, in part three of Love-Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister, “Behn . . . [uses] the seemingly reliable narrator to explore how people deceive not only each other, but also themselves” (53). Although Behn’s narrative structure in Love-Letters (1684-1687) is much different from the consistent first-person point-of-view one finds in A Spy Upon the Conjurer, they share concerns about authority and self-deception.

Readers confront similar questions about narrative authority in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which, as Bannet argues, also invites judgment from the reader. Defoe’s reader

is invited to work with the agreement or disagreement between H.F.’s testimony and that of other witnesses, whom he also hears. [The reader] is required to use “diligence, attention, and exactness” in determining how far H.F.’s evaluation of the testimonies of witnesses is true to the reality of things and how far H.F. is himself a reliable witness; and he is asked to “proportion consent to the different probabilities.” (51)

Just as Defoe’s readers must evaluate H.F.’s testimony, Haywood’s readers must evaluate Justicia’s reasoning and determine if her testimony is “true to the reality of things.” With A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood creates a text that appears to be a biography like Bond’s, but by using the narrative strategies of fiction, she actually creates an account of Campbell that requires more active judgment from readers.

These rhetorical differences suggest that A Spy Upon the Conjurer is not merely a continuation of Bond’s credulous, Campbell-endorsing agenda but rather a skeptical challenge to the kind of credulity exhibited by his text. These differences also challenge assessments that deem Haywood’s central purpose to be unequivocal promotion of Campbell. King suggests, for example, that

A Spy Upon the Conjurer began as a piece of hack work, a kind of infomercial, if you will, intended to plug Duncan Campbell, a deaf-mute fortune-teller, quack doctor, and by the 1720s, member of Eliza Haywood’s literary set. . . . Haywood, in 1724 already a seasoned professional, set out, it would seem, to crank out a straightforward promotional piece—the plan apparently was to string together anecdotes testifying to the seerer’s [sic] wonderful gifts—but somewhere along the way she seems to have become interested in Campbell as a brother of the pen. (“Spying” 183)

Although I do not dispute that Haywood recognized the market value of her narrative or that she was interested in the written nature of Campbell’s fortunes, the fictionality and unreliability of her narrator suggests that she might have set out to write something more than a “straightforward promotional piece.” In addition, in King’s political biography of Haywood, which only gives a few sentences to A Spy Upon the Conjurer, she calls the text a “fascinating variant on the scandal chronicle” (Political 183). Although, to some extent, this is true—it does, like Haywood’s other scandal narratives, include references to various people in and out of her circle, especially Sansomxiii—the text is even more reflective of the conventions of biography and the apparition narrative, invoking those conventions in order to mock them, attacking credulity in order to privilege skepticism.

With this aesthetic, Haywood is not only satirizing credulous writers, but she is also engaging skeptical readers. Davis has suggested that readers (and writers) of the early eighteenth century had a difficult time making distinctions between fact and fiction (Factual 76-77). However, Kate Loveman argues otherwise, saying that readers recognized the differences and saw it as their job to avoid being duped and that the early eighteenth-century readers were both astute and eager to identify “shams” (2-3, 10-12). As Loveman explains, “There was a general agreement that a wary, enquiring disposition was a valuable asset in reading, and a necessary defence against error and deception” (34). Readers knew their roles as skeptics, but the proper rhetorical strategies or aesthetics needed to be in place in order for them to perform that role. In A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood not only employs the rhetorical strategies to elicit readerly skepticism, but her subject, a deaf fortune-teller, serves as a case study for the fear of being “duped.” The newspapers during the early 1700s often included stories about duplicitous individuals arrested for fraudulent fortune-telling, and Justicia, herself, even offers accounts of such frauds.xiv For example, she tells the tale of a man who goes from one money-grubbing fortune-teller to another “till his Money was all gone,” and she also discusses fortune-tellers who “deceive the ignorant Wretches that confide in them” (25, 126). Haywood also has other texts that caution readers against fortune-tellers. In Present for a Servant Maid (1743), for example, she warns servants to avoid the “wicked Designs” of these “Pretenders to Divination,” and in The Invisible Spy (1755), the narrator gives an account of a woman taken in by a fortune-teller, and at length, he criticizes these “impostors” and the “credulous part of mankind” who visit them. By focusing on a fortune-teller in A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood invites readers to put on an “enquiring disposition” and do their skeptical work.

Haywood’s focus on the stories of Campbell’s clients also expands the context of the conflict between skepticism and credulity. The male writers of apparition narratives and other anti-skeptical texts were concerned with threats to empiricism and religious belief. As a result, they typically focused on questions related to natural philosophy and God. Even their arguments about witches and apparitions were ultimately meant to support arguments about science and religious belief. As Jayne Elizabeth Lewis puts it,

Apparitions became the protagonists of a long line of hefty works that fixed matter-of-fact accounts of their manifestation within the frames of Protestant theology and natural philosophy, thereby working a perverse reconciliation between these two discourses on reality. (87)

In A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood invokes the conventional touchstones of empiricism—experience and perception—but her questions and concerns tend to focus more on people than on theology or natural philosophy. This text, like others by Haywood, highlights the fact that it is extremely difficult to gain knowledge about other people (and ourselves) even though such knowledge is necessary and can have significant consequences for our daily lives. When Haywood shifts the epistemological conversation to the topics of Campbell’s clients, who are mostly women, she inserts questions about relationships and women’s concerns into the epistemological conversations of the early eighteenth century. As Gevirtz argues, the epistemologies of the natural philosophy, or New Science, practiced by the Royal Society, “valorized the isolated individual (the man)” and, therefore, “the individual who could not or ought not exist as an isolated entity (the woman) was removed from the systems of knowledge production” (29). And as Judy A. Hayden puts it, “As science moved out of the household and into the universities and various institutions, an important avenue of access for women in this new knowledge began to close” (5). In A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood not only interrogates traditional methods of knowledge-making, but also, by focusing on household matters such as money as marriage, she challenges the closure around what counts as valuable knowledge.

The special significance of the epistemological power of fortune-telling also is addressed by Jennifer Locke in a study of Frances Burney’s Camilla, in which Locke notes that fortune-telling, in the eighteenth century, offered a potential way of knowing that “surpassed and went beyond scientific observation,” a way of knowing that was particularly valued by women (708). She says, “The majority of eighteenth-century texts advertised themselves as containing exotic, ancient, or occult knowledge that could provide information different from what was provided by conventional epistemologies.” In fact, one of the last letters in A Spy Upon the Conjurer is from someone asking Campbell about “Sir Isaac Newton’s System of Philosophy” and “how near it comes to Truth” (247). Campbell, who calls himself “a living practical System or Body of new Philosophy” (qtd. in Capoferro 138), claims to provide the occult or extra-scientific knowledge that is inaccessible to others without second sight— knowledge about the New Science itself, as well as knowledge about other people and their intentions that cannot be determined reliably through the five senses. As Locke points out, such knowledge would be of particular interest to women:

The strong connection between women and fortune-telling in the period can in part be explained by the relative unpredictability of women’s economic and social lives. Women’s futures were understood as difficult or even impossible to forecast and, therefore, were the most in need of an alternative form of projection. (705)

Campbell’s clients, who are mostly women, have questions about whom they will marry, whom they should marry, who is lying to them, and so on. They see deception all around them, and they recognize that their perceptions and experiences are often insufficient for discovering truth. They seek Campbell’s preternatural answers to these questions because appearances (and people) often are deceiving, and individual judgments often are biased. Through this context, Haywood makes clear the stakes of credulity, especially for women. By using the language of the New Science, she mocks naïve empiricism even as she assigns gravity to the problems of domestic deception.

Questions about other people prove to be as challenging to answer as questions about nature and God. In A Spy Upon the Conjurer, knowledge about people is thwarted not only by flawed perception and biased judgment, but also by the fact that other people are often willfully deceptive—a problem that pervades Haywood’s Campbell narrative as well as most of her other texts. Furthermore, for Haywood, deception can be almost impossible to penetrate, and often the person being deceived can only learn the truth when either the deceiver chooses to reveal him- or herself, or when the deceived person engages in deception of his or her own in order to gain or regain epistemic privilege. Readers find such to be the case in Fantomina (1725), in which, in order to penetrate the deceptions of Beauplaisir, Fantomina (or Lady — ) must, herself, become a deceiver. Deceptions expand to an even larger scale in Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) and The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), both of which feature not only extended tales of individual deception, but also central plots based on mass delusion that is nearly impossible to detect or overcome. The central plots of Anti-Pamela (1741) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) also turn on deception and the difficulty of discovering truth. Deception is even the first point of concern in A Present for the Servant Maid (1743), a “conduct manual” that warns about deception in the marketplace (as well fraudulent fortune-tellers). In fact, Haywood has few texts that do not involve people deceiving each other for their own personal gain.

A Spy Upon the Conjurer has a particularly noteworthy example of the difficulties of gaining knowledge about other people, and Justicia uses this example as a key piece of evidence in her argument for Campbell’s legitimacy. To that end, she spends significant time explaining an episode in which a fifteen-year-old young lady visits Campbell to find out “when she shou’d get a Husband” (88). Justicia gives a lengthy, entertaining account that includes the young woman’s first meeting with Campbell, along with accounts of subsequent information-gathering (“spying”), by which Justicia learns about the events as they unfold. Justicia has pursued information about the young woman because of both curiosity and her intent to defend Campbell, and in doing so, she learns that all has come to pass exactly as Campbell predicted it would. Specifically, the young woman got married but now is suing for a separation because her husband treats her poorly and because he behaved strangely in bed on their wedding night. In response to the suit, the husband agrees to divorce his young wife under one condition: that she never again associates with her previous suitor, Mr. E—d M—n. The husband then summons Mr. M—n to explain the binding agreement and to ridicule him, upon which action Mr. M—n becomes enraged and challenges the husband to a duel. At this moment, the husband reveals that he cannot fight in a duel because he is, in reality, a woman:

The Person challeng’d presently discovered herself to be a Woman, and consequently unfit for such an Encounter as the other demanded. — Having pluck’d off her Perriwig, all the Company knew her to be a Lady who had long been courted by Mr. E—d M—n; but the other’s Fortune being greater, had alienated his Affections to her: On which she had dress’d herself in Mens Clothes, and contriv’d this Strategem to disappoint his hopes. (93-94)

In short, a jilted woman has retaliated against the man who rejected her by posing as a man and stealing his preferred beloved. Justicia explains that no one begrudged the Lady for her cross-dressing trick and that all praised her for her “ingenuity.” Even the deceived young woman was grateful to this trickster rival who prevented her marriage to Mr. M—n, who was clearly a man of inconstant and selfish affections.

It is striking that, in this episode, the deceived woman finds the deception quite understandable and forgivable. However, even more striking is the magnitude of the deception and the degree to which the lady’s direct sensory impressions fail to sufficiently inform her of the real sex of her spouse and how that reality differs from appearances. Granted, one might imagine ways in which, during this time period, such a deception before marriage might be achieved, and the young woman does find her husband’s bedroom behavior to be “very different from what might be expected” (91). One should also grant that such cross-dressing disguises are a common plot device in Haywood’s texts and in other eighteenth-century fiction and, therefore, might be considered to be an ordinary and insignificant comedic turn in the plot.xv Nevertheless, in the context of the foregrounded questions that pervade this text—questions of belief, doubt, and the reliability of evidence—this incident suggests that our senses can be fooled even about what appears to be the simplest questions of reality, such as the sex of one’s lover. As Justicia herself acknowledges elsewhere in the text, “Things are frequently very different in Reality from what they appear to the World or sometimes even to their greatest Intimates” (44-45).

Although Bond’s narrator bases much of his defense of Campbell on sensory experience and testimony, anecdotes like the above demonstrate that Haywood’s text, despite Justicia’s credulity, recommends little trust in either. In Haywood’s narrative, Campbell is the only one who can truly distinguish between appearance and reality. The five senses of his customers are not sufficient for determining truth, a reality which challenges empiricism and implies that only by extra-sensory perception can truth be determined. However, since the legitimacy of Campbell’s extra-sensory perception remains in doubt, readers are left with no reliable method to gain knowledge or determine truth—even though Haywood puts them in the position to do so. In other words, Haywood’s skeptical aesthetic puts the readers in an authoritative position at the same time that she leads them to question their ability to exercise that authority. If Justicia has failed as an authority on Campbell (and she has), she also has demonstrated the difficulty of reaching a conclusion about the central question-at-issue, namely Campbell’s legitimacy, and while the question about Campbell, himself, might not seem particularly urgent, it is only the most explicit question in the text. Many other questions are equally difficult to answer, namely the questions asked by Campbell’s clients. The question about Campbell’s legitimacy, then, signifies, to some degree, all of the epistemological problems in the text.

Nussbaum writes that, “unquestionably, Campbell’s station as a hot commercial property motivated Haywood’s opportunistic desire to capitalize on the popular rage that made his conjectures marketable” (Limits 51). I agree that Haywood likely was capitalizing on the market potential of Campbell’s story—Lewis reports that apparition narratives were “cash cows for a prenovelistic publishing industry” (85)— but it is important not to overlook or negate the epistemological concerns of Haywood’s text, along with the degree to which it enters a pre-existing conversation begun by Bond and other anti-skeptical writers, thereby engaging with dominant concerns of Enlightenment intellectual culture. In A Spy Upon the Conjurer, Haywood demonstrates that truth is elusive at the same time that she charges her characters and her readers with epistemic responsibility and authority. This double bind of skepticism and responsibility leaves the text’s characters—and, necessarily, its readers—in crisis, and it demonstrates a central challenge of the modern individual: the problem of determining what is true.

With this argument about the genre and purpose of A Spy Upon the Conjurer, I do not mean to undermine other scholars’ claims about how the text addresses issues such as marginalization, deafness, and curiosity. In fact, by recognizing A Spy Upon the Conjurer as a woman writer’s fictional and skeptical challenge to anti-skeptical works typically penned by men, other readings of the text can become even more layered. When Justicia says to one of Campbell’s clients, who is holding a piece of paper with Campbell’s prediction on it, “Why, Madam, said I, as soon as I had read it, should you question the Truth of what is here set down?”, she is echoing the credulity that one finds in Bond’s text and in other apparition narratives. Haywood, however, gives the reader many potential answers to such a question, attacking credulity and privileging skepticism in its place and inviting readers to ask questions of her own text—and what she has “here set down”—ultimately placing interpretive authority in their hands.

Cuesta College

NOTES

i Campbell’s fortune telling is mentioned in 1709 by Richard Steele in The Tatler (No. 14) and in 1714 by Joseph Addison in The Spectator (No. 560). These texts, combined with Haywood’s Campbell text, suggest he practiced as early as 1709 and as late as the early 1720s.

ii See Nussbaum, Limits; Nussbaum, “Speechless”; King, “Spying”; and Farr, Queer Deformities.

iii Regarding Defoe, for example, Maximillian Novak has said, “Defoe knew a great a great deal about the supernatural and the occult. How much he actually gave credence to and how much he thought to be complete hokum is difficult to say” (11).

iv Thorne’s use of “anti-romance” here suggests that he does not mean “romance” in terms of literary genre, but rather he means “love” or “courtship.”

v See Wilputte, “Textual Architecture” and “Haywood’s Tabloid Journalism.”

vi For Defoe’s de-attribution and arguments for Bond as author, see Baine 137-80 and Furbank and Owen. Spedding accepts Baine’s attribution to Bond in his Bibliography (642). Other contemporary texts about Campbell include The Friendly Demon, which Spedding says is thought to be by Defoe (655). Spedding argues against attributing the Secret Memoirs to Defoe or to Haywood (as others have done) and argues that attribution to Campbell, himself, is more plausible (654-56). For the attribution of Bond’s book to Haywood, see Richetti’s introduction to The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (xxxvii).

vii See King, “Spying,” 183. For more details on the relationship and timeline of Bond, Sansom, and Haywood’s connections to Campbell, see Spedding 142-143.

viii Also see The Dumb Projector (1725), which focuses in large part on an extended “jest” (or test) of Campbell’s claims to second sight. Despite being different in tone from A Spy Upon the Conjurer, The Dumb Projector is still attributed to Haywood by Spedding 229-230.

ix For more on “free-thinkers,” see Hutton 208-25.

x In the late seventeenth century, belief in the actual presence of witches was becoming outdated, but even educated people generally acknowledged the reality of witchcraft because of biblical foundations for “pacts with the Devil.” However, most were skeptical about individual accounts of witches or apparitions (Waller 16-17; Amussen 154-155). By 1736, belief in witchcraft was considered “to be a vulgar notion bred of ignorance and credulity” (Davies 7).

xi For discussions about authority in The Female Spectator, see Shevelow 171; Powell 156, and King, Political, 111. For a discussion of authority in The Invisible Spy, see Froid.

xii “Partiallity” is a central concern in numerous Haywood texts, including The Female Spectator (1744-46) and The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), so its inclusion here is not incidental; rather, it marks the beginnings of a theme that carries throughout Haywood’s body of work.

xiii For a detailed discussion of Haywood’s attention to Martha Fowke Sansom in A Spy Upon the Conjurer, see Spedding 141-143.

xiv See, for example, The Flying Post; or, The Post Master, 28 February 1716, for an account of an imposter deaf and dumb fortune-teller who was “put in the House of Corrections at Nantwich, and can both speak and hear.” See also The Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 27 June 1724: “One Susana Howard of Windmill-Hill, a pretended Fortune-Teller was last Monday Night committed to Bridewell, by Colonel Mitchel, for defrauding a young married Woman of 10 s.”

xv For example, in A Spy Upon the Conjurer, there is one other cross-dressing deception, and Haywood’s Invisible Spy (1755) features an extended and comedic cross-dressing trick in which a young woman dresses as a man to save her friend from an undesirable marriage. For a more tragic episode of cross-dressing, see Haywood’s The Double Marriage: or, the Fatal Release (1726).

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The Deplorable Daniel Defoe: His Supposed Ignorance, Immorality, and Lack of Conscious Artistry

Maximillian E. Novak

Originally presented at the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Defoe Society, September 2017.

ON 13 FEBRUARY 1787, a member of the House of Lords quoted Daniel Defoe in a speech on matters pertaining to Scotland. Defoe’s History of the Union had just recently appeared in a new edition, and he seemed a likely person to quote for his expertise on the creation of sixteen peers from Scotland to sit in the House of Lords. But Lord Loughborough rose to warn the speaker that Defoe was not a “creditable” person to quote. He pointed to the passage in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad which had Defoe punished in the pillory for his actions and warned that Defoe’s reputation had been too damaged by Pope to be named as an authority on any subject (Whitehall Evening Post). Lord Loughborough’s reliance upon Pope as an arbiter of cultural capital and his ignorance about Defoe have to be viewed as fairly symptomatic of this particular date. A few years later, in 1790, matters had begun to change. George Chalmers was to publish his biography of Defoe, the elegant edition of Robinson Crusoe with illustrations by Thomas Stothard appeared, and another Crusoe edition with Defoe’s True-Born Englishman along with his tract on the Original Power of the people as the source of government was also published. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Defoe had already been established as an important writer of fiction. Indeed, as the new century began rejecting many aspects of the previous period, including its often low estimate of narrative fiction, Defoe began emerging as a significant literary and intellectual figure of that era. That this was, in fact, a re-emergence—a return to the reputation he had enjoyed during the early eighteenth century—seems on occasions to have been forgotten. It is the peculiar nature of that forgetting that I want to discuss.

For example, very recently Ashley Marshall has interpreted the hiatus in Defoe’s reputation as an indication that he had no reputation to salvage. Swift, Pope, and Gay, the leaders of the Scriblerian Club appeared to regard Defoe with contempt. Should they not have had a better grasp of the true literary standing of one of their contemporaries than many of the critics of the past two centuries (Marshall, “Fabricating Defoes”)? Is not this reputation of Defoe something intangible, something made up? In a later essay that points out the lack of external evidence in establishing the Defoe canon, she goes so far as to say that the very idea of Daniel Defoe, the author, is a myth. The corpus of works ascribed to him by modern bibliographers cannot truly be ascribed to him with any certainty (Marshall, “Beyond Furbank and Owens” 131-190).

I.

Marshall’s argument follows only a slightly different path from that laid out by a series of journal articles that appeared in 1864. The writer of those essays on Defoe, published in a journal with the all-inclusive title, The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science, asked why Defoe appears to have had no real recognition from his contemporaries. Why did not Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele treasure his company? Like him, they were Whigs. Would they not have enjoyed sitting around with Defoe for a hearty discussion of politics? The solution for this writer was dependent on a series of letters that revealed Defoe as a government spy, running a variety of newspapers to undercut the publication of ideas that the government preferred not to have aired. In these letters to Charles de la Faye, Defoe explained how, no matter how much he might try, he would occasionally be unable to prevent Jacobite sympathizers such as Nathaniel Mist from publishing seditious material in their journals (Letters 450-61). To the writer for The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science in 1864, they threw light on his character in general: “How much credit is to be attached to the statements of a writer in his other works against his political and religious opponents, when he could thus prostitute his honour and his talents, we need not insist.” At a time when poverty was considered something like a crime, the notion that Defoe may have died penniless in a “sponging house” only added to his immoral nature. It must have been this unsavory reputation that forced the great writers of the time—Swift, Pope, and Addison—to shun him. They were the writers who carried the burden of morality during this period. Defoe had his strong defender in his biographer, William Lee, but William Minto, the author of a study of Defoe published in 1879, summed up his survey of Defoe’s character in the line stating that Defoe was the “greatest liar that ever lived” (Daniel Defoe 169).i The image of Defoe as a saintly guardian of Whig principles, that had been in place since 1753, when Robert Shiels contributed his biography to Theophilus Cibber’s Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, was more or less shattered.

If Defoe’s character and career as a writer on politics was under attack toward the end of the nineteenth century, there were also those who disparaged his standing as a writer. Most critics (Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt excepted) considered Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana to be the kind of works that should never be read by younger readers and hence unacceptable. Sir Walter Scott thought them “a coarse species of amusement…justly rejected” by the refined taste of the nineteenth century, and that opinion governed most of the criticism during the remainder of this period (Scott 166). This kind of attitude was perhaps most vehemently stated in 1879, when Anthony Trollope argued that Roxana was completely vile with no redeeming features (24-43).

But the critic who provided the template for much of the subsequent negative criticism of Defoe’s fiction was unquestionably Leslie Stephen. His essay, “De Foe’s Novels,” which first appeared in 1868 in The Cornhill Magazine, was subsequently republished in Stephen’s three-volume Hours in a Library (1874-79), an influential work that was frequently reprinted in Britain and the United States into the twentieth century. Stephen maintained that Defoe’s supposed realism, highly praised by Sir Walter Scott, Laetetia Barbauld, and Charles Lamb as making Robinson Crusoe unique—a masterful work of fiction—could not be placed alongside the realists of contemporary European fiction such as Honoré de Balzac. Defoe’s “realism” was merely a bundle of tricks: “…he had the most marvelous power ever known of giving verisimilitude to his fictions; or, in other words again, he had the most amazing talent on record for telling lies” (Hours 1:2-6). Stephen returned to his consideration of Defoe’s realism in his essay on Balzac, also reproduced in his Hours in a Library. Whereas Balzac had a program for depicting the social and economic problems of the modern world, Defoe would merely throw in a few insignificant details to trick the reader into believing he/she was experiencing a real world. Stephen admitted that Balzac occasionally resorted to the kind of “tricks” that Defoe used to create a sense of the real, but his fiction was saved by a subtle creation of character and understanding of psychology (Hours 3: 186-8, 190). As for creating a sense of the real, whereas Scott had compared Defoe to the realist painters of Holland’s Golden Age, Stephen refused to accept this judgment. The comparison to the Dutch realists might apply well enough to Balzac, but Defoe was a mere sign painter for some commercial enterprise. On the other hand, characterization in Defoe’s novels, as Stephen had explained in his essay on Defoe, amounted to nothing more than Defoe asking himself what he would do if he were in that situation. His characters were no more than so many Defoe’s. His female characters, Moll and Roxana, had nothing truly feminine about them. They were men—versions of Defoe—in skirts. There was no psychology and no “sentiment.” He admitted that Defoe’s realist technique worked well enough for A Journal of the Plague Year, and confessed that Roxana had a certain interest, but he wondered if these successes were not achieved “unconsciously.” As for Robinson Crusoe, it was for boys not men. It was without intellectual interest or psychological insight. While it has the freshness of a first novel, it provided merely “a low form of amusement” (Hours 1:57).

Stephen’s argument helped to establish the notion of Defoe as a writer lacking in subtlety and skill. And the notion of “unconscious artistry” had a unique appeal to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He transferred the notion of Defoe as a liar in matters of politics, from the revelation provided by the discovery of Defoe’s letters to De la Faye, as a bridge to the idea of Defoe as a dishonest writer, no true artist. Why Stephen should have attacked Defoe in this manner is not at all clear. He could be relatively generous to Bulwer Lytton, whose works, as he argued, never rise beyond a certain mediocrity. Even his biographer expressed some wonder at his inability to appreciate Roxana (Annan 274). Admittedly as a writer on the eighteenth century, with his notion of an established hierarchy of writers such as Swift, Pope, and Johnson or thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Mandeville, Stephen may have found Defoe difficult to place. He classified him as a mere “journalist,” without any original ideas. But perhaps the main reason for his attitudes was his distaste for commerce and business revealed in his omissions in the Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen seemed to believe that Defoe’s business interests had to disqualify him from any claims to artistry. This class snobbery, ignored by the essayist of 1864 and Ashley Marshall, provides an excellent explanation for many of the attitudes toward Defoe. Even Samuel Johnson, who praised Defoe, prefaced his comments to Boswell with the caveat that Defoe had been a “tradesman” (3: 267-8).ii

How influential Stephen’s essay has been may be discovered in certain formulas that descended to twentieth-century critics. For example, Defoe’s “unconscious artistry” became a classic concept in Defoe criticism. But another concept—Stephen’s notion of an evolutionary theory of the novel as a form that became progressively better— is apparent in one particular passage:

He had nothing to do with sentiment or psychology, these elements of interest came in with Richardson and Fielding; he was simply trying to tell a true story and leaving his readers to feel what they pleased. It never even occurred to him, more than it occurs to the ordinary reporter, to analyse character or describe scenery or work up sentiment. He was simply a narrator of plain facts. (1:40)

Like Stephen, Ian Watt was to take Stephen’s trilogy of authors and assign to them his three realisms: Defoe, formal (or circumstantial); Richardson, psychological; and Fielding, the reality of assessment. I will deal with Ian Watt later in my more or less chronological survey of Defoe criticism, but I wanted to note how pervasive were Stephen’s judgments.

Not surprisingly, the followers of Henry James, who became a major force in establishing rules for writing fiction after his death, tended not to like Defoe. He found a few defenders among Marxist critics such as Ralph Fox and Arnold Kettle (Fox 36-39; Kettle 1: 55-62). James Joyce gave an admiring lecture that unfortunately was not published until long after his death. And members of the Bloomsbury group, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, praised him without having recourse to theories of unconscious art, Woolf expressing admiration for Robinson Crusoe and Roxana, and Forster choosing Moll Flanders for analysis of the nature of character in his Aspects of the Novel. Forster contrasted Moll favorably with Scott’s insipid characters and Dickens’s heavily moralized ones (59-62.).iii But F.R. Leavis relegated Defoe’s fiction to a footnote in which he said that anything necessary to say about Defoe had been said by Leslie Stephen (2).

This brings me up to my entry into the study of Defoe. As a graduate student, I read Ian Watt’s wonderful essay, “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth.” I found it brilliant and suggestive. The range of Watt’s discussion—from J-J. Rousseau to Max Weber—opened up a world of possibilities, and I began my study of Defoe under its influence. But I immediately saw a problem. Although I admired the richness of Watt’s allusions to the many important writers who had been influenced by Robinson Crusoe, I did not see an equal abundance of references to Defoe’s contemporaries. Surely, I thought, if Defoe wrote on the economic problems of his time, what he had to say should provide some clues to his fiction. Although I could certainly perceive that there were times when Defoe was not writing or thinking at his best, for the most part, I found that I was encountering a writer with an extraordinary mind drawing upon a wealth of experience and knowledge. He also appeared to have an inexhaustible ability to present ideas in a fresh manner and in a wide variety of styles. I ascribed the criticism of his gifts to the disagreements of party politics and to a degree of snobbery. His father was a tradesman, and he had engaged in trade; he had not gone to either of the universities and did not have an extensive knowledge of the classics and their languages. Yet between the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1714, he was a major literary figure, challenged mainly by the emergence of The Tatler and The Spectator, the journals of Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison.

II.

This was before the publication of The Rise of the Novel in 1957. Ian Watt had been influenced by Marxist critics, by Leavis, and by the New Criticism. He argued for realism as the key to the novel and placed Defoe, the master of “formal” or circumstantial realism, as the crucial instigator of the realist novel. With his brilliant analysis of the social conditions that favored the development of the novel and its audience, Watt raised Defoe’s reputation as a writer of fiction, but at a time when the New Critics had made irony into one of the keys to careful artistry, he saw Defoe as incapable of sustained irony. He chose not to deal with Roxana, in which the protagonist describes herself as apt to be satirical and in which irony is a major trope, but in treating Moll Flanders, Watt, like Leslie Stephen before him, argued that anything resembling irony in Defoe’s fiction had to be “unconscious” (Rise 127).iv For Watt, Defoe was a writer who worked in broad strokes; no one as careless as Defoe could be discussed in terms of art or “irony” as that term was used by him in line with the New Critics. Besides, Watt was intent on creating a system of realisms, more or less along the lines of Leslie Stephen. Minor contradictions had to be ignored.

It seemed to me that Watt had fallen into the same trap of the many thinkers who have used Robinson Crusoe and have never given much consideration to what Defoe might have thought of his original Robinsonade. Karl Marx used it for establishing part of his system and for demonstrating his labor theory of value, just as the followers of Wittgenstein used it to discuss the notion of private language. And before that, J-J. Rousseau had used it as a point of reference for his theories of education and isolation. But just because these later thinkers adapted Robinson Crusoe to their own systems, that did not mean that Defoe did not have his own thoughts about government, economics, and society and that these thoughts were important for understanding his fictions.

In trying to see the ideas in Defoe’s fictions in terms of his writings. I had the benefit of not having to be overly concerned about the systems of later writers. Reading Defoe’s ideas against the important thinkers of the seventeenth century—Hugo Grotius, Sanuel Pufendorf, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke—as well as against the growing number of economic theorists such as Sir William Petty, John Cary, and Nicholas Barbon, I found sufficient material to elucidate many of the ideas that he brought to play throughout his fictions. As for Robinson Crusoe, Arthur W. Secord may have been right in suggesting that Defoe may not have had a full plan of what he was going to do from the beginning, but once he had his protagonist shipwrecked on his island, we would have to think that Defoe suffered a severe case of amnesia if he did not understand most of the possibilities inherent in his tale (21-111).v For example, in his discussion of Louis Althusser, Warren Montag raised the possibility of a resemblance between the isolated Crusoe and René Descartes’s Meditations, an idea more fully developed by Jacques Derrida in his notion of a “Cartesian Crusoe” or that the cogito ergo sum is a hyperbolic Robinsonade (Montag 108-109; Derrida 33).

Hence, before his death, Jacques Derrida devoted a volume to a consideration of various aspects of isolation and sovereignty. Using Robinson Crusoe as his basic text, he felt it necessary to let his readers understand that under no circumstances was Defoe capable of a comparable complexity of thought of the kind that he sometimes brought to his various speculations. And indeed, it is difficult to know what Defoe would have made of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose writings take up a considerable part of Derrida’s speculations in this volume. On the other hand, when he comes to consider Crusoe’s parrot and the invention of a wheel for use in making his pots, Derrida is not so sure that Defoe was entirely unaware of certain connections.

Finally, everything I am placing in relation in these texts would indeed be the effect of an unwarranted artifice, of a bad artifice, of a bad anachronism, if it were claiming, which I am not, that all these compositional artifices (for example, the contiguity of the story of the parrot and the wheel) were deliberately, intentionally calculated by Defoe. I am not sure and I do not claim that they are not, but I’m not sure that they are, and that they would be legible, as such, in his time and by Defoe himself. The possibility of this composition refers to something other than pure insignificant chance.

Derrida wrestles with this problem, allowing something to “fantasy” or the creative powers of what he calls this “fiction of an autobiography (88).

Derrida acknowledges that Defoe knew the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and gives considerable space to Crusoe’s imagining himself as the ruler of his kingdom of animals. It might be worth considering this passage for a moment:

It would have made a Stoick smile to have seen, me and my little Family sit down to Dinner; there was my Majesty the Prince and lord of the whole island; I had the Lives of all my Subjects at my absolute Command. I could hang, draw, give Liberty, and take it away, and No Rebels among all my Subjects.
Then to see how like a King I din’d too all alone, attended by my Servants, Poll, as if he had been my Favourite, was the only Person permitted to talk to me My Dog who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no Species to multiply his Kind upon, sat always at my Right Hand, and two Cats, one on one Side the Table, and one on the other, expecting now and then a Bit from my hand, as a Mark of special Favour (175).

The beginning alludes to his living close to nature with the kind of animal skins that were sometimes part of illustrations depicting the followers of stoicism. It suggests, with some irony, that the frugality forced upon him by his island life has an element of choice and introduces us to the image of Crusoe the philosopher. And irony pervades the entire notion of what is presented as a formal dinner with a “Family” rather than the primitive meal of a castaway and his pets. But the move to depicting the court of an absolute monarch ruling without opposition provides a more direct political irony. Ruling over these animals, who are dependent upon him for their food, he has no reason to fear the kind of rebellion that would have to make the life of a similar monarch in Europe perennially uncomfortable. The rebellions that broke out at the end of the eighteenth century in the American colonies and France were always a possibility for a Defoe who hated absolute rule and whose youth was shaped by the period that saw the end of Parliament’s revolt against Charles I.

The picture of a monarch conjured up by Crusoe, with its psychological isolation, is a reflection of the literal isolation that Crusoe knows about only too well. Poll is his only confidant. But all the language that Poll is capable of speaking has been taught to him by Crusoe to relieve his loneliness. Thus Crusoe, like a typical tyrant, listens only to himself, becoming more isolated the more he listens to Poll. His dog also seems somewhat like a reflection of himself. Like Crusoe, he too has found no mate. Has Crusoe also become slightly “crazy”? His two cats, who serve as his subjects in the extended metaphor, are entirely dependent upon his whims, though we know that they had managed to breed and bother Crusoe with a plague of cats.

Crusoe offers this as a comic picture of the court of a tyrant, a figure all too common in Defoe’s Europe. Indeed, Defoe had written a poem, Jure Divino, in twelve books on the subject of tyranny. He allows Crusoe to think of his imaginary political situation within his actual situation. There is no complicated history of tyranny as it had developed throughout the world, no theorizing on the psychology of tyrants as in Jure Divino, but in two relatively short paragraphs, which involve Crusoe’s self-mockery, there is a critique of Old World monarchy. Crusoe is not entirely removed from this critique. He thinks of the island as his possession, perhaps because he feels that he has possessed it with his labor. He has no real “Favourite” to whisper in his ears, but he regards whatever is on the island in terms of ownership, and whoever comes to the island as his subject. The point is: if Defoe did not have as complex a mind as Derrida, he was fully invested in the possible meaning of this passage. He was writing fiction, not a polemic, but writers such as Leslie Stephen, who failed to see any intellectual content in Robinson Crusoe, and Anthony Trollope, who considered it to be a literary “accident,” were dead wrong in their criticism.

III.

How did this underappreciation of Defoe get its start? During the 1690s, Defoe appears to have become a much appreciated laborer in the propaganda machine set up by the Earl of Dorset to defend William III. When his True-Born Englishman appeared at the end of 1700, it caused a considerable stir. The writer seemed to hold political principles associated with the Whigs, but also what appeared to be a streak of radical egalitarianism and a seeming contempt for Parliament. It brought out a rash of replies. Yet it was not until he allowed himself to be known in works identified as being “by the author of The True-Born Englishman” that his character as a writer emerged. And this was after he had been imprisoned and pilloried following the publication of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters in 1702, a work which earned him the undying hatred of those aligned with the High Church faction of the Church of England, among whom Jonathan Swift was to be a leading spokesman.

Defoe was a Dissenter, and hence, unlike most of the respectable writers of the time, he had not gone to one of the major universities. Yet from the time he exited prison in 1704 and started his Review, a journal dedicated to treating politics, history, and economic life, until 1710, when Richard Steele and Joseph Addison started The Tatler, Defoe dominated British literary life with a myriad of pamphlets, poems, and books on a wide variety of subjects. He used his Review to debate Charles Leslie, a Jacobite leaning journalist, on the nature of government. He wrote poetic encomiums on the various victories of the English forces over the French; he went north to Scotland to report on the Union between the two nations. And then, to the consternation of many, he supported the Tory government of Robert Harley as well as the peace treaty with France and the Commercial Treaty that accompanied it. By this time almost no one had anything good to say about him. In 1713, the Whigs attempted to have him arrested for being the author of three pamphlets which took up an ironic attitude toward the coming change of government. Although the irony could not have pleased the Tories, Harley managed a pardon from the Queen. From that time forward, this incident was used to depict Defoe as a Jacobite sympathizer whose pardon had been arranged through extra-legal means.vi After 1714, when George I assumed the throne after the death of Queen Anne, Defoe was considered a traitor by the Whigs and distrusted by the Tories. And subsequently, after 1715, he went undercover working for the Whig government as a spy on the anti-government newspapers.

But should not readers have recognized his talents? Should they not have suspected that he was the author of the many books he produced during the last fifteen years of his life? Publishers were apparently eager to have his works, but not his name on title pages. As mentioned previously, in 1718 George Read revealed Defoe’s role in Nathaniel Mist’s Weekly Journal, a publication which frequently verged on the Jacobite side of Tory politics. Small wonder that, on the erroneous news of his death, several poems depicted him as a Satanic figure in British politics being welcomed into Hell by the Devil himself. Charles Gildon’s attack on Defoe as the author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequel, The Farther Adventures, did not appear to make those works less popular, but surely publishers were not eager to involve themselves in scandal. In the end, readers were probably content to accept the notion that Crusoe was not, as the title page had it, “written by himself.” Did they suspect that Defoe was the real author of Moll Flanders or Roxanna? Some probably did. But Defoe had forfeited the advantages gained by attaching an author’s name to a work. As the “Author of the True-Born Englishman and as the “Author of the Review,” Defoe had achieved considerable fame, sufficient fame, in fact, that by 1709, he was using it less and less on title pages, even in works such as The History of the Union (1709) and The Present State of the Parties (1712), the first of which has his name in dedications, the second of which has autobiographical material that ties it clearly as being by Defoe. In 1713, he identified Some Thoughts upon the Subject of Commerce with France as by the “Author of the Review,” but such identifications were becoming rare. For the most part, his writings after 1715 had to be rediscovered by scholars who recognized the way he approached his subjects, his interests, his style, and his reliance upon a few publishers.

But “rediscovered” is certainly the proper word. Of course Defoe had made sufficient enemies among the Tories and the High Church during his early years as a writer; indeed, writers such as Joseph Browne made a living by composing pamphlets against Defoe. But among those who were willing to accept a writer who was a Dissenter, and a Court Whig with some radical ideas, he was often the recipient of reluctant praise. For example, the author of The Diverting Post in 1705 acknowledged his “Wit” in the midst of an attack. Despite his feeling that Defoe had stolen the “Scandal Club,” a feature of Defoe’s journal, the Review, from his Athenian Mercury, John Dunton described him as “a very ingenious Useful Writer.” Dunton noted that Defoe was a “Master of the English Tongue,” that his “Thoughts upon any Subject are always Surprizing, New and Singular,” and that his True-Born Englishman was an important work (Dunton, Whipping Post 88-90; Life and Errors, 239-40). Charles Lesley thought highly enough of him to debate the nature of government with him in their respective journals. And another critic acknowledged his ability to “tell a story,” but couched this praise in a way that made such a talent seem relatively trivial.

Nevertheless, among those such as Swift who held opposing political, social, and religious views, Defoe, along with his fellow journalist John Tutchin, was an “illiterate Scribbler” (3:15).vii It is notable that, at the time, compared with Defoe, Swift would have been a relatively unknown writer. Indeed, in the numerous attacks upon him, Defoe’s popularity as a writer was held against him.viii Defoe seemed to have a special dislike of Sir Richard Steele. Since he was essentially a Court Whig rather than a supporter of the Whigs as a party, writers such as John Oldmixon, who stood with the Whigs under all circumstances, detested him. Writing at considerable length on Defoe in his history of the reigns from William III to George I, Oldmixon described how Defoe’s “Venomous Libels” roiled the nation and how he became a “Tool” of the Tories, working on behalf of the awful Commercial Treaty (History 301, 509-10, 518).

What is noteworthy, however, is that when he traveled to Presbyterian Scotland at the time of the Union, he was received as a famous writer. He was invited to the houses of the nobility and asked to help with various committees involved in working out problems with the Treaty. As Pat Rogers noted, the list of noblemen before Defoe’s poem Caledonia (Edinburgh, 1706) was at least equal to that of some of the poems of Alexander Pope (Rogers 102-103; Novak, Daniel Defoe 307). When Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, with whom Defoe became acquainted during the time of the Union, was sending his son to London, he urged him to read some of Defoe’s poems and prose for their arguments about politics. Through such reading, he assured his son, he would understand the workings of the English political system (Clerk, 17 February 1707; 22 February 1707).ix In his Memoirs, Clerk, even after he knew that Defoe had been a spy acting on behalf of the British government, maintained that everything in Defoe’s History of the Union, an account of what went on during the Union agreement, was accurate (64).

And if Defoe became an undercover agent after 1715, the notion that he died in poverty—an important crux for nineteenth-century biographers—was certainly not true. Oldmixon complained that Defoe was given a thousand pounds by Robert Harley, but, in fact, during the days in which he was working as a spy in relationship with the Treaty of the Union, he was receiving over twelve hundred pounds a year.x When the young poet and teacher of the deaf, Henry Baker, came to visit Defoe and his family in Stoke Newington, he described a scene of upper middle-class prosperity. To Baker, Defoe was someone who had apparently enriched himself through his writings (Novak, Daniel Defoe 648-9). If Defoe refused to pay a creditor who was pursuing him during his last years, that did not mean that he or his family were impoverished.

IV.

It should be noted that Defoe was not a writer of the kind of polite literature, replete with classical allusions, that brought with it contemporary literary fame. A satire such as The True-Born Englishman was witty and merciless in destroying a simplistic xenophobia that was being expressed against the Dutch and William III. It had no pretension to politeness, even though it may have been the most popular poem of the century. He wrote some remarkable prose fiction. None of it was what Trollope called an “accident,” but only the first two volumes of Robinson Crusoe achieved world-wide prominence over the next two centuries. Thanks to Charles Gildon, Defoe was known by his contemporary readers to be the author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. If these volumes, translated into numerous European languages brought a sudden influx of visitors to Defoe’s house in Stoke Newington, we have no knowledge of anything like that happening. Until the end of the eighteenth century, these volumes, along with a third volume of essays, Serious Reflections, continued to be identified as being by Robinson Crusoe himself. As mentioned previously, Defoe was still working for the government as a spy upon opposition newspapers. It is doubtful that he would have welcomed more publicity than Gildon had already given him.

What of Defoe’s other works of fiction? A contemporary poem has the servants reading some of these works but does not identify any of them with Daniel Defoe, the notorious political agent and writer. And why should they? Prose fiction was hardly regarded as a refined literary form at the time. Only Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote had world-wide acclaim. Mateo Alemán’s widely read and imitated Guzman de Alfarache, the model for most picaresque literature, was usually identified with the name of its protagonist, Guzman, rather than its author. But for the most part, prose fiction, usually in the form of what we would think of as the novella, was not considered an important literary form. Robinson Crusoe, with its depiction of voyaging, exotic island existence and isolation, struck a nerve in eighteenth-century sensibility. The impact of Moll Flanders and, say, Roxana, was less spectacular. The first was essentially a female version of the picaresque, the second employed the form of the fictional memoir that had been exploited by Gatien Courtilz de Sandras. Both of Defoe’s novels were frequently reprinted, but they were not regarded as examples of “high” literature until Defoe, the “genius” who had written Robinson Crusoe, had emerged from biographical obscurity, in 1790 with George Chalmers’ study of Defoe and list of works written by him. Nevertheless these works were considered as too “low” in their treatment of sexual matters and in the social worlds they depicted. Sir Walter Scott treated Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year as an example of his realism but mentioned the others only to dismiss them for their “low” subject matter. It was only when the French realists introduced sex into what were considered artistically respectable novels that the other fictions by Defoe might be examined with less concern for morality. It was at that point that critics began perceiving just how good these works were.

As we have seen, John Dunton praised Defoe for the originality and variety of ideas that appeared in every work. Given his talent as a writer of fiction, it is hardly surprising that what emerged were works rich in character and vivid in their accounts of the environments in which these characters moved. W.H. Davies, who knew something of the life of tramps and thieves, found every word true (ix-xiii). Moll struggles between a life she has experienced and an older, more penitential self, that regards these adventures with a mixture of regret and admiration. The technique was fairly common in picaresque fiction, but there was something about Moll—her persistent innocence in the midst of her occasional cynicism—that made her one of the great creations of prose fiction.

We do not like Roxana half so well as Moll Flanders.xi With Moll, we are never certain whether she is the victim or merely less experienced than her victimizer. We sympathize with her as a girl born into poverty. Roxana is a courtesan. We may feel with Amy that, when it comes to Amy’s doctrine of choosing to live or choosing to starve, Roxana protests somewhat too much. Besides, hers is an account of life among the upper middle orders and the aristocracy. She has more sensibility—is more neurotic—than Moll, but she is also more scheming. She keeps a watch over her first husband to make sure he does not do her harm. Her quest to become the mistress of a monarch is certainly interesting, but it is also calculating. Jonathan Lamb found her character incoherent (167). I find it complex. He was working with a character somewhat like the protagonist of Courtilz de Sandras’ Memoirs de Madame de Fresne, but whereas that work tended to dissolve into an account of various characters throughout the Mediterranean world, Defoe imagines an extraordinarily layered character, fearful, haunted by her imagination, hard as nails on occasions.xii We never doubt that we are dealing with a single self, but it is one that has never managed to resolve her own contradictions.

Moll Flanders became an often reprinted chap book, shortened into a tale of a wronged woman who overcomes a harsh environment that would destroy her. Roxana, about a woman who moves in high society, was reprinted and translated frequently enough during the eighteenth century. In one German translation, the ending was edited out, and we see her living happily ever after as a countess. Readers of fiction apparently knew it well enough so that the illustration for her dance in a “Turkish” costume was identified as one of the high points of the novel as that of the “Lady Roxana.” Neither took their place as possible rivals for the fiction of Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding in considerations of the novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but for E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, Defoe’s fiction had a remarkable freshness and frankness about sex. These critics were no longer worshipping Defoe as a saintly exponent of Whiggish politics. His novels were not being suddenly read into the history of the novel by some kind of conspiracy. They were assuming a place that had been denied them by snobbery about class and literary genre and prudery about sexual matters. And if Marxist critics sympathized with Moll’s economic and social struggles and Roxana’s initial poverty and feminist stance, did this not amount to a degree of balance in relation to a tendency toward granting the upper classes a place of privilege in earlier fiction?

The one respectable work of fiction that claimed relatively unqualified admirers was A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Sir Walter Scott thought he saw in the unrelenting realism that Defoe used in this work a mark of Defoe’s genius. Here was Defoe conjuring up a world of complete horror. The vivid depiction of the physical symptoms of the plague’s effect upon the body had no parallel in fiction up to that time. Scott regarded it as a type of fiction that drew its power from some major national event. But was it fiction? Hester Piozzi (Thrale) saw the adventures of the three artisans who cross London to safety in Epping Forest as the central fiction; later critics have focused on the essential fictionality of H.F., the narrator (2:719). But librarians sometimes classified it as a form of history. Where is the love interest? Where the young hero and heroine? If Defoe pioneered a certain form of fiction, it was not always recognized for its originality.

Compared to these works, Captain Singleton, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Colonel Jack were hardly works upon which a major critical reputation might have been built. Certainly by the criteria established by Leslie Stephen, they seemed to lack psychological interest and depth of character. But they did have their admirers. Captain Singleton’s trek across Africa reads as a kind of adventure novel, and the quest for gold bears some resemblance to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”; Memoirs of a Cavalier uses the wars of Gustavus Adolphus on the Continent and the rebellion against Charles I in England to make points about war, heroism, and politics. Defoe’s Cavalier is by no means an entirely flat character, though he tries to depict himself in such a way as to have himself as a good Cavalier should have been: brave, seeking for good causes in war, loyal. But he worries about cruelty and finds in Thomas Fairfax the noble soldier who had been missing in his life after the death of Gustavus Adolphus. During the nineteenth century, with its obsessive admiration of Scott, it must have seemed lacking in imagination and love interest. It was not a novel upon which to base a reputation, but it certainly did not detract from Defoe’s reputation for building a realistic portrait of a soldier.

Colonel Jack has also had its admirers, even in the nineteenth century. In this novel constructed somewhere between a fictional memoir and picaresque fiction, Defoe attempted what we call a Bildungsroman. It functions effectively that way, especially if one omits the trading among the Spanish American colonies at the end. Up until that point, Defoe provides a sketch of how an impoverished orphan rises to achieve the status of a gentleman. He becomes a wealthy plantation owner in the North American colonies, and he becomes an officer fighting on the Continent with French and Jacobite forces. His growth from childhood poverty involves learning the use of money, and with the help of a merchant, he learns how to save money. He learns how to manage the labor of slaves by manipulating them through the use of gratitude, and with the help of one of his indentured servants, he undertakes a course in reading that provides him with the knowledge that a “Gentleman” ought to have. He also undergoes an education in love and marriage, choosing wrongly each time until he remarries his first wife, now a transported felon. This abstract pattern, based in part on his foster mother’s informing him that his father had been a gentleman and he should behave as a gentleman should behave, does not allow for much in the way of complex characterization, except for the degree to which a character may be driven by a single idea. There is a great deal of comedy in Jack’s various missteps along the way. And in choosing to fight for the wrong side, Jack places his status as a ‘Gentleman,” at least that based on his military career, in question. But in choosing to write a work of fiction based on a structure that he was later to make into a work of education, The Compleat English Gentleman, Defoe’s practice demolishes the critique of Leslie Stephen to the effect that there was nothing intellectual in Defoe’s fiction. About the “artistry” of this rambling novel, on the other hand, Stephen may have had a point.

If much of the above is intended to counter claims against Defoe’s failings as an artist and his ignorance, what of his immorality? I have suggested that this was hardly the reason for the way in which Defoe was treated by his contemporaries, but the question of hypocrisy may be a case in point, since it influences the way we read Defoe’s fiction. One of his early controversies involved attacking those Dissenters who “occasionally” conformed with the Church of England for failing to act according to their conscience. A few years later, he was attacking those who wanted to prevent occasional conformity, never mind conscience. By the time he was writing his fiction, he had learned the lesson of those years many times over. As I suggested years ago, the fiction was a stage upon which natural law, the governing concept of the period, forced actions that religion could never sanction (Novak, Defoe 65-86). Moll Flanders survives as a thief and a prostitute; Roxana prospers as a courtesan. As narrators in present time, they frequently judge their past actions harshly—more harshly than we, as readers, might judge them. Samuel Richardson sometimes acted in the role of an “editor” to correct any misconceptions of his readers. Defoe did not do this. True to the tradition of his predecessors in picaresque fiction or the fictional memoir, he allowed his characters to tell their own stories. Moll Flanders narrates her story with considerable humor amid the difficulties she encounters. She believes in her penitence at the end, but the preface permits us to doubt its permanence. Roxana rises to great wealth after her husband abandons her to complete poverty. Presumably, as readers, we are supposed to admire her determination and success, while disapproving of how she makes her money. But Roxana was written after the financial chicanery that produced the South Sea Bubble. Defoe frequently enough compared the relative innocence of the highwayman to the evil of stock speculators. These were works of fiction, first person fiction at that, not religious treatises. Apparently Defoe did not think that hypocrisy was an issue in these works. If one holds him to a strict rule of conduct, it may be said that in works such as The Family Instructor (1715; 1718, 1727) and Religious Courtship (1722), he wrote religious works enough.

University of California, Los Angeles

NOTES

i Whereas Minto was generally in agreement with Leslie Stephen, whose opinions will be discussed below, he had a high opinion of Defoe’s prose style and artistry (Manual 347-361).

ii I owe the “tradesman” part of this quotation to Professor John Richetti. My mind had always focused on Johnson’s praise of Defoe as a writer.

iii Published originally in 1927, this work was enormously influential. Forster wrote, “Moll Flanders then shall stand as our example of a novel in which a character is everything and is given freest play” (95).

iv See also Watt’s “The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders.” Watt may have taken a hint for his approach to the novel from Leslie Stephen’s remark that “the causes of the great development of this kind of literature must be sought chiefly in social conditions” (Stephen, History 2:367).

v Approaching Defoe’s work through its sources, Secord tended to view it as pieced together in a somewhat chaotic fashion.

vi See, for example, Oldmixon, History 509.

vii Swift has it in the plural: “two stupid illiterate Scribblers.”

viii See the comments of Thomas Brown in A Visit from the Shades and the anonymous An Equivalent for Daniel Defoe.

ix See also Clerk to Lady Marsh, 10 February 1707.

x In The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring, John Oldmixon remarked that, like Jonathan Swift, Defoe worked in a bad cause for Robert Harley but that Defoe was paid much better (276).

xi Although David Higdon’s essay “The Critical Fortunes and Misfortunes of Defoe’s Roxana” is not actually an account of the reputation of Defoe’s novel as might be suggested by the title, he does argue that before 1964, with Jane Jack’s edition in the Oxford English Novels series, few critics had anything good to say about Roxana.

xii This translation of Mémoires de madame la marquise de Frene (Amsterdam, 1701) was published by Thomas Warner, a friend of Defoe, who also published a large number of Defoe’s works during the last decade of his life. It is likely that Defoe would have had some familiarity with it.

WORKS CITED

Annan, Noel Gilroy. Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time. MacGibbon & Kee, 1951.

Boswell, James. The Life of Johnson. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill and L.F. Powell, Clarendon Press, 1934. 6 vols.

Brown, Thomas. A Visit from the Shades. London, 1705.

Clerk, Sir John. Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuick, Baronet, Baronet of the Exchequer, Extracted by Himself from His Own Journals. Edited by John M. Gray, Edinburgh UP, 1892.

—. Scottish Public Records Office, GD 18/3135; GD 18/4029. Edinburgh.

Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien. Mémoires de madame la marquise de Frene. Amsterdam, 1701.

—. The Unfortunate Marriage. The story of Madame Fresne. London, 1722.

Davies, W. H. Introduction. Moll Flanders. By Daniel Defoe. Small, Maynard and Co., [1924], ix-xiii.

Defoe, Daniel. The History of England During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I. London,1735.

—. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Edited by G. H. Healey. Clarendon Press, 1955.

—. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1719.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and Sovereign. Vol. 2. U of Chicago Press, 2010.

The Diverting Post. 17-24 February, 1705.

Dunton, John. Dunton’s Whipping Post: or, a Satyr upon Every Body. London, 1706.

—. The Life and Errors of John Dunton. London, 1705.

An Equivalent for Daniel Defoe. [Edinburgh?], 1706.

Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1954.

Fox, Ralph. The Novel and the People. Lawrence and Wishart, 1937.

Higdon, David. “The Critical Fortunes and Misfortunes of Defoe’s Roxana.” Bucknell Review 20, 1972, pp. 67-82.

Kettle, Arnold. An Introduction to the English Novel. Harper and Brothers, 1960. 2 vols.

Lamb, Jonathan. The Things Things Say. Princeton UP, 2011.

Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. Chatto and Windus, 1948.

The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science June 4, 1864; June 11 1864.

Marshall, Ashley. “Beyond Furbank and Owens: A New Consideration of the Evidence for the Defoe Canon.” Studies in Bibliography 59, 2015, pp. 131-190.

—. “Fabricating Defoes: From Anonymous Hack to Master of Fiction.” Eighteenth Century Life 36, 2012, pp. 1-35.

Minto, William. Daniel Defoe. Macmillan, 1879.

—. A Manual of English Prose Literature. Ginn & Co., 1901.

Montag, Warren. Louis Althusser. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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

—. Defoe and the Nature of Man. Clarendon Press, 1962.

Oldmixon, John. The History of England During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I. London, 1735.

—. The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring [London, 1715].

Rogers, Pat. Robinson Crusoe. George Allen and Unwin, 1979.

Scott, Walter. On Novelists and Fiction. Edited by Iaon Williams. Barnes and Noble, 1968.

Secord, Arthur W. Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe. U of Illinois Press, 1924.

Shiels, Robert. “Daniel De Foe.” In The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. 4. Edited by Theophilus Cibber. London, 1753, pp. 213-328.

Stephen, Leslie. Hours in a Library. London: Murray, 1917. 3 vols.

—. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902. 2 vols.

Swift, Jonathan. Examiner and Other Pieces Written in 1710-11. In The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Vol 3. Edited by Herbert Davis, et al. Blackwell, 1957.

Trollope, Anthony. “Novel Reading.” The Nineteenth Century 23, January 1879, pp. 24-43.

Watt, Ian. “The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders.” Eighteenth Century Studies 1, 1967, pp. 109-126.

—. The Rise of the Novel. U of California Press, 1957.

—. “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth.” Essays in Criticism 1, 1951, pp. 95-119.

Whitehall Evening-Post, 13-15 February 1787: 2.

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The Maximillian E. Novak Essay Prize (Defoe Society)

The Defoe Society invites submissions for the best published essay (chapter in a book or journal article) on Daniel Defoe. The winning essay will receive $200 / £125.

Please send the published version of your essay either as an email attachment or in hard copy to Sharon Alker (alkersr@whitman.edu) Whitman College, 345 Boyer Avenue, Walla Walla, WA. 99362. It must arrive by 1 March 2018. Applicants will be notified of the outcome by 15 May 2018.

Eligibility:

– You must be a member in good standing of the Defoe Society. Join here for $35 (faculty) / $10 (student). Society membership is also required for attendance at the biennial conference.

– As well as self-nominations, members are welcome to nominate another person’s essay, though it will only be considered for the prize if the nominee has joined the Society by the deadline.

– The essay must have been published (in English) with a 2016 or 2017 imprint.

– It must deal substantially with any aspect of Defoe’s life or writings, but does not have to be exclusively on Defoe.

– Members of the sub-committee judging the prize are ineligible.

The prize will be judged by a committee comprising members of the Defoe Society Executive Board. The judges reserve the right not to award a prize or to award it jointly (splitting the award). Please direct queries to alkersr@whitman.edu.

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Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing 1690-1840, by Aileen Douglas

Reviewed by Jennifer Batt

Aileen Douglas’s careful new study, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing 1690-1840, begins with Daniel Defoe’s observations in An Essay upon Literature (1726) that “since the Art of Printing has been invented, the laborious part of Writing is taken off, and the Copying or Writing of Books is at an end” (1). As Douglas notes, Defoe’s position in the Essay is rather more nuanced than this quotation might suggest, but the opposition of these two modes of textual production is a fruitful starting point for a book that joins a growing body of work that reconsiders the relationship between print and manuscript in the long eighteenth century, including, but certainly not limited to, Margaret Ezell’s Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999); Stephen Karian’s Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript (2010); and Betty Schellenberg’s Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture (2016). Douglas’s contribution to this field “is not a history of writing,” her introduction declares (4); rather, she offers a series of case studies interrogating “the co-existence of script and print” in order to engage with “fundamental, complex, and highly varied questions about the nature of writing, and … the nature of writers” (2). Two very different preoccupations thread throughout the book: the first is a concern with what Douglas terms “the expansion, and the diffusion of manual writing”; the second is an interest in “issues associated with the specialised work of authors” (17).

To take the first of these: in An Essay upon Literature, Defoe argues that learning to write is “one of the most essential parts of Education” (quoted by Douglas, 1). As Douglas explores the ways in which that skill began to proliferate to ever-widening constituencies throughout the eighteenth century, Work in Hand is repeatedly interested in the question of who received that “essential… Education,” how they were taught, why they were taught, and what the consequences of that were—or were feared to be. Copybooks were marketed as invaluable manuals for would-be-writers, and in her second chapter, Douglas considers the role that these publications played in disseminating the two leading styles of the eighteenth century, round hand and the Italian or italic hand; while the former came to connote masculine commercial practicality, Douglas argues that the latter became associated with female writers. Later in the book, Douglas picks up on this gendering of handwriting again, recounting an episode in which Richard Lovell Edgeworth showed an example of his daughter’s writing to an acquaintance who declared, emphatically, that it “could not be the hand of a woman…it was the writing of a manly character” (175).

More than gender, though, Douglas is interested in the connection between class and writing. Chapter one contains (among other things) a brief sketch of the kinds of writing education that might be made available to the lower orders in charity and Sunday schools. In those places where the teaching of writing was encouraged, it was within strict limits: children in charity schools should not be taught “fine Writing” (as Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London argued in 1724) lest it “set them above the meaner and more laborious Stations and Offices of Life” for which they were destined (33). As Douglas frames it, “Proscriptive social theory…held that the script of the labouring poor—if it was to be visible at all—should manifest its class origins” (34).

This question of class is the backdrop to Douglas’s third chapter, which focuses upon the kinds of writing education that took place in colonial settings. Douglas explores how the skill of writing in English was exported by the schools run by the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland and through Andrew Bell’s well-publicised work at the Male Asylum in Madras, India. Douglas describes the emerging role that writing played in documenting the shaping of children into productive, English-speaking, Protestant subjects, as key to a “Foucauldian disciplinary model” (77), before proposing that methods employed in a colonial context were considered too risky to deploy in an English setting. Douglas explores Bell’s reluctance to implement the methods, of which he was so proud, in schools that educated the English poor for fear of the socially-disruptive—and even revolutionary—energies this might unleash.

Maria Edgeworth, of course, was one of the many who shared an interest in the educational theories and innovations of the age: the eponymous hero of her story “Lame Jervas” (published in Popular Tales in 1804) even rises from his working-class origins to go and teach in Bell’s Madras Academy (explored by Douglas, 161-163). In the chapter of Work in Hand focused on Edgeworth, Douglas reflects upon the ways in which her various fictional works—including Castle Rackrent and Helen—explore “the fear that working-class writers might challenge rather than support the social order” (158). The threat, as Douglas sketches it, comes not only from the self-actualisation that writing might enable in the writer but also from the power that writing—especially the copying of documents—allows working class writers to assume both over knowledge and over people of a higher-class position. This reaches an apogee, Douglas proposes, with the servant Carlos in Helen; his unauthorised copying of documents that do not belong to him comes to symbolise a “monstrous working-class literacy veering out of control” (168).

Though much of Douglas’s discussion of the impact of the diffusion of the skill of writing focuses on the perspective of the educators and educational theorists of the period, in her final chapter, she turns to the testimony of one of those who learned to write in “the poor child’s school” (186). In 1840, the Yorkshire-based Methodist preacher Joseph Barker intervened in debates about the purpose of Sunday school education with Mercy Triumphant, an autobiographical account of the impact that learning to write had had upon him. “The station of a poor child is changed from the moment he learns to write,” Barker argued; as Douglas figures this, “Barker’s child writer exists beyond his social functions and his visible productivity; he is a subject, an individual” (189). Barker was an example of precisely that which the socially conservative feared: an individual whose understanding of their place within the world was radically transformed by acquiring the skill of writing.

The second thread that Work in Hand traces is very different: it is an exploration of what handwriting and handwritten texts—particularly those that were reproduced in print—reveal about the characters and practices of individual authors. In chapter four, on Samuel Johnson, and chapter six, on Maria Edgeworth, Douglas is concerned with the ways in which authors who had constructed a particular version of their character in print might have that exposed or undone by the publication of their private manuscript letters and journals. In these chapters, Douglas is largely concerned with manuscripts reproduced through the medium of moveable type. In focusing on Pope and Blake in chapter five, by contrast, she moves to consider the reproducibility of “the original written copy of a literary work”—that is, the version of that work in the author’s own hand (124). What impact, Douglas asks, might that reproduction have had “on how literary works, and the writers who undertook them, were understood?”

To explore this question, Douglas focuses first upon Isaac D’Israeli’s inclusion of a facsimile reproduction of lines from Pope’s working manuscript of the Iliad in his Curiosities of Literature (3rd edition, 1793). (The increasing proliferation of facsimiles in the late eighteenth century is an intriguing current that runs throughout Work in Hand.) The facsimile image of Pope’s poem—showing him crossing out and inserting text, as well as suggesting that he composed upon whatever scraps of paper he had to hand—offered readers, so Douglas contends, the opportunity “to focus on the author at work” by giving new insight into his creative processes (132). In the contrasting example of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, meanwhile, Douglas considers the writer at work in a different way. Reflecting upon Blake’s interlinking creative processes as author, artist, and printer, Douglas focuses upon his methods and arguments in Songs of Innocence and Experience and proposes that, in his work, “the distinction between original and copy collapses and the act of ‘copying’ enters a conceptual space that exceeds the ready discourse” (138).

The variety of this set of case studies is the strength of Work in Hand. It is also a weakness of a sort, since their distribution is uneven and not entirely conducive to developing, in a sustained way, the book’s key contentions. However, while its overarching arguments—and its conclusion, querying the connection between our understanding of writing and our understanding of being human—might be developed with greater clarity, this detailed and interesting book undoubtedly fulfils that promise it made at the outset of exploring, across its breadth, some “fundamental, complex, and highly varied questions about the nature of writing, and … the nature of writers” (2).

 

Jennifer Batt
University of Bristol

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The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690-1760, by Darryl P. Domingo

Reviewed by Barbara M. Benedict

If you can’t beat them, join them.

What can one do to snatch the attention of distracted audiences in an age of too much entertainment, especially when some of it is billed as information? This problem is hardly unique to our age of cell-phone usage and texting in traffic. In his splendidly entertaining new book, Darryl P. Domingo discovers a similar problem in the roiling world of eighteenth-century British print and performance, where literary digressions shake hands with social diversions in a riotous feast of competing amusements. He argues that, as leisure became commercialized and thus profitable, commercial writers of the long eighteenth century, in an attempt to pull readers away from boredom, defied the stern, attention-policing tactics of their high-literary, self-conscious, and neoclassically inclined rivals. Instead of trotting obediently down the path of sequential argument or plot, they cultivated perversity: a willful turning away from the main road to dive instead down the dimly lit, digressive pathways of peripheral significance. They appropriated distraction and made self-conscious, authorial meanderings at the margin of the topic actually the center of the entertainment.

This delightful and delight-filled work of cultural studies ably presents its argument that the various forms of entertainment from the late Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century are interrelated through a rhetoric of visual and literary interruptions and digressions. By juxtaposing in his chapters discursive and cultural diversions, Domingo positions a series of close readings of eighteenth-century texts in the broader context of the period’s cultural history, with particular attention to the shifts in the management of public space and spectacle, work and leisure practices, and anxieties about reading, discipline, and time. His questions—why do eighteenth-century texts contain so many interruptions? why does this coincide with the period that legitimized the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake? how did eighteenth-century readers enjoy these self-conscious digressions?—are highly significant, and by linking these questions to the cultural performances of diversion, he answers them in a way that explicates the flavor of a period of generic and imaginative experimentation. Irony and self-consciousness as concepts, so unique to the period, here receive fresh, close analysis in the context of London performance.

The book’s treatments of major Augustan writers, such as Swift, Pope, and Fielding, complement those of a fascinating host of “minor” writers: John Ralph, John Dunton, Ned Ward, John Rich, Tom Brown, and many others. Hence, the book explores a variety of genres: broadside and newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, periodicals, plays, novels, and treatises, and within these, a number of digressive techniques: textual lacunae, flourishes and ornaments that mirror digressive extrapolations, strangled metaphors, sudden interpolated tales and irrelevant jokes, which interrupt steady discourse to give readers refreshing relief from logical thought. (The illustrations also contribute to the digressive feast.) In the same way, and for the same yield of pleasure, cultural diversions—exhibitions, curiosity displays, street-theater, puppet-shows—provided a welcome alternative to the demands of serious life. In spaces such as the British Museum, Don Saltero’s, and Astley’s Theater, in the harlequinades of professional showmen, and in the pages of Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1700), Ned Ward’s The London Spy, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, what appears to be “mere amusement” becomes the main event.

The four, densely-researched chapters do not follow a strict, chronological progression, but rather combine it with a historical portrait of the development of “the commercialization of leisure.” Domingo explains the book’s historical range, from the late Restoration to the mid-century, by referring to the argument in Neil McKendrick, J. H. Plumb, and John Brewer’s The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982) and Plumb’s The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (1973) that conspicuous consumption and sophisticated commercialism became fully realized in Britain only by 1760. The first chapter, perhaps the most splendid in content and argument, traces the parallels between the growth of pleasure-places in London and the rise of literary techniques designed to divert, or relax, attention. By exploring the rise of professional entertainment in the period and the contemporary debates about taste and audience response in the later Restoration and early-eighteenth century, the chapter contextualizes amusement in social and intellectual history. An exploration of James Ralph’s quasi-sincere survey of London’s entertainments in The Touch-Stone: or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town (1728), written under the pseudonym A. Primcock, launches an enlightening exposition on the ambivalent, tonal waver characteristic of eighteenth-century literature. Hovering between reproof and delight, Ralph’s work serves as an emblem of “diversion itself” (30). Ensuing forays into mechanical displays, tricks, puppet shows, raree-shows, doggerel verse, games, and more explain the “Mental unbending,” or psychological release, enabled by diversion (53).

Diversion had its critics, of course, and not merely for prompting the waste of time, but also for undermining reason and social truth by encouraging the admiration of distortions of nature, such as freaks, curiosities, and pantomime. In the second chapter, Domingo addresses this sour-puss discourse by turning to wit and false wit (catachresis, or usage error) in Augustan theory and street practice in the years from 1720 to 1740. Harlequin receives special attention as a figure of excess but also of soundless communication, and proves a telling example of the ostensible clash, but secret friendship, between high theory and popular response. In drawing connections between physical and verbal diversions, Domingo argues that this pantomime figure reignites the Augustan complaint, voiced by such writers as Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope, against false wit and audience duplicity: “dumb Wit” stands as the “physical equivalent of ‘false wit’” (95). This exposition provides a highly suggestive recontextualization of Augustan aesthetic. Another appealing, if slightly less original, chapter, titled “Popular wonder, print culture, and monstrosity,” examines why looking at (and reading about) monsters became such a popular entertainment by connecting it to the cursory reading of texts as a shallow delight in strange material: the lust of the eyes. Domingo suggests that popular writers, such as D’Urfey and Ward, regard monsters “as a textual corroboration of the breakdown of objective representation”: games of print like ellipses, dashes, and asterisks similarly attract “even the most superficial of gawkers” (175, 177).

The remaining chapter moves into the analysis of more canonical material. It examines Henry Fielding’s plays and, particularly, the interpolated genres that wriggle their way into Tom Jones, which abandons, temporarily, tiresome plot and prudence for other forms of entertainment: songs, stories, sudden and shocking events. Domingo sees this novel as the equivalent, for a later day, of The Touchstone in its survey of contemporary amusements and justification of the practice of leisure time reading. Finally, Tristram Shandy appears in the book’s conclusion as a triumphant resistance to what had become the textual commodification of diversion. The book’s embrace of textual and spectacular performances, and the demonstration of the overlap of “cultural and discursive diversion,” is a most welcome addition to the critical discourse on eighteenth-century popular culture, canonical and commercial literature, and characteristic literary modes, particularly irony (and its use especially by Pope) (21). By linking cultural areas that have previously been segregated, in for example the works of John O’Brien and John Brewer, the book is original and important.

By both declaration and demonstration, Domingo defies high theory in favor of scholarly research, literary analysis, and the recovery of pleasure. Consequently, his style is humorous and full of joyful jokes in a way that reinforces the pleasure of diversion. Indeed, Domingo bluntly resists what he sees as an over-intellectualizing tendency in New Historicist cultural and literary scholars, which subordinates the primary aim of producing pleasure to murky political and subterranean readings of cultural resistance. While I might take issue mildly with the argument that recognizing the contemporary enthusiasm for material and mental oddities—or diversions—necessarily precludes or invalidates a theoretical examination of the historical phenomenon, it is very welcome to read a book that takes play seriously on its own terms (a phenomenon that Freud would easily recognize). This anti-theoretical approach distinguishes Domingo’s analysis from those of other scholars, such as Dennis Todd, Julie Park, and Brian Cowan.  Indeed, there is an intellectual and intellectualized argument here about intellectualizing itself (whatever that exactly means), and one with historical and theoretical resonance.

However, the book speaks to many current theoretical concerns. One of the more interesting contentions in a book full of them is that the prevalence of digressions and diversions in eighteenth-century literature argues for a sophisticated reading public who expected leisure in their literature. In this way, the book contributes to the history of reading by exploring the specific reactions of a particular readership. This enterprise includes attention to other aspects of book history: the format and presentation of the material object in print. Nonetheless, the book invites, but does not answer, some of the more resonant implications of its argument. Play is a serious subject in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and of course, history, but these dimensions are largely unexplored (although philosophy gets a look-in). On the other hand, obviously, the question of attention, or concentration, is at the heart of this argument, and its discussion of boredom as a social phenomenon, not merely an epistemological or mental one, contributes usefully to the field. However, could more be said to differentiate kinds of diversion? Drinking alcohol is both like and unlike reading, or watching a pantomime, or other pastimes, both for historical/cultural and physiological reasons, and I would be very interested in more development of that distinction.

Underpinning this analysis, too, is something of a paradox: whereas “commercial” writers used distraction to get attention, Augustan writers such as Pope parodied popular culture both to reprove and to profit from it. This seems to have it both ways: making a distinction between literary styles and then collapsing the distinction. Still, Domingo does acknowledge ultimately that this distinction is perhaps a latter-day invention of the literary academy (a possibility that has been accepted for some time), and thus the book does contribute to the more complex portrait of the period that critics are now painting.

The Rhetoric of Diversion, 1690-1760 draws on an astonishingly wide number of sources—literary, performative, visual, historical—to present a cogent argument, solidly grounded in history, criticism, and cultural studies, about the crucial role of “di-version” as both a turning away from matters of central importance and as a turning toward them in eighteenth-century British culture more broadly. The book contributes to studies in cognitive theory, cultural history, literary history, and the history of curiosity that are cutting-edge concerns in eighteenth-century studies. Domingo presents a thesis that does not merely engage these issues, but presents a new perspective, one firmly grounded in the dominant discourse of the period and one that vitally destabilizes the relationship of the center of culture to its margins, most particularly by an insistence on the central role of performance as an aspect of eighteenth-century cultural experience. The book is an engaging and sophisticated work of synthesis and originality that promises readers a straightening out of their own minds, an unbending, and thus provides much more than Tom Brown promised: “nothing but amusements” (6). Instead, it shows amusement is everything, and diversion itself the real mental exercise.

Barbara M. Benedict
Trinity College

 

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Planters, Merchants and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820, by Trevor Burnard

Reviewed by George Boulukos

Burnard’s Planters, Merchants and Slaves offers a masterful synthesis of archival evidence and scholarship on the economics and culture of the Anglo-American slave plantation complex from its beginnings through the emancipation of slaves. The profitability of the plantations, and their brutal methods of labor organization, provide the focus. Always maintaining this focus, Burnard, writing briskly, manages to incorporate everything from literary criticism to cultural histories of early modern European warfare without ever straying far from his organizing concerns. The result is a deeply accomplished—and surprisingly slim—volume offering provocative interventions into the debates about the culture and experience of plantation slavery in the English-speaking Atlantic world.

Throughout, Burnard insists on two uncomfortable truths about the Anglo-American slave plantation system that become only more disturbing when paired. The plantations depended on relentless brutality toward slaves, and, nonetheless, were a spectacular financial success for whites in the plantation communities, for colonial merchants, and for metropolitan investors. While either point is difficult to deny, the combination is hard to reconcile with the recent scholarly emphasis on slave agency and the shaping influence of slaves on their culture and on the politics of slavery and abolition. It is also hard to square with longer-standing debates about the relationship between capitalism and abolition. Burnard frequently recurs to the view that violence was a consistently effective method of extracting labor in the plantation system, especially for the extremely demanding work of monocrop plantations, such as, notoriously, planting, growing, and processing sugarcane. Such brutal management, Burnard points out, made slavery highly profitable, and also made it part of an ongoing revolution in management techniques, the “industrious revolution” fundamental to modern capitalism. While earlier generations of historians have debated the extent to which forced labor can be understood as capitalist, Burnard joins an emerging consensus among the current generation of historians of slavery (particularly visible in major recent works on the American nineteenth century) that it was always a quintessentially capitalistic endeavor. This brutality, of course, was itself dependent on a steady stream of slaves being imported from Africa, because it inevitably resulted in shockingly high rates of slave mortality and therefore in the impossibility of the natural reproduction of the enslaved population. While such imports remained easily available, Burnard insists, the planter class did not spare a thought for the victims who fueled their profits. As he notes, “slaves were there to work and make money for their owners” in those owners’ view. Indeed, “slave owners adopted ameliorative measures only in an effort to improve productivity, not standards of living, let alone to address the moral issues tied up in slavery” (149). Although he acknowledges that some planters in the nineteenth century came to see relatively humane treatment of slaves as more profitable, Burnard generally insists that slave owners (and even more so, the managers they hired) pursued profit relentlessly with no regard for the lives or welfare of slaves.

Burnard is well aware that his two central points—that the plantation system was consistently brutal and consistently profitable—have controversial implications, and frankly acknowledges that he has come to this view of slavery through his career-long immersion in documents of the lives of the planter and overseer class. Seeking to explain the cultural background of the system—but never to excuse those who benefitted from it—Burnard argues that the white men who oversaw slave labor had themselves crucially been “brutalized” by prior experiences, especially in early generations, as soldiers, naval sailors, and slave-trade ship workers. In this sense, he contends, the vicious brutality of the plantation system was “not an incidental byproduct” of that system. Indeed, Burnard suggests, the system itself selected such men for their brutality, given the inherent challenges of managing an enslaved workforce and, indeed, one faced with difficult and even life-threatening labor. Such men were often stranded on the plantation islands by their professions, with little means available to make their way home, but plenty of remunerative opportunities in the violent world of the plantations. Viewed in this light, the brutality of the system was in a sense historically incidental—brought about partly by accidents of history and geography that caused soldiers to be stranded in the plantation colonies. But Burnard’s larger point is that the dedication of the planter class to unstintingly violent labor exploitation, especially given the rich returns they garnered, was not a bug but a feature.

Burnard also sees a long-standing British view of Africans as radically other as another factor that allowed the relentless brutality of the plantations. In this view he (explicitly) follows Winthrop Jordan. Burnard questions the influential view that in the first generations of Anglo-American plantation, little difference was made between British indentured servants and African slaves. However, Burnard also embraces the view of race as a system of cultural privilege, and acknowledges the path-breaking work of Edmund Morgan as another important influence. Ultimately, the history of theories of race never comes to the foreground of the discussion, which always returns to the central focus on the plantation system itself.

Burnard does engage the implications of his work for slave agency directly; he states several times that slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not revolt against English colonists often enough to present a palpable threat. This point remains much debated and discussed, and much work remains to be done on the frequency of slave uprisings and the cultural responses to them in the English-speaking Atlantic world. Burnard concedes that Jamaicans feared the Maroons they could never defeat, but recurs to a calculation that successful uprisings were rare and suggests that this was due to the extreme violence of the measures taken against those who did attempt to rise up against their masters. While the success of brutal plantation management techniques is hard to dispute, it seems more of an open question whether terrorizing a population with extreme violence is really an effective method of social control.

While the underlying truth here may be more complicated than Burnard acknowledges, his point that revolts were not always a serious concern of the planter class is well taken. Burnard’s related observation that talk of the “anxiety” of the planter class is a “historiographical trope,” rather than a phenomenon one observes in the available evidence, is particularly convincing to me. This point extends from Burnard’s two central points: the plantation regime was horribly violent, but nonetheless very successful economically. Planters (and the white men working for them) had little incentive, and little desire, to consider seriously the moral implications of what they were doing, and, it seems, easily avoided doing so. In my own view, that they did not feel “anxiety” about a labor regime that we can now see as one of the greatest genocides in human history is profoundly upsetting. But to insist, without concrete evidence, that “anxiety” and “guilt” must have accompanied their genocidal actions is to grant humanity an inherent moral sense that does not seem to be reflected in many key swathes of the historical record. Hence, when Burnard insists, convincingly, from the vantage point of a scholar who knows the records of the planter class better than almost anyone else, that they consistently acted to maximize their profits, and rarely spent much time considering the human costs of the measures they took up in this pursuit, I think it is important to take his point.

Of note to readers of this journal, Burnard offers a chapter organized around Defoe’s representation of the plantations, especially in Colonel Jack. Although Burnard analyzes the complexity of Jack’s unwilling empathy with slaves, and its result in his ultimately ameliorative technique of attempting to manipulate slaves psychologically, in keeping with the overall book, Burnard sees the most important point as Jack’s explicit endorsement of brutal violence as a necessary measure in controlling African slaves on the plantation, and in this regard, Jack becomes a trope he returns to repeatedly.

Burnard insists that decisions of planters, and of specific colonies, to join the American Revolution, had nothing to do with an interest in reforming slavery, despite the historiographical obsession with the paradox of slavery in the age of revolution. Indeed, Burnard points out, southern American colonies were inspired by a fear that British imperial administrators were likely to act against their human property. West Indian planters, on the other hand, made a different calculation, staying loyal to the empire due to their closer economic, political, and cultural integration with the British Isles. The West Indians lost the ability to protect slavery more rapidly, as they became an even more pronounced minority in British politics after the Revolution. But British imperial administrators were distressed, not enthusiastic, when some of their generals early on used the emancipation of their enemy’s slaves as a war measure.

In his conclusion, Burnard opposes his favored “Hobbesian” scholarly view of slavery, emphasizing relentless brutality, with a “Panglossian” opposite emphasizing slaves’ agency in a “Manichean” struggle with masters. While invoking Voltaire’s “Dr. Pangloss” and his mantra of “the best of all possible words” is unfair, Burnard typically offers a judicious assessment of the limits and advantages of each view, while frankly disclosing his own preference. In the end his book is a miraculous work of scholarship, fearlessly offering readers disturbing truths, and a thorough grounding in the culture, economics, and politics of the Anglo-American plantation system in a mere 300 pages of text.

George Boulukos
Southern Illinois University

 

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Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature, by Anne M. Thell

Reviewed by Michelle Burnham

As Anne M. Thell puts it in the introduction to her fine book on empiricism and eighteenth-century travel writing, Minds in Motion excavates the “prehistory of objectivity that predates the term itself, which does not take on its modern form until the early nineteenth century” (10). While other scholars have described the gradual separation of the realms of the aesthetic and the scientific in the early modern period, Thell pays attention to the ways in which the two were nonetheless hopelessly entangled with each other, perhaps nowhere more so than in the popular genre of travel writing. The period covered by Minds in Motion extends for a little over a century, beginning in the 1660s with the emergence of the Royal Society and the emphasis by writers and thinkers such as Francis Bacon on the centrality of experience to the new philosophy of science. Travelers and travel writing were critical to the subsequent emergence of empiricism and notions of scientific objectivity, for these writers and the genre they produced brought back experience and data from unknown locations around the world for Enlightenment projects of knowledge-building.

But Thell’s analysis of these works foregrounds the difficult role played by imagination in these efforts, for “imagination simultaneously enables and undermines empirical engagements with the world” (20); it is at once entirely crucial to the enterprise of scientific understanding and utterly deceptive. Travel writing was a primary site for the popular practice of scientific method, and it engaged with a variety of empirical concepts, including “impartiality and observational detachment, the mechanics of sense perception, the primacy of first-hand experience” (4). But the genre also raised questions about the reliability of first-hand testimony, especially when the selves reporting this information were understood to have unique access to new material while also working to suppress themselves from the narration of that material. Readers of travel writing were thus often left uncertain whether to be skeptical or believing of what they read.

The story Thell tells—about writers grappling narratively, formally, and conceptually with imagination’s role in the production of scientific objectivity—covers a variety of literary texts about travel published between 1668 and 1775. Her selection of texts asks us to reconsider our assumptions about and definitions of the genre of travel writing, first by expanding the breadth of the genre to include any text about the movement of people into and through “space outside of the habitual” (7). She furthermore insists that we consider those texts not as dry documentary records but as aesthetic and philosophical works that were deeply engaged with contemporary debates about scientific objectivity. For Thell, eighteenth-century travel writing erases any distinction that may have existed (or that still persists) between the literary and the scientific. And because travel literature was so enormously popular, it became a mechanism for circulating these ideas and bringing them into the lives of ordinary people, serving at once as “products” of and “agents in a larger process of epistemological change” (25).

Chapter One reads Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1668) as a fictional travel narrative designed to accompany her natural philosophy treatise Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). For Cavendish, motion serves as the guiding force of all of the natural world; even thinking itself requires for her the active motion of rational matter animating the imagination. In this way, ontology and epistemology fuse in her natural philosophy. Cavendish challenges the notion of impartial witnessing and turns to fiction for what Thell describes as “an epistemological tool that can do more than philosophy because it allows her to speculate about what cannot be known for certain” (59). Cavendish’s alternative to Baconian method therefore relies on an imagination that is nomadic rather than static and multiple rather than individual, for it is only through imagination that one can approach an ever-changing universe.

If Cavendish overtly rejects impartial witnessing, William Dampier (the subject of Chapter Two) embraces it so fully that it all but implodes. Thell demonstrates how his 1697 A New Voyage Round the World takes the position of “modest witnessing” to extremes, aiming to create an act of witnessing so impartial that the witnessing self is absent. As a result, Dampier’s style awkwardly oscillates between “exhaustiveness and selectivity” (82) until the distinction between “the necessary and the superfluous” (83) disintegrates altogether. Overwhelmed by an excess of information, Dampier’s form fragments. Thell reads Dampier alongside narratives by fellow traveler Lionel Wafer and naturalists Hans Sloane and John Ray to show how travel writing served as a readily available resource for new ideas about objectivity during this period. Moreover, the popularity of the pirate Dampier’s account meant that its struggles with objectivity and impartiality circulated widely among the reading public.

Daniel Defoe’s New Voyage Round the World (1724) emerges in Chapter Three as the culmination of its author’s experiments with fiction’s ability to explore imaginative spaces unreachable by other modes of perception. Thell positions Defoe’s New Voyage as a critique of Dampier’s New Voyage; where Dampier strove for an impossible impartiality, Defoe turns to the possibilities of a simulated reality. In an early modern anticipation of contemporary forms of virtual reality, Defoe’s text encourages readers to take on avatars in a process that allows them to explore and imagine more than what may exist or be known at present. The genre of travel writing becomes, for Defoe, a “device to visualize and experience places he cannot access in real life” (124).

Chapter Four turns to John Hawkesworth’s 1773 compilation of Pacific travel narratives, Account of the Voyages, which aimed to translate the overly empirical travel logs of British navigators into entertaining narratives for non-specialist readers. His effort to do so ends up collapsing fiction and natural history in ways that disturbed and distressed contemporary readers. Even as his narrative strives to retain the “empiricist ideal of first-hand experience” (157), it “exposes the imaginative machinery that structures travel relation in even non-fictional accounts” (155). Hawkesworth’s narrative method thus exposes “the uncanny relationship between the particulars of literary realism and those of science” (167).

Thell’s volume concludes in Chapter Five with Samuel Johnson’s 1775 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, written while Cook’s Pacific voyage narratives were causing a sensation but also when Johnson’s own eyesight was deteriorating. The narrative thus raises questions about the role and reliability of visual perception in understanding. For Johnson, imagination arrives in order to enrich knowledge that might otherwise be distorted by purely sensory means. For him, imagination therefore serves as a tool of epistemology that can actually be more reliable than sense or reason (217).

Thell concedes at the beginning of her study that her focus on epistemology necessarily eclipses the role of commerce and colonialism in her examination of travel literature, and argues that this focus allows her to bring to the fore concerns with science and knowledge-production not always given as much space in scholarship whose primary focus is on empire. Minds in Motion is a well-written book that offers an important intervention in studies of travel writing, the history of science, and the prehistory of fiction. The book has its own capacity to travel and drive knowledge across disciplinary borders: it will be of interest to scholars and students of these subjects working outside as well as within literary studies, outside as well as within British studies, and outside as well as within the eighteenth century.

 

Michelle Burnham
Santa Clara University

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The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism by Rajani Sudan

Reviewed by Betty Joseph

Alchemy of Empire is a unique work of scholarship that engages a number of critical questions within the literary and historical studies of Enlightenment science. Lucidly written, replete with elegant close readings and provocative juxtapositions of archival and imaginative texts, the book focuses on five substances: mud, mortar, ice, smallpox inoculant, and paper. Sudan challenges the assumption that Enlightenment’s Reason belonged uniquely to the West by tracking a series of objects that had non-European origins and uses but which were subsequently appropriated as European technologies via colonialism’s subjugation of native knowledge paradigms. The book’s critical genealogy of these technologies has two primary aims. First, it seeks to show that the Enlightenment’s growing self-confidence about scientific knowledge was often interrupted by the sight of foreign wonders that confounded existing theories about matter. Second, it aims to demonstrate that these technologies often had other origins, which, while acknowledged, were understood through alchemical models, or residual forms of pseudo-science, that served to marginalize alien knowledge while also allowing it to be recoded and made into English techne. Using the transactions of the Royal Society and the East India Company’s records as primary sources, Sudan identifies key phenomena and substances that were investigated and then subsequently appropriated by and through colonial trade and governance, first as the intellectual products of Western science and finally as technologies of Empire.

This book joins a number of recent studies that have sparked a new interest in material culture studies. In its focus on the ontology of objects in early modern philosophical and literary contexts, the book resembles Jonathan Lamb’s The Things Things Say (2011). Sudan’s analysis of the relationship between science, technology, and administrative systems in colonial settings resonates with Kavita Phillip’s earlier book Civilizing Natures (2003), while its attention to the networks of correspondence through which knowledge moved back and forth between Britain and its colonies extends, in new and exciting ways, Miles Ogborn’s Indian Ink (2007). The book’s originality lies primarily in the methodology Sudan uses to trace and transform common objects (mud, mortar, ice, and paper) into rich discursive contact zones by reading their historical and cultural significance as transactional objects. In so doing she reveals the theoretical potential of Bruno Latour’s notion of assemblages as a mode of describing the dynamic nature of the social. In this mode of analysis, substances are not identifiable objects that exist in the outside world, but rather they are observable as substances by virtue of the many historical connections that help constitute a network of connections. Substance, in other words, is a name that “designates the stability of an assemblage” (8). Sudan’s work is the only one I know of that braids together a cultural, scientific, philosophical, political, economic, ecological and literary history for each of the substances she takes up. This is a book that will appeal to scholars in postcolonial studies and British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies as well as anyone interested in the historical intersections of materialism, science, ecology, and economy.

In chapter one, “The Alchemy of Empire,” Sudan’s reading of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock sets the stage for what she calls a “reversed alchemical trajectory,” or the rendering of foreign commodities back to the base materials of their origin. This trajectory, she argues, is the preferred compensatory narrative that allegorizes early eighteenth-century “British helplessness in the face of Chinese power” as a conflicted relationship to foreign commodities (26). By mid-century, however, the idea that rational thought and technological superiority was solely the province of Europe had taken hold. This view is underscored in texts such as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas where a non-western informant concedes that Europe is “now in possession of all power and all knowledge” (27). Sudan contrasts this representation of European power with evidence from historical documents of the East India Company that reveal the views of men such as Helenus Scott (officer, gentleman, doctor, author, and adventurer) when writing to the Royal Society about the “discoveries” of wondrous substances that he cannot recognize or render through analytical reason. Here Sudan offers “alchemy” as a mode of representing non-Western techne, as wondrous substances beyond the ken of European know-how. The alchemical process is a “discursive structure” with which Britons imagined and shaped their “material historical engagement with cultural and epistemological difference” (48). These historical reports also show, Sudan argues, that “European Scientific hegemony was not as solidified as it is represented in later histories of European hegemony” (37).

Sudan’s contrapuntal and careful weaving of various kinds of textual sources is most successful in the outstanding second and third chapters of the book on mortar and ice, respectively. In chapter two, “Mortar and the Making of Madras,” Sudan reads some early records of Fort St. George that reveal the difficulties faced by early English settlements in India to secure their boundaries and walls. The spatial division of these settlements into White (English) and Black (native) towns was secured, Sudan shows, discursively rather than materially. Such imagined divisions ironically depended for their visualized difference on the use of techne from the Black town—the lime-based mortar and plasters used in the brilliantly white and durable native buildings. Thus, while there was no real difference architecturally between these two towns, the appropriation of white mortar as a symbolic representation of racial separation was enacted visually in descriptions of settlements by English travellers. In chapter three, “Ice and the Production of British Climate,” we encounter George Orwell’s Burmese Days set in the waning days of the British Raj and in which a material such as ice signifies a “metonymic relation to the metropole,” separating the “jungle life” from the climatic and gastronomic aspects of English life (77). Tracing the fascinating circuits of a precious commodity such as ice in the tropical climate (imported from the United States no less), we are reminded of the various material objects that go into the making of assemblages like a colony. In Sudan’s account of these circuits appear some remarkable textual nodes, such as a set of quotations from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Journals that reveal the American icon’s interest in Vedic Scriptures and his awareness that the ice of “Walden well” took the “fixed air” of Concord to mingle with that of the Indus and the Ganges as it went to the “parched inhabitants” of India, Cuba, and Southern United States (95).

Chapter four, “Inoculation and the Limits of British Imperialism,” takes up smallpox matter as the material basis of the practice of inoculation, which had been widely noted by early-modern travellers to Turkey and India well before Edward Jenner created a cowpox vaccine at the end of the eighteenth century. Sudan connects these scientific histories to the “colonial disease etiologies” visible in eighteenth-century novels like James Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as well as nineteenth-century classics like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. When inoculation transforms England into a space free from the plague, the spaces of mass epidemics are then easily displaced to colonial non-European hot zones, where such diseases are seen as organically connected to the environment. Here, Sudan reveals the colonial provenance of the metaphoric equivalence of contamination/contagion caused by a foreign body with xenophobia.

In the fifth and final chapter, “‘Plaisters,’ Paper, and the Labor of Letters,” Sudan draws some remarkable connections between the intellectual labor of literature, the representation of domestic and everyday life, and the material history and political economy of ink and paper. Using examples such as plasters and paper to understand the material effects of objects in the everyday life of a female writer, Sudan reprises for Jane Austen a question about the local and the global that she poses in various iterations throughout the book: “What were the political conditions that both kept Austen bound to the insular community of rural England and connected her to the remote reaches of the British empire?” (134). This seems a great way to end the book, though the alchemical elements that are central to the other chapters operate quite differently here, as Sudan gets into the textual intricacies of Jane Austen’s Emma. Sudan sees an alchemical trajectory in the similarity between the harnessing of female intellectual labor and the appropriation and sublimation of “Indian techne” into a “masculinist imperium” (135). She unearths through a series of elegant and revelatory close readings, how there lie, in proximity to the tropes of intellectual labor and acts of writing (especially correspondence) replete in Austen’s novels, numerous references to the paid labor of governesses, companions, postal clerks and slaves. In this economy of materiality, Sudan sees an enabling “alchemist moment” when the sublimity of intellectual labor is rendered from an abstract conception into the material, thereby allowing the reader to see the embedding, for instance, of commerce and consumption in the slave trade and governess trade alike (142). In some respects, what Austen does in Emma is reflective of Sudan’s efforts in the book as a whole. She transforms Indian and non-European forms of manufacture (and practices of science) from abstract and unreadable scenes to historical visibility. She unearths the sublimated Indian physical and intellectual labor that is extracted, refined, and disseminated in the properties of substances and renders them into forms of techne that are not able to appear as such without this critical effort.

In Sudan’s book “materiality of signification” is another name for a methodology that pays careful attention to the role that objects play in the commercial circuits and labor regimes of human beings (144). In thinking of human agency through the principle of an assemblage that includes both human as well as non-human elements (climate, goods, mud, disease, paper, and so on), Sudan shows us what a description of connections can reveal when a privileged subject—the European, male, propertied Christian individual—is displaced as the sole initiator and central player of the story of European civilization. In this changed topography (and changed notions of agency), what we get are not overarching and intimidating pyramids of power that often appear in discussions of empire, but rather many different sites and conduits from which connections spread out at various scales and forms to form assemblages constituted by human and non-human elements.

Betty Joseph
Rice University

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Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century, by Heather Keenleyside

Reviewed by Donna Landry

What can eighteenth-century literary studies contribute to animal studies in the humanities? This book offers a gratifyingly canonical answer for eighteenth-centuryists. Beginning with James Thomson’s The Seasons and ending with Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “To a Caterpillar,” the book’s argument hinges most tellingly on the different ideas of species difference represented in those staples of the undergraduate curriculum, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Keenleyside writes clearly and compellingly; she is well-informed, if selective, in her citations of the past decade’s outpouring of early modern and “long” eighteenth-century scholarship on humans and animals; and she is unashamed in her partisanship with regard to eighteenth-century writers as a resource for exploring new, more generous, and less instrumental, creaturely relations.

The book is refreshing in its fronting of what might in some circles be considered unfashionable or problematical. Had the book been entitled People and Other Animals, what have by now become familiarly leaky distinctions between humans and non-humans would doubtless have been to the fore, bringing human exceptionalism and indeed humanism under pressure. If not exactly boring, such an approach would have been predictable. However, by making good on James Thomson’s imagining of humans as one species among many, in the sense that species are populations, and populations “peoples,” Keenleyside makes a break from what amounts to an orthodoxy in recent animal studies.

A book entitled Animals and Other People promises to break some rules, the first of which is that in writing about animals or even thinking about them, one must never engage in anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism. That is to say, from a certain point of view, the terminology of “animal people” could be construed as unrigorously humanist. To erase differences between humans and other species by granting personhood, as it were, and the possibilities of interiority, subjectivity, and complex sociality, transgresses these protocols. And yet the unfolding history for which the Enlightenment has become shorthand has entailed precisely such a process of rolling out to previously disenfranchised groups the entitled status of belonging to liberal legal and political subjecthood: plebeians, women, slaves, colonized and racialized others—and animals. If classism, sexism, racism, and colonialism are to be resisted and eventually overcome, why not speciesism? Isn’t the teeming earth of multispecies diversity precisely evidence of the mutual entanglement of all such populations, or peoples, in a universal system of some sort in which all and not only homo sapiens are entailed or engaged? Tobias Menely’s The Animal Claim, which Keenleyside cites, made a powerful, well-historicized argument regarding the contribution of eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility and sympathy to the status of animals, anticipating animal rights; now Keenleyside suggests that such a favourable treatment of animals was already thinkable, via the concept of the “creaturely.”

Fellow-creaturely-thinking certainly risks anthropomorphism. Non-human animals thereby accede to capacities of feeling and acting, and perhaps thinking, comparable to those of humans. It is not so much that species difference is erased, according to Keenleyside, but rather that acute debates about living together, “in a sweeping and capacious vision of a domestic and multispecies society” (18), transpire within eighteenth-century texts, from which we can all still learn. I find myself in sympathy with this argument, given that in Materialist Feminisms, Landry and MacLean proposed that an ecological turn in materialist and feminist thinking informed by the work of Donna Haraway should make precisely this move, recognizing non-human animal exploitation as injustice and intrinsically valuing life-forms other than human ones, “regardless of their instrumental value to human society”: “In this sense, the critique of anthropocentrism both dethrones ‘man’ and lets other sentient beings accede to the status of ‘animal people’” (217) .

For readers alert to what have become increasingly global approaches to the study of animals, the most striking feature of Keenleyside’s Thomson may well be his seeming consonance with Islamic thinking. Sarra Tlili, in Animals in the Qur’an, has explored the pro-animal and ecologically sophisticated implications of the Qur’anic passage “There is not an animal in the earth, nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are peoples like you” (Sura 6/al-An’am: 38). Tlili convincingly expounds this passage as egalitarian and non-anthropocentric and even goes so far as to make a case for Islam’s eco-centric and “green” (in multiple senses) potential. Although many Muslims today, Tlili writes, may hold “ambivalent views about the psychological natures of nonhuman animals and generally share the idea that the latter are inferior to humans” (that is to say, a belief in human superiority if not quite exceptionalism), this attitude of human superiority is not grounded in a close reading of the Quran (3). A reading that is attentive to Qu’ranic textual nuance will not so much “devalue” humans as “place them amidst a natural order that God seems to value greatly” (8, xi). When Keenleyside observes how for Thomson all the universe (or multispecies multiverse) is conjoined by Love, with all creatures/peoples praising the creator in a grand design, she casts Thomson in what could be regarded as a distinctly Sufi Islamic light.

Although Defoe does not join Thomson in “animal-peopling” the globe, he does entertain fellow-creaturely feeling, according to Keenleyside. Treating Robinson Crusoe as a case of creaturely expansionism to which Gulliver’s Travels offers a riposte, Kenleyside reads Defoe together with Locke, concluding that to kill or be killed in Robinson Crusoe determines where a being stands in the hierarchy of species, but this hierarchy is one of species in relation; relations are always power relations. This is not as new a move as Keenleyside implies (e.g., Rajani Sudan’s analysis of Crusoe’s assimilation of/with/and/as the “old goat” in Fair Exotics). For Swift, according to Keenleyside, such relationality, rather than constituting an embrace of shared creatureliness, marks an intolerable instability of species categories—and of human exceptionality. Here I find the argument unconvincing, stumbling into a liberal individualism I would never wish to attribute to Swift, surely a champion of thinking-in-relation, if ever there was one. “In a society in which one’s identity depends on others,” Keenleyside writes, “it does not matter whether one’s master is kind or cruel, whether he makes you a pet or a monster—one lives ‘upon such a foot as ill became the Dignity of Human Kind’” (101). But surely this is the point for Swift, that Gulliver wishes to stand singularly, and foolishly, upon his human (and English) dignity. “Lacking fixed and intrinsic forms of identity, nothing holds one together as the person one is” (102), Keenleyside adds. “In a world in which species distinctions have come unhinged, Gulliver is a fundamentally homeless first-person perspective…He longs for the shelter of species” (102). He may long for it, but it ain’t coming any time soon. That is, surely, the brilliance of Swift’s dizzyingly relational multispecies satire.

By the time we arrive at this third chapter, largely devoted to Swift, it has become clearer why Keenleyside was at such pains in the first chapter to distinguish her approach to Thomson from what she baldly calls John Barrell’s “Marxism” (28). Multispecies capaciousness, for her, can only be achieved at the expense of, and gathers its argumentative force from working explicitly against, an ideology critique that is “fundamentally humanist” in its “alertness to systems that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor” (28-29). There is not a word in Keenleyside’s book about John Clare, Thomson’s opposite number in Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840. Laboring-class alternatives to Thomson’s world-making are not of interest to her. The critique of Thomson’s imperial complicity offered by Kevis Goodman (acknowledged) and others (unacknowledged) is similarly put to one side. While the animal writing of Jacques Derrida is cited here, there is hardly any mention of Donna Haraway’s (feminist, “Marxist,” materialist), and no mention at all of the powerfully multispecies work of Isabelle Stengers or Vinciane Despret. Perhaps their multispecies propositions and nuanced, but undoubtedly political, philosophical interventions would take Keenleyside too far from the domain of literary criticism.

Keenleyside’s theoretical touchstones, then, are works of philosophy and the history of ideas, rather than, say, the critique of capitalism. She eschews such terms as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and Capitalocene, or to borrow from David Nibert, “domesecration” for domestication (Animal Oppression and Human Violence).  There is no embarrassment in this book regarding humanity’s “georgic” stewardship of the natural world, or that active stewardship’s possible modulation by more highly mediated “pastoral” modes. Her readings of Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, and Derrida notwithstanding, Keenleyside is most enthusiastic about literature’s capacity for envisaging human-animal relations. To this end she explores vitalism in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as well as the Comte de Buffon’s natural history writing (chapter four), and in chapter five rescues the animal fable, typified by Sarah Trimmer’s writing for children, from traditional charges of serving as a screen for entirely human interests. Something of the animal, that is, of species-specific animals, gets across in the fable, she claims, and this is an interesting and provocative move. The case could have been made more compellingly, I think, had Keenleyside engaged with Laura Brown’s work on the capitalist animal fable (Fables of Modernity, which provides the groundwork for Brown’s later Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, cited briefly by Keenleyside).

Keenleyside’s clear and readable style renders her philosophical learning lightly-worn, though she does observe at one point that her own translation of a passage in Henri Bergson differs in an important way from the standard English translation cited by most scholars (217, note 52). Does this desire to translate for oneself also account for the differing versions given of the title of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, which sometimes appears in Keenleyside’s footnotes as The Animal That I Therefore Am (i.e., 217, note 53)? The book appears carefully copyedited and proofread, as is to be expected from the University of Pennsylvania Press, which raises the question of whether the word reversal is meant to be significant. What does it mean to prefer “one’s own translation” of a well-known text, especially if that retranslation leads to an English version in which an “I” comes before the “therefore”?

The undoubted attractions of this book need to be balanced against its curious relationship to historicist scholarship. I find it especially odd that in her ethically alert reading of Barbauld’s “To a Caterpillar,” which, she suggests, begins to usher in a new kind of literary regard for species not immediately companionable, the question of the poem’s historical context is bracketed. The date of composition of the poem is briefly considered, but there is nary a mention of the battlefield to which the poem explicitly alludes. If indeed Barbauld wrote the poem during the summer of 1815, there was more at stake vis-a-vis the historicity of battlefields at that moment than at any other time during the nineteenth century. Surely the context of the Napoleonic wars, and the possible relevance of the 18th of June 1815 (the date of the Battle of Waterloo) deserve at least a mention, alongside the relative temperatures experienced in England in the summers of 1815 and 1816, and the resulting presence or absence of large numbers of caterpillars in Barbauld’s garden?

 

Donna Landry

University of Kent, UK

 

WORKS CITED

Barrell, John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach

          to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972.

Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001.

—–. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the

          Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010.

Despret, Vinciane. “The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society 10 (2004): 2-3: 111-34.

—–. What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016.

Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003.

—–. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016.

—–. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Landry, Donna and Gerald MacLean. Materialist Feminisms. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Menely, Tobias. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015.

Nibert, David A. Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict. New York: Columbia UP, 2013.

Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” (2004) 1-16. Accessed 26/06/2017: http://syntheticzero.net/2014/01/25/stengers-the-cosmopolitcal-proposal-pdf/

—–. Cosmopolitics I. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Sudan, Rajani. Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720-1850.       Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002.

Tlili, Sarra. Animals in the Qur’an. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2012.

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

Reviewed by Ruth Mack

Colonel Jack occupies an odd spot in Defoe’s canon. It was published in 1722, the same year as Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year, one year before Roxana. But while these other novels have long been considered major works, and have for decades anchored undergraduate syllabi, Colonel Jack has never achieved a similar status. Indeed, those of us writing on the novel have, until now, used Samuel Holt Monk’s 1965 Oxford edition, long out of print. Gabriel Cervantes and Geoffrey Sill’s important new Broadview edition will have a major effect on the place of this particular novel in studies of Defoe’s works. Thanks to this beautiful, accessible new publication, the generation of students now in our classrooms may well be challenged to know Colonel Jack before they know Robinson Crusoe.

This is an especially fine moment for a new edition of Colonel Jack, given a recent surge of critical works that encourage us to think of this still-minor novel as a touchstone for the major cultural issues of the day. Thus, Erin Mackie uses the novel in the introductory chapter of Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates to set up her analysis of the gentleman figure in the eighteenth century. Likewise, George Boulukos, in his book The Grateful Slave, has a chapter entitled “The Origin of the Grateful Slave: Colonel Jack.”

I will admit that when I opened the new Broadview edition, I expected to see an introduction articulating the novel’s importance along these same cultural lines, stressing the work’s centrality to discussions of such topics as convict transportation, the treatment of slaves, and the status of Jacobites in the eighteenth century. These are clearly important contexts the editors have in mind for the text: all are to be found in the supplemental materials following the main text, as is conventional in a Broadview edition. There are incredible teaching materials here: from George Alsop’s pamphlet on emigration to America, to William Fleetwood’s sermon on the humane treatment of slaves, to a part of the “Piracy Act.” Colonel Jack appears in this edition with a total of twenty documents divided into “Historical and Political Contexts” and “Literary Contexts.”

Yet in the introduction, the editors do not put forward the fiction as itself a cultural document. They begin, in terms that might at first sound old-fashioned, by championing the “literary reputation of the novel,” even its “high level of artfulness” (14-15). Indeed, they take as a major project the reorientation of the reader’s thinking about the novel: from a “period piece,” mined for historical phenomena and “snippets,” to a novel of “literary interest” (12-13). In 2016, this is an unusual path for editors to tread, and it is worth considering Cervantes and Sill’s exact intentions for their rather radical reorientation.

In the new Broadview edition, Colonel Jack is marked as a problem novel, as it also has emerged in many major considerations of Defoe’s fictions. G.A. Starr’s response to the novel in his 1971 book on casuistry is telling. In that book, Starr illuminates the way Defoe’s novels stage conflicts between legal and moral codes; casuistry, in fact, is the branch of ethics which comes into play when the meaning of such codes is uncertain: when “their scope or meaning is obscure, or when their obligations conflict” (vii). Enter Colonel Jack. Even within Starr’s analysis, which, mind you, marshals a historical form that is precisely about distinguishing individual threads of ambiguity and, even within the context of Defoe’s body of work, which is hardly known for its precision or consistency in idea or expression, this particular novel offers trouble. Yes, elements of casuistry may serve to explain the various junctures in the novel, but Starr declares his frustration that all still does not hang together. As he notes early in his analysis, “there is a difference between being preoccupied with complexity and attaining full mastery of it, and in this book Defoe’s gift for perceiving incongruity seems to me to have exceeded his ability to control and interpret it” (82). Later critics have continued to grapple with this extraordinary messiness, as Lincoln B. Faller does in Crime & Defoe. Here, one of Defoe’s (and this novel’s) most sensitive readers begins his account of the novel by stressing that it “fits together better as a collection of signifiers than it does as a collection of signifieds.” He cautions the reader of his own analysis: “Much of what follows, necessarily, will involve the tracing out of hints and partial, not whole, often confused and contradictory meanings” (169). We have been warned: Faller does not rest with a description of ambiguity but instead leads us through the text’s confusions, its attempts at unity (Might that happen through its proliferation of analogies? Through the sheer number of professions Jack takes up?), ultimately turning to Pierre Macherey in order to assert that “while ideology seems to add up, it doesn’t” (198).

If Colonel Jack has not exactly baffled Defoe’s best readers, we can at least say with certainty that it has given them a very hard time. In turning away from thematic concerns that have made the text seem more straightforward, and back to formal, literary concerns, the recent editors do nothing to settle our minds; quite the contrary, they begin by stressing the novel’s slipperiness and complexity, be it in “Jack’s Name” (the first section title in their essay) or in the status of plantation labor.

Their argument, in brief, stresses a kind of phenomenological account of the uncertainties that struck both Starr and Faller, asking us to read inconsistency as process, as the mind grappling to put together its own experience. Whether or not one buys their explanation of the “collection of signifiers”—for the record, I do—their introduction takes a surprisingly deep dive, one that should inspire the students of the novel (older and younger, and those more and less proficient in the idiosyncrasies of Defoe) to begin again with it.

So compelled was I by the argument of the introduction that I almost wished to push back at the structure of the edition—not against the historical sources offered in those long appendices (how could one argue with such gifts) but against their headnotes, which often suggest an easy text/context application. I also found myself considering the strangeness of the “Contents” page of the Broadview edition, whose list of twenty supplemental sources with names and dates completely overwhelms the name of the primary text, an especially small-seeming “Colonel Jack.” Given the stakes of the introduction, I cannot but feel that the editors would take at least some pleasure in this confusion. After all, theirs is an account of how Colonel Jack forces us to think about “how things are seen rather than what they actually are” (31).

 

Ruth Mack
SUNY Buffalo

 

WORKS CITED

Faller, Lincoln B, Crime & Defoe: A New Kind of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Starr, G.A., Defoe & Casuistry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

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Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self, by Misty G. Anderson

Reviewed by Holly Faith Nelson

Misty G. Anderson’s animated and absorbing book on the representation of Methodism in eighteenth-century texts, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, belies its austere cover featuring a dour old Methodist. In her consideration of the subject, Anderson expertly navigates historical, religious, philosophical, sociological, and literary material, providing her reader with even more than she promises: a helpful overview of Methodist culture during a forty-year period; a perceptive analysis of the role played by Methodism in the formation of the modern British subject; and a critical approach that accounts for and gives meaning to the religious aspects of eighteenth-century culture.

Anderson proposes that in Enlightenment Britain, when the modern self was beginning to take shape, Methodism was perceived as both deeply threatening and strangely captivating. She theorizes that Methodism came to function in this period as “modernity’s homegrown, mystic-evangelical other” (3). The porous, unstable, affective self of the Methodist, she believes, challenged the emergent idea of a self that was solid, constant, and rational. Yet, she recognizes that contemporaries also found something appealing about the Methodist belief in an “explosive [spiritual] encounter,” the sudden “warming of the heart” as Christ infused the believer, releasing her or him from “the tyranny of the ‘I’” (68, 2, 3). Anderson suspects that what made Methodism particularly troubling at the time was the inability to differentiate it fully from modern thought: while early Methodists associated themselves with mystical experience and the primitive church, they still relied on Lockean rational conceptions of the mind to gauge their spiritual experience and made use of contemporary “discourses of civic engagement and self-improvement” (2). At once familiar and foreign, Methodism functioned as the “uncanny” in this period of British history.

Anderson confirms that anxieties about Methodism—located on the shadowy borderlands of modernity—often led to satirical representations of the movement and its adherents, mainly in the “first phase” of its development (1736–78) (3). Nervous laughter is, for Anderson, the natural response in those who worried “that Methodism would overwhelm individual consciousness” but who also longed for the relief that a bodily “experimental Christianity” might offer the alienated, isolated, cerebral modern self (5, 28).

In the first chapter of her study, Anderson describes the genesis and early development of Methodism, from its origins with the Wesley brothers and the “Holy Club” at Oxford University (38). The rapid growth of the movement she attributes to “charismatic preaching, a somatic language of transformation,” and a powerful “rhetoric of the spiritual event” (49). She examines Methodist engagements with literature, discussing works that early Methodists believed would spiritually enrich, transport, and transform readers (including texts by Chaucer, Milton, Pope, and Rowe), as well as their own literary efforts, intended to serve the same spiritual functions. This chapter also considers fear of the movement: the association of the Methodist “religious enthusiasts” with the Puritan regicides of the previous century, as well as, paradoxically, the “menacing” Roman Catholics. This, despite the fact that John Wesley expressly instructed Methodists to “‘avoid enthusiasm’” and tempered his “evangelicalism” with “Lockean empiricism” (50, 51). Wesley’s call for the opening of the Lockean self to the Divine was enough to unsettle many of his contemporaries.

Chapters 2 through 6 of Imagining Methodism examine the figure of the Methodist in selected eighteenth-century publications. In chapters 2 and 3, Anderson demonstrates that the “sexualized satire” of earlier centuries became a useful literary instrument to voice uneasy laughter at Methodist doctrines and practices (29). Anderson first takes up Henry Fielding’s fusion of Methodism and “aberrant” sexuality in his factually-based pamphlet The Female Husband, in which the unorthodox sexual identity and behaviour of Mary/George Hamilton is blamed on the ideas and actions of her Methodist friend Anne Johnson. The spiritually erotic discourse of Methodism (expressed, for example, in the sermons of George Whitefield) and its “same-sex intimacy” in and outside of “devotional band-meetings” destabilize Mary’s/George’s gendered and sexual identity (71). For Fielding, Anderson argues, Methodist bodily conversion experiences operate as “a queer technology of desire”: desire, as a result, is “multiplied” rather than controlled (72). However, while Fielding ridicules Methodism, Anderson shows that he believes in the power of the movement to transform the vulnerable (female) self.

Anderson maintains that John Cleland’s pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, associates prostitution and Methodism (albeit indirectly) with the intent of exposing religious enthusiasm as unnatural and sexual enthusiasm as natural. Anderson reads Mr. Barvile as a Methodist figure in Fanny Hill and the novel’s discourse of desire as typical of the language of Methodist literature. While deriding Methodist discourse, Cleland redeploys its primitive power to ignite “a modern secular account of the material mechanists of sex with a sacred flame,” according to Anderson. Fanny Hill is thus read as “a secular account of sex as the new space of the soul, the locus of the deepest truth of the modern self” (129, 102).

Anderson moves from the page to the stage in chapter 4 of Imagining Methodism, examining the eighteenth-century anxiety about the theatrical dimension of Methodist “performance,” especially oral sermons, which many felt uncomfortably blurred the lines between the fictional and the real, the performer and the “true” self. While Anderson contends that the theatricality of Methodism disturbed some writers and visual artists, such as Samuel Foote and William Hogarth, its “theater of the real, in which something happens” resonated with the desire for a spiritual or mystical experience (131). Although Foote and Hogarth (among others) want to move away from the “false illusion and myth” stirred up by Methodist “theatrical performance,” they are drawn to the “tantalizing promise” of an event that “transcends the limitations of representation” in early modern Britain (133, 169). Turning from theatrical performance to hymnody in chapter 5, Anderson highlights how communal singing of intensely emotional Methodist hymns ruptured the buffered, modern self, allowing singers to collectively “inhabit a range of gendered subject and object positions,” given the diversity of voices in hymns (173). As Anderson notes, the “corporate I/me/my of the Methodist hymn” challenged the “triumphalist individual agency” of “modern consciousness” (199, 189).

In the final chapter of her book, Anderson posits that by the 1770s, when Methodism was no longer a radical wing of the Anglican Church but a distinct, more established denomination, it received a gentler comic treatment by writers. Anderson finds in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote a recognition of the social connectedness brought about by Methodism, which functions as “an affective supplement to a more materialist account of mind that isolated individual consciousness, as well as a response to the economic materialism of early capitalism” (202). Although Methodism was still the object of laughter in aesthetic works of the 1770s and 1780s, particularly in 1778 when John Wesley publically preached against slavery, many writers continued to explore its ability to perform “significant cultural and social work” in an increasingly materialist age (231).

Anderson stresses in her afterword that it is imperative to understand that conceptions of modernity and modern selfhood are irrevocably linked with the expression of “religious beliefs” (237). To ignore religion in an analysis of eighteenth-century culture is to fail to understand its pivotal role in early modern British society. Her study encourages students of eighteenth-century literature to be sensitive to the ways in which the secular and the religious intersect in verbal, visual, and musical texts in their period of study.

Misty Anderson’s Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain is a strikingly original and sophisticated work of literary criticism. It makes a critical contribution to the study of Methodism in the eighteenth-century cultural imagination. But more than that, it is a model of “right reading” inasmuch as it refuses to bypass or ignore the religious dimension of cultural artifacts in the Enlightenment, which Anderson observes has been a “blind spot” in “defensively secular account[s] of eighteenth-century [British] culture” (238). Imagining Methodism is a vital resource for anyone working on the history of Methodism, the treatment of Methodism in eighteenth-century literature, the intersection of the secular and the sacred in the eighteenth-century British imagination, and the place of religion in modern identity formation.

 

Holly Faith Nelson
Trinity Western University

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A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism, by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins

Reviewed by Benjamin Pauley

Eugenia Zuroski’s A Taste for China argues that an engagement with Chinese objects was central to shifting conceptions of Englishness over the course of the long eighteenth century.[1] Zuroski delves into what she terms the prehistory of English Orientalism. The Orientalist view of China and Chineseness (in which China functions as an alien Other against which Englishness comes into focus) was not the only attitude evinced by Britons. In Zuroski’s telling, the Orientalist attitudes of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries displaced—and, interestingly, entailed the disavowal of—an earlier “taste for China.” The positioning of China as a figure for all that was undeveloped, fanciful, and irrational is one that came to seem natural and inevitable to the extent that it dovetailed with a story of English development that the English came to tell themselves about themselves. It is this story of Englishness, and the place of “things Chinese” in it, that Zuroski explicates in this immensely interesting book.

In offering the “prehistory” of Orientalism, Zuroski stresses, her object is not to fill in an earlier chapter of the “post-Enlightenment” Orientalism described by Edward Said, but rather to explore the intellectual and cultural milieu out of which Orientalism did—but did not have to—emerge. Aligning her approach with Srinivas Aravamudan’s pluralization of orientalisms, Zuroski seeks to trace a Foucauldian genealogy of Orientalism, rather than a teleological history of it (9-10). In broad terms, Zuroski traces a shift from a model of Englishness that prized cosmopolitan mixture to one that insisted upon an homogeneous English national identity purged of all “alien” influence. In the Restoration and earlier eighteenth century, amidst a burgeoning market of exotic consumer goods, the acquisition and display of Chinese objects became an exercise in self-fashioning for the well-to-do. The accumulation of China goods served as a marker of the cultivated Englishman’s or -woman’s capacity to make judicious choice of the endless variety of goods that the world afforded and to assimilate them into a coherent, cosmopolitan Englishness crafted “out of things not English” (35). By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, chinoiserie was viewed with greater suspicion, even as the vogue for it expanded. The gradual re-valuation of China and Chinese objects coincided with—and contributed to—the elevation of a specifically middle-class English sensibility that rejected aristocratic privilege and emphasized personal virtue and self-regulation. The disavowal of the taste for China coincided, as well, Zuroski argues, with the growing literary dominance of the realist novel. Both of these trends, in her account, aimed at defining the proper relationship between reason and the imagination, on the one hand, and between people and objects, on the other. Zuroski’s argument is at once sweeping and intricate, making a claim for a broad historic shift impelled complexly by multiple forces, and with diverse ramifications.

(It is worth noting at the outset that words like “China,” “Chinese,” and “chinoiserie” carry somewhat broader meanings in Zuroski’s argument than one might at first assume. She is interested, ultimately, in Britons’ ideas about “China” and “things Chinese,” even when those ideas were not necessarily clear or accurate. “China” in her book—and in this review—can refer to a range of things: from objects actually made in China, to objects made in Europe in imitation (however approximate) of “Chinese” style, to English treatments of “China” that bear little resemblance to anything authentically Chinese. “Chineseness,” she carefully clarifies early on, is treated in this book “as an English literary effect that is ascribed to objects rather than an ethnic quality that inheres in objects” [2].)

The book proceeds by a series of deft readings of a variety of texts and objects. She turns, more than once, to the examination of the material culture of chinoiserie, offering, for instance, an intriguing discussion of pattern books of “Chinese” and “Indian” motifs meant for do-it-yourself interior decorators. The contents of these design books were to be studied, then selected and combined on painted screens or lacquered furniture. They offered their users (mostly women, it would seem) the occasion to balance “humour” (or fancy) with “judgment” in the creation of aesthetic objects expressive of their creator’s taste. In another fascinating section, she teases out the dizzying series of cultural exchanges manifested in a porcelain punchbowl that juxtaposes a scene of a Chinese feast with a reproduction of Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation (1732), in which a group of drunken Englishman disport themselves around a chinoiserie punchbowl (146-50). This piece of chinaware was manufactured in China, but apparently to the specifications of an English designer (and, of course, expressly for export to England). The bowl is rife with self-conscious ironies. At one level, it seems to lampoon English intemperance by contrasting it to the sedate and sober Chinese scene, suggesting the bad use to which the English might put this exotic import. In another sense, however, Zuroski suggests, it dramatizes the choice that its owner is empowered to make both about “which kind of chinoiserie [the punchbowl] will be” and, by extension, what kind of Englishman the owner will be (149). English consumers were increasingly surrounded by Chinese objects (some imported from China, some of European manufacture in the Chinese mode), and Zuroski seeks to draw out the ways that English subjects could employ those objects to construct and display a sense of self.

Though she offers a number of readings of selected objects, Zuroski focuses her attention primarily on textual sources, and on works of literature more particularly. The question of shifting English attitudes towards “things Chinese,” she suggests provocatively, is “a literary problem” (2). On the one hand, she sees the question of changing English ideas of China as one that sheds light on matters of specifically literary history (the ascendance of the realist novel, in particular). But she also considers it a question that may be pursued profitably through the methods of literary study. Zuroski sees the English revaluation of “Chineseness” and the redefinition of Englishness that accompanied it as things that happened in and through literature.[2]

A Taste for China offers a series of ingenious readings that reveal an ongoing English preoccupation with Chinese objects. Zuroski doesn’t have to beat the bibliographical bushes to find her examples, either. Her sources are drawn from the most widely-read authors of the period: works by William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Daniel Defoe, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane Austen all receive attentive, incisive treatment. In many cases, Zuroski’s readings fit quite comfortably with well-established lines of thought on the texts she examines. Her reading of The Rape of the Lock in chapter four, for instance, enters a conversation that might also include the work of Tita Chico, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Laura Brown, or Louis Landa, to name just a few. But Zuroski manages consistently to draw to the fore the specifically “Chinese” presences in these works—the objects that it is easy to pass over as props or furniture, or to register as generically “exotic.” The cumulative effect of so many examples drawn together from such a range of sources is quite compelling: Zuroski shows how Chinese objects became a means of thinking about and thinking through Englishness.

It is difficult to select just one example of the kind of skillful readings that Zuroski offers, but her discussion of Austen’s Northanger Abbey is characteristic of her knack for illustrating the shifting ideas she traces with a well-chosen case study. Catherine Morland’s education in the novel entails, in part, coming to a proper understanding of the nature of objects as mere objects—that is, as not enchanted or fraught with sinister meaning. Zuroski turns to account the fact that Catherine is only too ready to mistake a cabinet of “black and yellow Japan of the handsomest kind” for the “old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold” that Henry Tilney jokingly suggests she imagines she will find at the abbey. Just as the mysterious “lost manuscript” proves in the light of day to be only a laundry list, so too is the seemingly exotic cabinet, on closer inspection, “only” a piece of furniture of a by-then not-extraordinary kind. As Zuroski argues, this evacuation of the imaginative excess of “things Chinese,” their reduction to mere “things,” corresponds with a rejection of the excesses of Gothic literature and an embrace of realist narrative. And both of these transformations are figured, crucially, as maturation, as a leaving behind of childish things. The plot of Austen’s novel, then, enacts Austen’s literary historical project for the novel as a genre: a rejection of the “wild” enchantments of the Gothic and an embrace of the more sober probabilities of the novel. The story of English development that Northanger Abbey tells is one that registers through the abjection of the kinds of “things Chinese” that had served earlier generations of Britons as imaginative touchstones: the novel “converts the Chinese object into a ‘memento of past folly’ that marks the boundary between fact and fiction. Like the Tilney’s chinaware [described as ‘the prettiest English china’], this ornament of an earlier aesthetic regime has been appropriated to the prosaic world, redefined by its ‘usefulness’ as a point of self-discipline” (209).

The case of the Japan cabinet in Northanger Abbey illustrates, I think, some of the book’s great strengths: Zuroski’s ability to turn very particular textual details to account for much larger questions, and her ability to advance an argument that unfolds on multiple levels simultaneously. It may also highlight, however, one quality that can make the book’s argument a little bit difficult to come to grips with in places. In this account, the specifically “Chinese” object is conflated with the Gothic aesthetic. In fairness, of course, that is what happens in the novel, and I do find Zuroski’s description of the novel’s aesthetic agenda very persuasive. But the definition of “Chinese” can be so elastic as to be somewhat disorienting at times. This is less a critique than a caution: readers need always to keep in mind that Zuroski’s “China” is not literally “China,” but, as she notes at the very outset of her project, “an English literary effect” (2).

Zuroski’s A Taste for China is a remarkable, thought-provoking work that offers shrewdly-observed readings of numerous works that are central to our sense of eighteenth-century literature. And it puts those readings in service of a highly interesting and compelling argument about broad developments in the period.

 

Benjamin Pauley
Eastern Connecticut State University

 

 

WORKS CITED

—. “The Story of an Old Name.” Avidly:A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, 16 Sept. 2016, avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/16/the-story-of-an-old-name/.

[1] The book was published under the name Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins. In a subsequent essay, however, the author has offered an eloquent reflection on her decision to return to using the name she was known by before marriage. I defer to her expressed preference in the text of this review (“The Story of an Old Name”).

[2] To be sure, there are portions of the book that engage with writing that we might not today consider the domain of literature departments. Both Berkeley and Locke appear in her account, for instance, as key figures in a pre-Orientalist epistemology that was less hostile to the claims of the imagination and more disposed to see the self as something to be assembled or constructed.

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Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery, by Jonathan Lamb

Reviewed by Sarah Schuetze

Stories about diseases are always popular. The details of bodily trauma can horrify yet rivet an audience while the methods of cure may amuse. Thus, a book such as Jonathan Lamb’s Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery attracts readers with its promise of the weird, horrible, and wonderful. Lamb’s work does not disappoint.

As Lamb explains with scientific detail, scurvy is a deficiency disease, meaning it is caused by the absence of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, in one’s diet. Those without access to fresh fruits and vegetables were susceptible to scurvy, and historically those with the most documented cases of scurvy included sailors and others on extended sea travels. Indicators of scurvy include extreme weakness and fatigue, loss of teeth and foul breath, difficulty breathing, hemorrhages under the skin that can turn limbs black and blue, and pain in the joints as the collagen is lost. In fact, some eye-witness accounts of cited by Lamb describe the clacking of bones in scurvy patients. Death from scurvy was painful and frightening to observe in oneself and others as the body and even personality of the sufferer altered significantly.

In choosing scurvy as subject matter, Lamb inherited an archive of marvelous stories of exploration, illness, and science. His text is rife with accounts of mariners, poets, and medical men that highlight the unique language of scurvy. As a literary historian, Lamb brings an artful analytical eye to these texts, reading language and images (both textual and pictorial) as artifacts of the disease.

Lamb has the added challenge that anyone working with a wealth of archival materials has: finding the right spot for each source. Lamb steps and sometimes leaps from one rich account to another, creating what can at times be a dizzying reading experience, particularly when he asks the reader to bound from one historical period to a non-adjacent one within one paragraph. Of course, he makes no promise of following a historical trajectory, but such shifts without signals can be jarring for readers.

Undergirding Lamb’s assemblage of scurvy textual curios is his argument that extended oceanic travels to explore and discover the world were also fundamentally endeavors to explore and discover the nature of and possible cures for scurvy. Thus, the effects of exploration—transoceanic trade, scientific knowledge, colonization, and slavery—have traces in scurvy, not just as an effect, but as a cause.

Sailors who were stricken with scurvy experienced a particular form of discovery as the signs of disease in their body were revealed to them. Likewise, in reading accounts of travel, readers can discover the physical and linguistic effects of scurvy. Lamb writes, “There is…always a possibility that a narrative of scurvy might itself exhibit signs of the disease, either being dulled by the bleakness and the pain, or brightened by its hallucinations” (61). The first-hand narratives, therefore, are extensions of the bodily experiences with the disease because of the way it heightens the senses, affects perception, and alters personality—all factors that can influence the content of an account. Therefore, Lamb explores the relationship these pathological intensities have in fiction and coins the term “scorbutic fiction” in his fourth chapter (223).

Drawing upon medical texts, medical philosophy, poetry, novels, accounts of journeys, and literary interpretations of them, Lamb discusses the aesthetics and what he calls the “genius” of scurvy—the word “genius,” referring to the disease’s inscrutable logic (9). Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner figures most prominently as a literary source in Scurvy. Other key literary texts and authors include Homer’s Odyssey, Luis Vaz de Cameons’s The Lusiads, Shakespeare’s Othello, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, accounts of expeditions with Captain Cook by Joseph Banks, Johann Reinhold Forster, and Robert Falcon Scott, as well as various works by Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, and Herman Melville—and that’s the short list.

Rather than an extended analysis of these and other texts, Lamb’s Scruvy offers new insights on these works by relating them to the discourse of scurvy both medical and popular. For instance, one of the comments on Coleridge begins with a quotation from Rime: “heat and stench arising from diseased bodies rot the very planks.” About this line, Lamb writes, “In the poem which owes so much to Coleridge’s interest in the effects of scurvy, the decayed state of Death and Life-in-Death is answerable to the skeletal and disarticulated state of the spectre-bark on which they sail…In scorbutic voyages, this diseased equivalence between the ship and its company is often noticed” (50). The subsequent discussion includes other examples of ships thought to be “corrupted” by the presence of people sick with scurvy. It is not, therefore, an exhaustive analysis of the Coleridge.

In Scurvy Lamb also seeks to trouble the notion that sailors, doctors, and other scientists readily accepted the use of citrus fruits as a cure for scurvy. While the claim that citrus cured the disease circulated in the eighteenth century, it was still a disputed point (as innovative as medicine is and has been, new ideas can be challenged by tradition). Many believed the disease could be cured by malt wort, and others thought it was caused by corrupted or foul foods.

In fact, Lamb sees the citrus debate as a synecdoche of the intellectual battle in the eighteenth century between empiricists who based medical claims on practice and observation of actual cases and theorists who bandied with the latest concepts about bodily systems such as circulation and consumption. As a result, Lamb writes, “The history of scurvy is especially tormenting…being strewn with red herrings, false starts, and mistaken conjectures that mock all teleological symmetries” (34). While the same could be said for many other disease histories, Lamb is right that most readers will have a preformed notion of the history that hinges on the use of limes or lemons to cure scurvy. However, these same readers will approach the history of another disease, such as leprosy or yellow fever, with no such notions since that knowledge is more specialized.

Despite its historical significance in the age of exploration, scurvy has been the subject of only a few book-length works with varying target audiences. Stephen Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (referred to by Lamb) is less a cultural and literary history of the disease, as Lamb describes his own project, and more a popular history of scurvy in oceanic voyages in the eighteenth century. Kevin Brown’s Poxed and Scurvied focuses more generally on maritime health and medicine. Those interested in looking at archival works on scurvy may want to consult Scurvy: Webster’s Timeline History 1534-2007, edited by Philip M. Parker, a bibliography of works on scurvy as early as the sixteenth century. Many of those referenced in this text and Lamb’s bibliography can be accessed digitally through Early English Books Online, the Wellcome Library, and the United States National Library of Medicine.

Scurvy has not received nearly the same kind of critical attention that diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever have. Because of its more conceptual approach (again, it is not a historical narrative of scurvy), Lamb’s book is different from anything else on scurvy and is, in fact, more akin to scholarship on disease in literature, for example Cristobal Silva’s Miraculous Plagues, Priscilla Wald’s Contagious, and David Shuttleton’s Smallpox and the Literary Imagination. At the same time, it is unclear to what extent Lamb engages with other scholarly disease discourses, for his citations of contemporary scholarship focus more on the history of science (especially Stephen Shapin and Joyce Chapin) than medical or disease history.

Often the observations Lamb makes about scurvy also apply to the histories of other diseases. For instance, in the archives of smallpox, yellow fever, and tuberculosis, one will find similar disputes among medical scientists, the clergy, and laypeople concerning the definition, treatment, and containment of the disease in question. Lamb notes the impossibility of documenting a lived experience with scurvy that is legible and meaningful to readers because of the altered senses and perceptions of a scurvied individual. While this is beautifully argued and detailed in Scurvy, the same disorientation and sensitivities can also be seen with other diseases, such as smallpox and tuberculosis. Therefore, one has to wonder how his analysis might shift with consideration of scholarship on disease more broadly. But Scurvy is already a book crowded with references.

A truly exciting feature of this book is the notion of the aesthetics of scurvy or disease in general. Nonetheless, readers hoping to find a series of narratives about scurvy that trace a historical trajectory and provide an overview of scurvy in literature and culture might find this book challenging. Even specialists in historical diseases and their narratives may struggle with some of Lamb’s analyses, organization, and sometimes competing central claims. Overall, Scurvy is an inventive, thoughtful, complex, robustly researched book—and generous, as it invites other scholars to delve into the primary sources and further the literary history of scurvy.

 

Sarah Schuetze
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

 

WORKS CITED

Bown, Stephen. Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.

Brown, Kevin. Poxed and Scurvied: The Story of Sickness and Health at Sea. Annapolis: Naval Institute P, 2011.

Chapin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Parker, Philip M., ed. Scurvy: Webster’s Timeline History 1534-2007. Las Vegas: ICON, 2009.

Shapin, Stephen. A Social History of Truth. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

—. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.

Shuttleton, David. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660-1820. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Silva, Cristobal. Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.

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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.”


WORKS CITED

Alker, Sharon, and Holly Faith Nelson. “Daniel Defoe and the Scottish Referendum.” Manicule, Sept. 9, 2014. Web.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Print.

Bowers, Terence N. “Great Britain Imagined: Nation, Citizen, and Class in Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.” Prose Studies 16.3 (Dec. 1993): 148-78. Print.

Clarke, Edward Daniel. A Tour Through the South of England, Wales and Part of Ireland, Made During the Summer of 1791. London, 1793. Print.

Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992. Print.

Davies, John, Nigel Jenkins, Menna Baines, and Peredur I. Lynch, eds. The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies. 3 vols. London, 1724-26. Print.

—. “Of Trade in General.” A Review of the State of the English Nation, vol. III, no. 2. Thursday, 3 Jan. 1706. Issued by the Facsimile Text Society. Ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord. New York: Columbia UP, 1938. 5-8. Print.

Duckworth, Alistair M. “‘Whig’ Landscapes in Defoe’s Tour.” Philological Quarterly 61 (Fall 1982): 453-465. Print.

Hucks, J. A Pedestrian Tour Through North Wales, in a Series of Letters. London: J. Debrett, 1795. Print.

Hutton, W. Remarks Upon North Wales, Being the Result of Sixteen Tours Through that Part of the Principality. Birmingham, 1803. Print.

Jenkins, Geraint H. The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1642-1780. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Johnson, Samuel. A Diary of a Journey into North Wales in the Year 1774. Ed. R. Duppa, LL.B. London, 1806. Print.

Jones, Kathryn N., Carol Tully, and Heather Williams. “Introduction: Travel Writing in Wales.” Studies in Travel Writing 18.2 (2014): 101-106. Print.

Landa, Louis. “A Modest Proposal and Populousness.” Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. James L. Clifford. London: Oxford UP, 1959. 102-111. Print.

Lyttelton, George Lord. An Account of a Journey into Wales, in Two Letters to Mr. Bower (1756). The Works of George, Lord Lyttelton, Vol. II. Published by George Edward Ayscough, Esq. Dublin: G. Faulkner, 1774. 741-755. Print.

Macky, John. A Journey through England in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman Here, to His Friend Abroad. 2nd ed. London, 1724. Print.

MacColl, Alan. “The Meaning of ‘Britain’ in Medieval and Early Modern England.” Journal of British Studies 45.2 (April 2006): 248-269. Print.

Mavor, William. The British Tourist’s, or, Traveller’s Pocket Companion, Through England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. 6 vols. London: R. Phillips, 1809. Print.

Moir, Esther. The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists 1540-1840. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Print.

Morgan, Prys. “Wild Wales: Civilizing the Welsh from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Keith Thomas. Eds. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Pennant, Thomas. Esq. Tours in Wales. 2 vols. London, 1810. Print.

Prescott, Sarah. Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Print.

Richards, William. Wallography: or, the Briton describ’d: being a pleasant relation of a journey into Wales (1682). A Collection of Welsh Travels. London: John Torbuck, 1738. Print.

Roberts, Michael. “‘A Witty Book, but mostly Feigned’: William Richards’ Wallography and Perceptions of Wales in Later Seventeenth-century England.” Archipelagic Identities. 153-165. Print.

Rogers, Pat. The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Print.

—. “Defoe’s Use of Maps of Wales.” English Language Notes 42.2 (2004): 30-35. Print.

Rogers, Shannon L. “From Wasteland to Wonderland: Wales in the Imagination of the English Traveler, 1720-1895.” North American Journal of Welsh Studies 2.2 (Summer 2002): 15-26. Print.

Schellenberg, Betty A. “Imagining the Nation in Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ The Whole Island of Great Britain.ELH 62.2 (1995): 295-311. Print.

Schwyzer, Philip, and Simon Mealor, eds. Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago 1550-1800. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Print.

Speller, Trevor. “Violence, Reason, and Enclosure in Defoe’s Tour.” SEL 51.3 (Summer 2011): 585-604. Print.

Thomas, M. Wynn. Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999. Print.

Thomas, M. Wynn, and S. Rhian Reynolds. “Introduction.” A Bibliography of Welsh Literature in English Translation. Ed. S. Rhian Reynolds. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005. Print.

Ward, Ned. A Trip to North-Wales: Being a Description of that Country and People. London, 1738. Print.

Wyndham, H.R. A Gentleman’s Tour Through Monmouthshire and Wales, in the Months of June and July, 1774. London, 1775. Print.

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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).


WORKS CITED

Barney, Richard A. and Helene Scheck. “Introduction: Early and Modern Biospheres: Politics, and the Rhetorics of Plague.” Rhetorics of Plague, Early and Late, special issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.2 (2010): 1-22. Print.

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Print.

Campbell, Timothy. “Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito.” Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. vii-xlii.

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

—. Due Preparations for the Plague: As Well for Soul As Body. Being Some Seasonable Thoughts Upon the Visible Approach of the Present Dreadful Contagion in France. London: Printed for E. Matthews, and J. Batley, 1722. Print.

DeGabriele, Peter. “Intimacy, Survival, and Resistance: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.ELH 77.1 (2010): 1-23. Print.

Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge,: Polity, 2011. Print.

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

Gee, Sophie. Making Waste: Leftover and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 112-136. Print.

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Great Britain. An Act to Oblige Ships Coming from Places Infected, More Effectually to Perform Their Quarentine. London: Thomas Newcomb, and Henry Hills, 1711. Print.

Great Britain. Sovereign (1702-1714: Anne) By the Queen, a Proclamation, Requiring Quarantain to Be Performed by Ships Coming from the Baltick Sea. London: Thomas Newcomb, and Henry Hills, 1710. Early English Books Online. Web.

Great Britain. Sovereign (1714-1721: George I) By the King, A Proclamation, Requiring Quarentine to be Performed by Ships Coming from the Mediterranean, Bourdeaux, or Any of the Ports or Places on the Coast of France in the Bay of Biscary, or from the Isles of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, or Man. London: John Baskett, Thomas Newcomb, and Henry Hills, 1721. Early English Books Online. Web.

Gomel, Elana. “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body.” Twentieth Century Literature 46.4 (2000): 405-433. Print.

Hammill, Graham. “Miracles and Plagues: Plague Discourse as Political Thought.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.2 (2010): 85-104. Print.

Healy, Margaret. “Defoe’s Journal and the English Plague Writing Tradition.” Literature and Medicine 22.1 (2003): 25-44. Print.

Landa, Louis A. “Religion, Science, and Medicine in A Journal of the Plague Year.” A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. New York: Norton, 1992. 269-285. Print.

Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. “Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions.” Representations 87.1 (2004): 82-101. Print.

Montagu, Mary Wortley. “To [Sarah Chiswell] 1 April [1717] (01 April 1717).” The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Ed. Robert Halsband. Vol. 1: 1708–1720. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. 23 Oct. 2015. Web.

Moore, Benjamin. “Governing Discourses: Problems of Narrative Authority in A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Eighteenth Century 33.2 (1992): 133-147. 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, Maximilian E. “Defoe and the Disordered City.” PMLA 92.2 (1977): 241-252. Print.

Rambuss, Richard M. “‘A Complicated Distress’: Narrativizing the Plague in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” Prose Studies 12.2 (1989): 115-131. Print.

Seager, Nicholas. “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Epistemology and Fiction in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.The Modern Language Review 103.3 (2008): 639-653. Print.

Silverstein, Arthur M. and Genevieve Miller. “The Royal Experiment on Immunity: 1721-1722.” Cellular Immunology 61 (1981): 437-447. Print.

Slack, Paul. The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Print.

Stephanson, Raymond. “The Plague Narratives of Defoe and Camus: Illness as Metaphor.” MLQ 48.3 (1987): 224-241. Print.

—. “‘Tis A speaking Sight’: Imagery as Narrative Technique in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year,” Dalhousie Review 62.4 (1982): 680-92. Print.

Thompson, Helen. “‘It was impossible to know these People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Eighteenth Century 54.2 (2013): 153-167. Print.

Wacquant, Loïc. “Bourdieu, Foucault, and the Penal State in the Neoliberal Era.” Foucault and Neoliberalism. eds. Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. 114-133. Print.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

Wild, Wayne. “‘Due Preparations’: Defoe, Dr. Mead, and the Threat of Plague.” Liberating Medicine, 1720-1835. eds. Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. 55-68. Print.

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Zimmerman, Everett. “H.F.’s Meditations: A Journal of the Plague Year.PMLA. 87.3 (1972): 417-423. Print.

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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).


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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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Daniel Defoe’s Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (1716): A Critical Edition

Edited and Introduced by Nicholas Seager

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

Introduction

DANIEL DEFOE’S extensive writings have never before been so widely available. The 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe (2000–8) provides professionally edited and annotated texts of most of his economic, political, travel, and religious works, as well as the novels, and has been joined by a new edition of Defoe’s Review (2004–11). These multivolume works are tremendously useful, albeit expensive. Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) are invaluable resources, again for those who have access, making available page images of thousands of printed books from before 1800. Certain minor Defoe titles, however, have slipped through these nets, including Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country. … In a Letter to an Honest Tory in London (January 1716). It is a relatively short political pamphlet written from the point of view of a rural Tory who is loyal to the recent Hanoverian succession, at a time when there were efforts in some quarters to paint all Tories as Jacobites, particularly in the wake of the 1715 rising. The speaker ruefully traces the gradual turn towards Jacobitism by a contingent of Tories after the disappointment of their political hopes under the new king, George I. It lays out the lamentable conduct of the rebellious Tories in the persona of an “honest” member of that party.

There was only one edition of the pamphlet published; it has not been digitized, is not included in the Works, and survives (to my knowledge) in only six copies.[1] Unless one lives close to London, Pasadena, Chicago, Montreal, or New Haven, it is hard even to access Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory. The present edition brings this title to a wider readership. This introduction explains the pamphlet’s political and religious contexts, describes the grounds for its attribution to Defoe, and considers what it tells us about Defoe’s activities in early Hanoverian Britain and the rhetorical and polemical strategies he employed during this turbulent period.

Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country was advertised as published “This Day” in The Flying-Post: or, The Post-Master for January 26–28, 1716 and likewise in The Daily Courant for January 28. It was priced at sixpence and published by Rebecca Burleigh, a trade publisher of predominantly loyalist, Whiggish tracts at this time (Treadwell 110). Alongside the advertisement of Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in The Flying-Post there was an announcement of the publication of A Cry for Justice against all the Impeach’d and Attainted Rebels and Traitors, shewing, That Mercy to K. George’s Enemies, is Cruelty to all true Friends of our King and Country. On the same page, the paper lists fourteen Jacobite rebels tried on January 23 and 24, 1716 (twelve of whom were found guilty and sentenced to death), and it gives a vivid description, with picture, of “The Pretender’s Gag,” also known as “the Highchurch Crossbow,” an instrument of torture applied to the mouth; an alarming number of these implements are reported as found in a Popish house in Liverpool (fig. 1).[2] With the advertisement for Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in The Daily Courant, a paper sold by Burleigh, there was another for The Pretender’s Declaration transpos’d, by Mr. Asgill, another Burleigh publication; and John Asgill’s “other Tracts against the Pretender, and in Defence of the Title of King George” were there advertised as being sold by Burleigh.[3] So, Defoe’s pamphlet was published at a time of intense reaction to the recent Jacobite rising, a “rebellion” which threatened to return Britain to Catholicism and absolute monarchy at a time when the nation was defining itself in terms of Protestantism and liberty, and defining itself decisively against “Popery and Slavery,” in the unrelenting words of A Cry for Justice (2). A Committee of Secrecy, headed by Robert Walpole, was investigating the conduct of the last Tory ministry of Queen Anne’s reign, a ministry led by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (impeached and languishing in the Tower in January 1716) and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (long since fled to France and the Pretender’s court), and A Cry for Justice merges its call for retribution against the armed Jacobite rebels with that against the alleged ministerial rebels. The Tories had been crushed in the general election of 1715 and all but excluded from central government by George I. The King believed that the unilateral peace the Tories secured with France in 1713 was a betrayal of Britain’s allies, including his native Hanover, and he suspected Harley and Bolingbroke had angled for the Pretender’s accession before Anne’s death in August 1714.

These were dizzying times for Defoe. He had worked diligently and often thanklessly for Harley for more than a decade, and he remained loyal to Harley after his fall from office in July 1714 and his impeachment and incarceration a year later. Defoe wrote the three-part Secret History of the White-Staff (1714–15) and An Account of the Conduct of Robert, Earl of Oxford (1715) in defense of his former patron at this time. Defoe was ardently Hanoverian and anti-Jacobite, but genuinely believed that Harley at no point favored the Pretender (see Appeal to Honour and Justice 41–42). Historians agree that Harley was never an adherent to “James III,” despite his correspondence with the court at St. Germain, the motivation of which was to strengthen his domestic political position (Hill 205–8; Holmes xxxvi, 268; Szechi, 182–91). Defoe was moreover aware that the Tory-Jacobite equivalence being widely promulgated was a gross simplification, and he had even defended non-jurors, those who refused in conscience to accept the terms of the 1689 settlement but recognized the de facto authority of William and then Anne (Schonhorn 874). Indeed, Defoe believed that the sudden surge of Whig power, buttressed by George’s royal favor and a landslide election result, was politically unhealthy, unsettling the balance of parties moderated by a non-partisan monarch. He argued for the inclusion of Tories in political life. He also believed that lenity towards the Jacobite rebels would be a good thing: commuting death sentences to transportation would make these individuals useful and engender gratitude for monarchical mercy, the surest way to gain disaffected people’s support for the Hanoverian regime. And the Jacobite threat, Defoe knew, was not entirely defeated, despite the crushing victory at Preston: “There are Agents at Work busily to spread that Disposition further among the rest,” his honest Tory cautions (5). Further complicating the picture, Defoe was laying the foundations for his rapprochement with the Whigs, which according to him was accomplished shortly after his libel trial in July 1715. Therefore, he was juggling various, apparently conflicting, agendas in the period immediately following Anne’s death.

Defoe produced a number of pseudonymous political pamphlets at this time, demonstrating remarkable versatility. He adopted the voices of Anglicans and Quakers, Whigs and Tories, a “second-sighted Highlander,” a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne, and a French diplomat at the peace negotiations. Unusually, one piece is even written in the voice of “Daniel Defoe” (An Appeal to Honour and Justice in 1715). Defoe’s honest Tory says he is “speaking for one in the name of the rest”; indeed, Defoe’s strategy in these political pieces was to adopt a representative position for a particular group. Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country is described by Linda Colley as “a Hanoverian Tory pamphlet” (184), which accurately characterizes the voice Defoe impersonated.[4] Yet the stances of these publications are complicated by Defoe’s ventriloquism – his aim was inclusive rather than divisive, appealing to multiple readerships by establishing common ground. So, in Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory he writes as an apparently unsophisticated, plain-dealing country squire, expressing bemusement and sorrow at recent events. Whigs could enjoy the self-accusations of an opponent, but may be persuaded to relent in their political hostility; loyalist Tories would appreciate a forthright articulation of their position; and even those with Jacobite sympathies were supposed to see a way forward, based on an acceptance of the Hanoverian succession. Defoe anticipated a readership cutting across political divisions.

Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory was first attributed to Defoe in 1907 by William Peterfield Trent, who stated: “This seems clearly Defoe’s, both from its style, and from its correspondencies [sic] with several of his undisputed pamphlets” (“Bibliographical Notes” 182). Trent expanded on this view in his unpublished typescript bibliography of Defoe, where he says that the tract “is full of his peculiarities” (“Bibliography” 1245), some of which he proceeds to list, though several phrasal parallels could hardly be considered idiosyncratic.[5] Furbank and Owens dismiss the usefulness of Trent’s stylistic tests (Canonisation 92–99), but Trent should be credited with first assigning this pamphlet to Defoe. The attribution was accepted by John Robert Moore (Checklist 133), Maximillian E. Novak (897), and Paula R. Backscheider (624), though without any further justification.[6] Most recently it has been listed as a “probable” Defoe attribution by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, who reappraised the Defoe canon and excluded many of the questionable attributions made by earlier bibliographers. There is no concrete external evidence for Defoe’s authorship, but Furbank and Owens point to “two favourite allusions of Defoe” (Critical Bibliography 163) that, they argue, qualify it as a likely attribution. One is the future William III’s pledge “to die in the last Ditch” rather than to see his country lost (Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory 11), which is also recorded by Trent (“Bibliography” 1246). Furbank and Owens note that this allusion occurs twice in the Review in 1712 and in Jure Divino (1706).[7] When William’s native Holland was under attack from France and Britain in 1672, William was asked by an English ambassador “what Remedy he could think of for the Ruin of his Affairs” and “answer’d, He knew One effectual Remedy, viz. to lie in the last Ditch; intimating, that he would dispute every Inch of Ground with the Enemy, and at last would die defending the Liberties of his Country” (Jure Divino, Bk XI, 18).[8] As Furbank and Owens state, citing Burnet’s History of His Own Times, the statement is usually associated not with Temple, a connection Defoe makes in Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory and Jure Divino, but with the Duke of Buckingham, who was negotiating on behalf of Charles II (Burnet I. 327).[9] The second “favourite allusion” is to the pope who exclaimed: “What a strange deal of Mony we get by this Fable of Christ?” (Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory 37). This is usually attributed to the early sixteenth-century Leo X. Furbank and Owens note instances of this reference in Defoe’s Royal Religion (1704), the Review in 1705, The Secret History of the October Club (1711), and A New Family Instructor (1727) (Critical Bibliography 113). To these we can add an instance in Defoe’s A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (1718), which like Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory and several of the other invocations quotes and translates the Latin: “Heu! quantum profuit hoc fabula Christi. What prodigious Gain, says he, do we make of this Fable of Christ” (Turkish Spy 19). The evidence for Defoe’s authorship of Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory, then, is entirely internal: it matches the arguments he was making at the time, and it makes concurrently idiosyncratic use of allusions he used elsewhere. As such, it remains a probable attribution until further evidence is presented.

The only evidence worth noticing that potentially conflicts with Defoe’s authorship of Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory is the positive reference to Observations upon the State of the Nation, in January 1712/3 (January 1713), a “Revolutionary Tory” pamphlet Defoe had criticized in the Review. Its author was a disaffected Tory. He argues that “the Bulk of the Tories of England are in their Hearts against the Pretender” (24), instead saying that the danger to the Hanoverian succession lies in Scotland, where Episcopalians and Presbyterians alike were refusing to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration. Defoe thought the piece was by his old enemy, the Earl of Nottingham, a man excluded from power under the Tories and, so, somewhat oddly, allied to the Whigs in opposition to the Tory peace. In January 1716, Nottingham was the most important Tory serving under George (though he was dismissed in February). Defoe attacked Nottingham in the Review when the Observations came out. Although Defoe concurred that, of course, the ministry was innocent of Jacobitism (“They must either be clear of that Charge, or of their Senses” [9.242]), he rubbished the author’s assessment of affairs in Scotland among other things. Nottingham apparently denied authorship at the time (see Review 9.244) and the attribution was also repudiated in July 1714 in A Vindication of the Earl of Nottingham (i–ii), a work attributed to William Wotton (New and General Biographical Dictionary 12.586).[10] So why, we might ask, would Defoe have his speaker recall this pamphlet now? Given the doubt about Nottingham’s authorship, the obsolescence of the main bones of contention, and Defoe’s need in 1716 to capture realistically the voice of a Hanoverian Tory, it is perfectly plausible that Defoe chose to have his “honest Tory” recollect this famous pamphlet, a vital point of reference for this political group, despite Defoe having denounced it three years earlier. The evidence we have, then, points to Defoe’s probable authorship of Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory.

Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory, as I have said, was written amidst intensely partisan debate, during the early days of the Whig ascendancy, the investigation of the last ministry for its conduct regarding the Treaty of Utrecht, and in the wake of the Jacobite rising. The phrase “honest Tory” – describing “the Hanoverian Tory group which took shape in the last two years of the Queen’s reign” (Holmes xxxii) – seemed to many people like an oxymoron. “Some will hardly allow the Term to be just,” Defoe’s speaker acknowledges at the outset (3). But even after the 1715 rising, Defoe was prepared to acknowledge “[t]hat there were a Set of TORIES in this Kingdom, who were always sincere in the Revolution-Principle, and loyal Subjects to the Sovereign; Friends to the Establishment in Church and State, and who ought still to be treated as true Lovers of their Country” (Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference 1–2). Defoe was not a natural friend to the Tories. Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, typified the extremism opposed by Defoe’s honest Tory, and his anonymously published pamphlet, English Advice to the Freeholders of England (January 1715), comes in for particular censure in Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory. Atterbury warned that the Whigs, if successful in the upcoming general election, would “subject [George I] to the Arbitrary Government of a Junto” (6), renew the war, and raise a standing army at home. Atterbury, having been attacked by Defoe in The Secret History of the White-Staff, jibed at Harley and Defoe as “that Able Politician the Staff (as he or his Hireling have Christned him, in their late Histories)” (7).[11] Defoe liked to point out to Tories promoting divine right, hereditary monarchy, and the passive obedience of subjects that they had supported the 1689 Revolution settlement. “It was always our Practice to yield Obedience to the higher Powers” (9), announces the honest Tory, and he expresses his bemusement that members of his party rebelled, given “those Principles of Loyalty and Submission to Government, which they, and especially their Ancestors, so avowedly profess’d” (11). This is a moment when the speaker’s words condemn Tory ideology, even though the pamphlet as a whole is more conciliatory.

In defending Harley at this time, Defoe depicted him as having aimed to manage the extremist element of the Tory party which veered towards Jacobitism; even if he did not always manage it efficaciously or indeed openly, Harley’s intentions were pure and the Jacobites were frustrated. Defoe criticized the former ministry – and claimed that they succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes even of adherents like himself – but did not say things that could harm Harley. “There is a great deal of difference between being wicked and being deceiv’d,” the ingenuous Tory opines (10), a plea Defoe made for himself in An Appeal to Honour and Justice.

Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory does not transcend its immediate purpose in the way of some of Defoe’s topical writing, but it displays his rhetorical verve nonetheless. In a brief discussion of Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the context of the author’s anti-Jacobitism, David Macaree points to Defoe’s “plain style” and impersonation of “a fairly slow-witted but steady countryman” (16). The straight-talking rustic Tory was a useful figure in Whig propaganda, and Defoe is in fact reviving a style that had been used when the Tories came into power in 1710. Benjamin Hoadly’s The Thoughts of an Honest Tory, Upon the Present Proceedings of that Party (1710) was also presented as a letter from a country Tory to a city one. It complains about the methods the party has used to regain power under Anne – hounding Marlborough, making a martyr of Sacheverell, pestering the Queen with addresses – curtly declaring that “Honour obtain’d by dishonourable Means, must end in Dishonour” (2). The sometimes flagrant self-accusation of the Tory in this pamphlet means that its mask is fairly thin:

When we are forced to explain our selves upon Absolute Non-resistance, or Hereditary Right: we have the Absurdity to own that by Absolute Non-resistance, we mean a Non-resistance which is not Absolute; and that by Hereditary Right, we mean the same with the Whigs Parliamentary Right. And yet we have the Conscience to raise the Spirits of the poor People against them [Whigs], by the deceitful use of these Words, and by Clamours about a Difference, where we cannot maintain any.

Frankly, this “Tory” dismantles Tory arguments with Whig rejoinders, acknowledging that, “if any of us condescend to argue, we are forced to acknowledge the truth of the main Whig Principles” (15).[12]

Defoe impersonates a Tory in a more concerted way than did Hoadly six years earlier. He was not writing Whig propaganda by having a Tory spout the ideas of the other party. Rather he adopted a voice with which he must, as a dissenter, have sympathized: that of a disenfranchised, even proscribed loyalist. And so, despite the loyalty to George of this honest Tory, the criticisms of the king’s political management are to be read as valid grievances, not acrimonious carping tending towards disaffection or hypocrisy. George should not be ruling solely with Whigs; but the Tories have work to do to regain trust. The pamphlet dexterously appeals to Whigs and (loyal) Tories, essaying to set aside factional differences in service of bigger objectives: the endurance of Hanoverian rule, the avoidance of “radicalizing” persuadable Tories, and the promotion of moderate, non-partisan government. Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory displays quite an astute sense of how Jacobitism encroached upon people by degrees after George’s accession, particularly through the operation of political discourse, as Tories “began to prepare themselves for it by a particular way of Treating the Affairs of the Succession with an Air of indifference, and bringing themselves to a Jacobite Style by Degrees” (23). Jacobitism is a “Style” as much as a set of convictions, so language is particularly important at precarious moments: the honest Tory establishes this with his ponderous opening sentences, carefully clarifying his terms, fearful of misconstrual. In this charged atmosphere, the incitements to rebellion of the lesser Anglican clergy come in for Defoe’s particular criticism, and in this regard Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory fits into what Rogers calls “the Whig attack upon the seditious activities of the high-flying clergy” in the early years of Hanoverian Britain (89). Defoe generally thought clergymen should keep out of politics, a motif of his attacks on Atterbury and a theme of Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), for instance.

Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory is not a major Defoe work, even by the standards of his party political output of the mid-1710s. The Secret History of the White-Staff gained more notice at the time and continues to interest literary scholars as well as historians for its obfuscating rhetorical and publication strategies. An Appeal to Honour and Justice tells us more about Defoe’s shifting tactics, political convictions, and self-fashioning as an author and political thinker. His Quaker pamphlets are arguably better acts of impersonation and more dramatic because of their high profile targets (Bradbury, Sacheverell, and Ormond). And Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager, in scope and form, brings the style of political impersonation closer to that of Defoe’s novels. But though it does not generally reach such heights Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory clarifies aspects of Defoe’s complicated activities in the period and attests to the sophistication of his politics, which refuse to be pinned down to narrow partisanship even at a time of immoderation and what the speaker calls “universal Misunderstanding” (3).

NOTES

[1] The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Furbank and Owens (Critical Biography 162) record copies at McGill University Library, Montreal; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the University of Chicago Library; the Huntington Library, Pasadena; and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. In addition, there is a copy at Senate House Library, University of London. Furbank and Owens note that pages are bound out of order in the Yale copy.

[2]   The Flying-Post: or, The Post-Master, no. 3755 (January 26–28, 1716). I use new style dates throughout.

[3]   The Daily Courant, no. 4453 (January 28, 1716).

[4]   Colley does not connect Defoe with the pamphlet.

[5]   Trent states: “[T]he style of this pamphlet very strongly resembles that of Defoe’s undoubted works. We have ‘who’ for ‘whom’—frequently—‘I must say’, ‘no question’, ‘and which is worse’, ‘in a Word’, ‘bear our Testimony, as the Quakers call it’, ‘Eclaircissement’, ‘Secret History’, loose syntax, the favorite phrase ‘some People’, a trick of balancing phrases and calling attention to the fact by typographical devices—something often found in Defoe’s pamphlets—and, finally, several pages the whole tone and style of which seem indisputably his—e.g. pp. 7, 16–17, 19, 22, 29, 31, 33, 36–37” (“Bibliography” 1246).

[6]   Moore (“Defoe Acquisitions” 47–48) makes reference to the pamphlet in his characteristically breezy way, using it alongside four other pieces to argue for a new Defoe attribution, A Letter from a Gentleman of the Church of England, to All the High-Flyers of Great-Britain (1715). Moore knew only the 1716 Dublin edition of this tract. The similarity he asserts exists between it and Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory is not self-evident, and Furbank and Owens reject the attribution of A Letter from a Gentleman of the Church of England (Defoe De-attributions 80).

[7]   The allusion also appears in The Fears of the Pretender Turn’d into the Fears of Debauchery (1715), a pamphlet assigned to Defoe in the nineteenth century by James Crossley, but nevertheless rejected by Furbank and Owens who did note the use of the same allusion (Defoe De-attributions 74).

[8]   Pagination restarts for each Book of Jure Divino.

[9]   William’s interlocutor is not specified in the Review allusions; Defoe refers to William proposing “lying” in the last ditch (8.726) and proposing to “die” in it (8.915). In The True Patriot no. 6 (1745), Fielding has William saying this to an “insolent Frenchman” (149).

[10] Nottingham’s biographer, Henry Horwitz, makes no mention of the pamphlet; indeed Horwitz’s account of Nottingham’s mistrust of the ministry’s commitment to the Hanoverian succession argues against his authorship of Observations (239ff).

[11] Atterbury may have attacked Defoe’s defenses of Harley in Considerations upon the Secret History of the White Staff (see Bennett 189–95), though Furbank and Owens urge caution in assigning this pamphlet to Atterbury (Political Biography 142–43). Defoe had represented Atterbury as the manipulative Mitre in White-Staff; in Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference (November 1716), he depicted him as Oracle, “a compleat State Firebrand,” more concerned with meddling in politics than with religion (29–32).

[12] See Gibson’s assessment of the pamphlet’s “unsubtlety” (118).

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Works Cited

Seth Rudy


WORKS CITED

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Montreal: Ubisoft, 2013. Xbox 360.

Aubrey, John. “An Essay Towards the Description of the North Division of Wiltshire.” Wiltshire: The Topographical Collections of John Aubrey. Ed. John Edward Jackson. Devizes: The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1862. Print.

Barnes, Annette, and Jonathan Barnes. “Time Out of Joint: Some Reflections on Anachronism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47.3 (1989): 253-61. Print.

Barry, Boubacar. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Beasley, Berrin, and Tracy Collins Standley. “Shirts vs. Skins: Clothing as an Indicator of Gender Role Stereotyping in Video Games.” Communication and Society 5 (2002): 279-93. Print.

Bialuschewski, Arne. “Black People under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718–1723.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 29.4 (2008): 461-75. Print.

—. “Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98 (2004): 21-38. Print.

Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Print.

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

Bond, Richard. E. “Piratical Americans: Representations of Piracy and Authority in Mid-Twentieth-Century Swashbucklers.” The Journal of American Culture 33.4 (2010): 309-21. Print.

Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Daston, Lorraine J. “The Factual Sensibility.” Isis 79.3 (1988): 452-67. Print.

“Did anybody else find James Kidd to be attractive? [SPOILER, SEQUENCE 5].” Reddit. Web. 15 Jul. 2015.

Dow, Douglas N. “Historical Veneers: Anachronism, Simulation, and Art History in Assassin’s Creed II.” Playing With the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. Ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliot. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 215-32. Print.

Dugaw, Diane. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.

Eastman, Carolyn. “Shivering Timbers: Sexing Up the Pirates in Early Modern Print Culture.” Common-Place 10.1 (2009). Web. 15 Jul. 2015.

Elliot, Andrew B.R., and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell. “Introduction: To Build a Past that Will ‘Stand the Test of Time’: Discovering Historical Facts, Assembling Historical Narratives.” Playing With the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. Ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew Elliot. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 1-30. Print.

Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry. Washington, DC: ESA, April 2014. Web. 5 Jan. 2014.

Ferreira, Roquinaldo. “Slaving and Resistance to Slaving in West Central Africa.” The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman. Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. 111-31. Print.

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

Gaver, W. W., et al., “The Drift Table: Designing for Ludic Engagement.” Proc. CHI EA ’04. ACM Press (2004): 885-900. Print.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens. New York: Beacon, 1971. Print.

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

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 118-30. Print.

Johnson, Charles. A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd ed. London: 1724. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Web. 5 Jan. 2015.

Jones, Steven E. The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Juul, Jesper. “The Definitive History of Games and Stories, Ludology and Narratology.” The Ludologist, 22 February 2004. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.

Kain, Erik. “Watch the Terrible 4th of July ‘Assassin’s Creed III’ Live-Action Trailer.’” Forbes, 7 Apr. 2012. Web. 6 Feb. 2015.

Konstam, Angus. Pirates: The Complete History from 1300 BC to the Present Day. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011. Print.

Lear, Anna. “What’s the point of buying art?” Arqade. StackExchange, 30 Oct. 2013. Web. 1 Aug. 2015.

Lichfield, John. “French left loses its head over Robespierre game,” The Independent, 17 Nov. 2014. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

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

Lupton, Christina, and Peter McDonald. “Reflexivity as Entertainment: Early Novels and Recent Video Games.” Mosaic 43.4 (2010): 157-73. Print.

McKeon, Michael. “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 382-99. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964. Print.

Miller, Monica K., and Alicia Summers. “Gender Differences in Video Game Characters’ Roles, Appearances, and Attire as Portrayed in Video Game Magazines.” Sex Roles 57 (2007): 733-42. Print.

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O’Driscoll, Sally. “The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body.” The Eighteenth Century 53.3 (2012): 357-79. Print.

Partridge, Stephanie. “The Incorrigible Social Meaning of Video Game Imagery.” Ethics & Information Technology 13.4 (2011): 303-12. Print.

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

Shaw, Adrienne. “What is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies.” Games and Culture 5 (2010): 403-24. Print.

Suellentrop, Chris. “Slavery as New Focus for a Game.” The New York Times, 27 Jan. 2014. Print.

Swann, Marjorie. Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Print.

Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon, 2004. Print.

Terlecki, Melissa, et al. “Sex Differences and Similarities in Video Game Experience, Preferences, and Self-Efficacy: Implications for the Gaming Industry.” Current Psychology 20.1 (2011): 22-33. Print.

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Ubisoft. “Ubisoft FY14 Earnings Presentation,” 15 May 2014. Web. 16 Jan 2015.

Warner, William. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1998. Print.

“Where does the art show up?” Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. GameFAQs, 2013. Web. 1 Aug. 2015.

Woodard, Colin. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007. Print.

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Last Words

Seth Rudy


Last Words

The writers, perhaps unsurprisingly, make no explicit connections between the questions raised in the exchange and their eighteenth-century parallels. Players therefore most likely confront the linked issues of autonomy, interpretation, media, and culture as present rather than historical or historicized phenomena — just as readers of novels would have 250 years ago. The game’s remediation of eighteenth-century phenomena, then, extends beyond history and subject matter; there is more to it than piracy, but as has long been the case, much depends on the user. Just as readers could read for sex and scandal, players can play for parkour and plunder. They can also, though, undertake the more diligent labor of following the guidance (or guides) that the texts themselves provide in order to sit in more thoughtful judgment of their content and the circumstances of their production. The elevation of the game requires the elevation of the player. Ironically, then, the most authentically eighteenth-century experiences of Assassin’s Creed IV may be those that take place outside rather than within the Animus.

Rhodes College


WORKS CITED

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Montreal: Ubisoft, 2013. Xbox 360.

Aubrey, John. “An Essay Towards the Description of the North Division of Wiltshire.” Wiltshire: The Topographical Collections of John Aubrey. Ed. John Edward Jackson. Devizes: The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1862. Print.

Barnes, Annette, and Jonathan Barnes. “Time Out of Joint: Some Reflections on Anachronism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47.3 (1989): 253-61. Print.

Barry, Boubacar. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Beasley, Berrin, and Tracy Collins Standley. “Shirts vs. Skins: Clothing as an Indicator of Gender Role Stereotyping in Video Games.” Communication and Society 5 (2002): 279-93. Print.

Bialuschewski, Arne. “Black People under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718–1723.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 29.4 (2008): 461-75. Print.

—. “Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98 (2004): 21-38. Print.

Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Print.

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

Bond, Richard. E. “Piratical Americans: Representations of Piracy and Authority in Mid-Twentieth-Century Swashbucklers.” The Journal of American Culture 33.4 (2010): 309-21. Print.

Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Daston, Lorraine J. “The Factual Sensibility.” Isis 79.3 (1988): 452-67. Print.

“Did anybody else find James Kidd to be attractive? [SPOILER, SEQUENCE 5].” Reddit. Web. 15 Jul. 2015.

Dow, Douglas N. “Historical Veneers: Anachronism, Simulation, and Art History in Assassin’s Creed II.” Playing With the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. Ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliot. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 215-32. Print.

Dugaw, Diane. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.

Eastman, Carolyn. “Shivering Timbers: Sexing Up the Pirates in Early Modern Print Culture.” Common-Place 10.1 (2009). Web. 15 Jul. 2015.

Elliot, Andrew B.R., and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell. “Introduction: To Build a Past that Will ‘Stand the Test of Time’: Discovering Historical Facts, Assembling Historical Narratives.” Playing With the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. Ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew Elliot. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 1-30. Print.

Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry. Washington, DC: ESA, April 2014. Web. 5 Jan. 2014.

Ferreira, Roquinaldo. “Slaving and Resistance to Slaving in West Central Africa.” The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman. Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. 111-31. Print.

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

Gaver, W. W., et al., “The Drift Table: Designing for Ludic Engagement.” Proc. CHI EA ’04. ACM Press (2004): 885-900. Print.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens. New York: Beacon, 1971. Print.

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

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 118-30. Print.

Johnson, Charles. A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd ed. London: 1724. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Web. 5 Jan. 2015.

Jones, Steven E. The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Juul, Jesper. “The Definitive History of Games and Stories, Ludology and Narratology.” The Ludologist, 22 February 2004. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.

Kain, Erik. “Watch the Terrible 4th of July ‘Assassin’s Creed III’ Live-Action Trailer.’” Forbes, 7 Apr. 2012. Web. 6 Feb. 2015.

Konstam, Angus. Pirates: The Complete History from 1300 BC to the Present Day. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011. Print.

Lear, Anna. “What’s the point of buying art?” Arqade. StackExchange, 30 Oct. 2013. Web. 1 Aug. 2015.

Lichfield, John. “French left loses its head over Robespierre game,” The Independent, 17 Nov. 2014. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

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

Lupton, Christina, and Peter McDonald. “Reflexivity as Entertainment: Early Novels and Recent Video Games.” Mosaic 43.4 (2010): 157-73. Print.

McKeon, Michael. “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 382-99. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964. Print.

Miller, Monica K., and Alicia Summers. “Gender Differences in Video Game Characters’ Roles, Appearances, and Attire as Portrayed in Video Game Magazines.” Sex Roles 57 (2007): 733-42. Print.

Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.

O’Driscoll, Sally. “The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body.” The Eighteenth Century 53.3 (2012): 357-79. Print.

Partridge, Stephanie. “The Incorrigible Social Meaning of Video Game Imagery.” Ethics & Information Technology 13.4 (2011): 303-12. Print.

Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Print.

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

Shaw, Adrienne. “What is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies.” Games and Culture 5 (2010): 403-24. Print.

Suellentrop, Chris. “Slavery as New Focus for a Game.” The New York Times, 27 Jan. 2014. Print.

Swann, Marjorie. Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Print.

Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon, 2004. Print.

Terlecki, Melissa, et al. “Sex Differences and Similarities in Video Game Experience, Preferences, and Self-Efficacy: Implications for the Gaming Industry.” Current Psychology 20.1 (2011): 22-33. Print.

VineAngus. In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.

Ubisoft. “Ubisoft FY14 Earnings Presentation,” 15 May 2014. Web. 16 Jan 2015.

Warner, William. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1998. Print.

“Where does the art show up?” Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. GameFAQs, 2013. Web. 1 Aug. 2015.

Woodard, Colin. The Republic of PiratesBeing the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007. Print.

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | The Reading Completionist

Seth Rudy


The Reading Completionist

In addition to digital renditions of rare manuscript pages and objects of antiquarian interest, the database also contains numerous other “documents” that explicitly refer to the making of ACIV itself. This self-reflexive irony at the outermost level of the simulation encourage players to maintain critical distance from the game and once again situates them in a twenty-first century version of an eighteenth-century cultural discourse — this time, that of prose fiction. As Christina Lupton and Peter McDonald have argued, certain tropes of modern video games in general make them the clear inheritors of novels from the mid-eighteenth century. In addition to “the panicked responses” both have provoked as popular entertainment, Lupton and McDonald cite as examples of shared self-reflexivity common instances of dialogue about gameplay within the diegesis and parallels between the material book and the game-world as navigable but self-consciously artificial and contained spaces (168).[1] ACIV goes beyond such examples and complicates the connection by separating its reflexive commentary from the eighteenth-century simulation and making it a matter of reading about the creation of that simulation from the first-person perspective of the Abstergo employee — provided, once more, that the player decides to do so.

Completionists, which term refers to a subset of players who must do everything, see everything, and in this case, read everything a game has to offer, will have a different understanding of the game and its relationship to the eighteenth century it portrays than will the sensation-seeking or casual players. The former, for instance, will learn the extent to which even the physical features of the Animus’ West Indies are a carefully considered authorial construction rather than an absolutely accurate recreation of historical reality. Whereas the Animus simulation always conceals or wordlessly passes over its anachronisms, the database sometimes reveals them. In those moments, the “creators” of the game reveal themselves, as in the entry on the Cathedral of Havana (fig. 14). Within the historical simulation, the cathedral constitutes what Annette Barnes and Jonathan Barnes label a “nonobvious anachronism,” a “potentially vicious” inclusion insofar as its “subtle blend of fiction and fact can render observers unable to distinguish between falsity and truth” (258).[2] The same holds true for the Queen’s Staircase in Nassau, which while not actually in Nassau until 1793 was considered “too iconic” to exclude. If read, then the entries on these landmarks undo the potential viciousness of the nonobvious anachronisms; they do so by identifying their inclusion as a matter of authorial choice rather than absolute historical fidelity, which in turn subverts the implicit claim to historicity upon which much of the eighteenth-century apparatus supporting the obviously fictional master narrative is founded.

 

The database, in other words, teaches its readers to maintain a skeptical posture with respect even to the supposedly accurate eighteenth-century environments they observe as players within the Animus — the detailed rendering of which environments might otherwise grant the medium particular distinction as a vehicle for the representation of historical truth. If, as Michael McKeon writes, “extreme skepticism was groping toward a mode of narrative truth-telling which, through the very self-consciousness of its own fictionality somehow detoxifies fiction of its error,” then ACIV applies a similar mode of truth-telling to an aspect of its narrative that players might still think they only have to see to believe (389). “Truth,” as the notes following the description of the cathedral reveal, does not necessarily precede “beauty” in the hierarchy of design priorities. “People want to see landmarks,” and so the designers weave them seamlessly into the verisimilar worlds they and their teams create. The database entries then reveal the stitching, thereby teaching the player how to “read” the game.

To form a full understanding of how far the fiction of ACIV goes beyond Kenway’s interactions with Read, Rackham, Roberts, Bonny and Blackbeard requires a mode of autonomous engagement encouraged by early eighteenth-century novels but in this case greatly enhanced by the Ubisoft team’s use of the new technology at their disposal. “Early novels,” Lupton and McDonald note, “often represent themselves as multi-directional, architectonic spaces to be traversed by a reader who can be sent backward and forwards between the conspicuously artificial boundaries of pages and scenes. J. Paul Hunter observes that “there has always been a taunting, teasing quality about the way novels promise to tell secrets and open up hidden rooms” (35). In ACIV, players can move between database entries and the entire simulated world simply by pressing the “back” button and scrolling to the desired location, and the game makes Hunter’s metaphors a literal part of the Abstergo office architecture. Players sneak into a video surveillance bay, use an outdoor window-cleaning rig to enter a locked executive office, and gain access to the subbasement mainframe housing in order to hack computers and locate secret documents by winning simple mini-games posing as cybersecurity measures.

One of these documents engages directly with a conundrum that many eighteenth-century authors of prose fiction no doubt would have recognized. Approximately 1,400 words into a 1,700-word “confidential” corporate email exchange about the future of the franchise, a chief Abstergo officer asks, “couldn’t we be using this technology to educate, not placate?” The response captures the conflict between the potential of the technology to disseminate knowledge and the realities of the popular entertainment market:

Okay, come on. Until oily, humorless university professors start paying us eight-figure fees to research the “reification of normative gender signifiers in pre-colonial India,” why don’t we STICK TO SHIT THAT SELLS?

I’m talking Jack the Ripper in Victorian London. I’m talking about guillotines, Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte in the French Revolution? I’m talking about Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp in the Wild American West. I’m talking about Genghis Khan and the Mongols killing a city of millions in the span of a long, summer weekend. Action. Blood. Adventure. CONFLICT.

Competition in a crowded marketplace is certainly nothing new. In the first decades of the eighteenth century (a period that largely overlapped with the Golden Age of Piracy), the popularity of amatory fiction made prose fiction a source of great moral concern. According to William Warner, “the incorporation of the novel of amorous intrigue within the elevated novel of the 1740s is one of the means by which old pleasures are disowned and forgotten” (42). The first executive’s desire to use the Animus technology and by extension video games as a means of education rather than placation gestures towards Fielding’s efforts to elevate his “new species of writing.” To a limited extent, ACIV also follows a similar strategy of incorporation and disavowal; the conspicuous absence of peg legs and hook hands among a host of famous pirates, the efforts to distinguish the game from an interactive Pirate Spring Break, and the hiding of “useless” manuscripts and works of art in secret treasure chests all revise old, popular, and problematic pleasures of the genre.

The email exchange, though, finally suggests that Abstergo and by implication Ubisoft (and perhaps the industry at large) are not yet ready or able to make the kind of declarative break with “hardcore” video games that Fielding effected with amatory fiction. The moment of self-critical self-awareness occurs deep within a conversation that (as with the Abstergo trailers, the items that make up the Art Collection, and the database entries on anachronistic landmarks) need never come to light. Even when the narrative obliges players to recover such documents, it does not or cannot compel a reading or viewing of them. Readers of Fielding’s novels could, once they recognized what was before them, skip his explanatory prefaces or the ironic meta-commentaries of his narrators. The equivalent features in ACIV, though, occupy spaces parallel to the scenes of action rather than in their way. The game, like the Abstergo officers, thus remains structurally as well as ideologically divided upon the matter of the right ratio of dulce to utile. Following the (thoughtless, outrageous, possibly unfair) disparagement of university professors, Abstergo’s Chief Creative Officer steps in to take the conversation offline. To the player, the dispute is therefore left unresolved.


NOTES

[1] Their analysis refers severally to Escape from Monkey Island (2000), the fourth installment in another video game franchise set against the background of Golden Age of Piracy.

[2] Quoted by Douglas N. Dow, “Historical Veneers,” 220.

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Collecting and Collectibles

Seth Rudy


Collecting and Collectibles

There was more to life in the early eighteenth-century than piracy. The game provides in-game access to a supplementary database that grows as the narrative unfolds but leaves players to determine the extent of their interaction with its contents. By inviting players to become avid collectors, for example, the game not only remediates the cultural phenomena of early modern antiquarianism and the curiosity cabinet but also creates the potential for the social meaning of those phenomena to be brought to bear upon the game itself. If the Animus brings the player into the eighteenth century, then the database once again brings the eighteenth century back out into the modern world of Abstergo and Ubisoft to address and reform the cultural status of the video game as a form of entertainment.

Video games have long required players to acquire objects scattered or hidden throughout their worlds. A distinction, however, must be made between “collecting” in ACIV and the simpler “gathering” of weapons, medicines, and other practical items. In addition to descriptions of these materials, the database stores information on characters historical and fictional, locations and landmarks, animals, ships, and sea shanties. It also houses “Documents” and an “Art Collection,” both of which require more deliberate effort to complete. Beyond the messages in bottles and electronic notes referring to the series’ overarching fictions, the Documents database includes pages from twenty actual texts: players can, for instance, view images of and from Athanasius Kircher and Christoph Scheiner’s Mundus Subterraneus (1664-65), Diego Muñoz Camargo’s History of Tlaxcala (1585), the fifteenth-century Voynich manuscript, and the pre-Columbian Dresden Codex (Codex Dresdenis). The Art Collection holds an additional fifty items ranging from paintings by Claude Lorrain and Peter Lely to fine furniture and musical instruments to zoological specimens and antiquarian objects such as Taino figurines, Aztec sculptures, and Nigerian jewelry. To collect the rare manuscripts, players must unlock the locations of “secret” treasure chests, journey to each one of those locations, dispatch their guards, and open the chests; items in the Art Collection come from opening trade routes in the Fleet metagame or purchasing them outright.

To create a world in which Kenway can participate in an ersatz culture of collecting makes historical sense. The collecting career of Hans Sloane, another kind of “self-made man,” as Marjorie Swann describes him, began in Jamaica, and by the 1690s the practices that culminated in his extensive collection had significant social importance beyond the upper echelons in which eventually he found himself:

Lower down the social scale, men in seventeenth-century England assembled ‘cabinets of curiosities’ rather than collections of art…Antique coins, scientific instrument, minerals, medals, rare or unusual zoological specimens, plants, natural and manmade objects from Asia and the Americas, intricate carvings, portraits of important historical figures — the early modern English cabinet of curiosities was an exuberant hodgepodge of ‘the singular and the anomalous.’ (195; 1-2)[1]

The ACIV database combines such curiosities — “collectibles,” in video game parlance — with the art and texts of collections proper. The poor, Welsh privateer and pirate Kenway would therefore seem to seek not only the wealth and power that comes from piracy but also the social status of his betters.[2] In the case of the manuscript pages, Kenway comes into their actual possessions; according to the database, they all once belonged to the immensely wealthy planter and lieutenant governor of Jamaica, Colonel Peter Beckford.[3]

Collecting, then, might be said to function as another act of social subversion akin to the cross-dressing of Bonny and Read, the establishment of a pirate republic in Nassau, or any number of other simultaneously political, economic, social, and piratical activities. By game’s end, Kenway’s “hideout” on Grand Inagua, if fully upgraded, includes a façade, towers, gardens, and a guesthouse; the Art Collection bedecks his walls and fills his shelves (fig. 12). The hideout thus becomes what Swann describes as an “elite house,” the purpose of which by the1670s was “no longer to demonstrate lineage” but rather “to dazzle in its profuse display of rarities, all of which bespoke the owner’s financial ability to amass objects of no use-value” (148). The objects are indeed useless, as several players have noted: in a message thread asking, “what’s the point of buying art,” for example, one such player observes that the collection “seems like a waste of money” and wonders if it serves an “in-game purpose” (Lear). Anonymous NPCs chat in corners as if taking in the spectacle of bat-nosed figurines and Mayan yoke-form vessels amid the more conventional markers of material wealth. Kenway seems, at least beyond Britain, to enjoy the trappings and social status of a gentleman, even though he has literally built his grand estate atop a massive pile of pirate booty secreted in the underground caverns.

A similar logic of social or cultural elevation applies to ACIV itself. In a franchise premised upon the possibility of accessing the past, collecting and the collection may indeed constitute the game’s most immediately self-relevant examples of remediated cultural phenomena. If “a collection is always steeped in ideology and functions as a site of processes of self-fashioning that may serve either to reinforce or to undermine the dominant categories of the society in which the collection appears,” then the presence in a video game of a collection that would not be out of place in an eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet again focuses attention on the self-reflexivity of ACIV as a video game (Swann 8). “In general terms,” Angus Vine writes, “the antiquary conceived of himself as bridging the gap between past and present, affording ‘olden time’ presence so that it might speak to or inform the current time. For this reason John Aubrey likened antiquarianism to ‘the Art of a Conjuror who makes those walke and appeare that have layen in their graves many hundreds of yeares: and represents as it were to the eie, the places, customs and Fashions, that were of old Time’” (3, 5).[4] ACIV strives to do the same; in the Animus, the dead walk again, and if they do not follow precisely the same paths charted by the historiographers, they nevertheless offer a vision of the fragmented past imaginatively reconstructed and made whole.[5]

Though already subject to critical scorn by the late seventeenth century, antiquaries’ devotion to and curiosity about the past survived into and beyond the period of the game’s historical setting. Their belief that “artefacts excavated from barrows, ancient buildings and even the landscape — as well as manuscripts — could be made to yield up the secrets of the past” echoes in the artworks, artifacts, and manuscripts re-presented in the game. The old media though which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquaries sought to “reconstruct the ‘shipwreck of time’” become the contents of a new medium that pursues or, as ACIV particularly demonstrates, could be made to pursue the same or similar ends (Sweet xvi).[6] The inclusion of European art and objects from the period simply suggests that it has become another part of history in need of recovery and reconstruction. Within the fictional framework of the series, that process proceeds not by collecting material fragments of cultures, but rather by collecting material fragments of people in the form of DNA, through which the Animus allows Templar and Assassin agents to access genetically encoded memories. The game offers itself and its simulation as real-life answers to that fantasy: not the advanced technology of a lost civilization, but perhaps (for now) the next best thing — a stop between the antiquarianism of an earlier age and that of an imaginable future.

At best, ACIV can only uncomfortably occupy a position in the antiquary or indeed any other scholarly tradition. Its acknowledged inaccuracies and ludicrous framing narrative make it a work of historical fiction, and though that fiction relies upon serious historiography, the game in general neither asks nor expects to be taken seriously as such itself. ACIV knows its limits and understands its obligations as a game built, like Kenway’s house, upon piracy and gold. It also, however, gestures toward the potential of the medium to do other kinds of work, and it implicates the player as a potential obstacle or asset to achieving what might be its more culturally elevating ends. On the one hand, players can ignore the Art Collection and Manuscripts sections completely; the game requires no interaction with them. Alternatively, they can cultivate an intellectual curiosity by viewing the collections directly through the database or via a room that, as one player grudgingly puts it, “you never go into, unless you wander around the house. Blah” (“Where does the art show up?”). Though once accessed, the programmatic interface and structures of the database set the operational parameters of the experience, players must first actively choose to become “subversive” gamers in their willingness to do more than hack and slash their way through the Golden Age of Piracy in pursuit of pure entertainment.

Fig. 13: Top: “Bat-Nosed Figurine,” in the Art Collection, Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013). Bottom: “Bat-Nosed Figure Pendant,” (66.196.17), in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000).

Fig. 13: Top: “Bat-Nosed Figurine,” in the Art Collection, Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013). Bottom: “Bat-Nosed Figure Pendant,” (66.196.17), in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000).

Without this kind of self-fashioning, neither Kenway in the eighteenth century nor ACIV in the twenty-first can entirely escape or alter the dominant categories into which their societies have placed them. Those who choose to interact with the collection will experience the added functionality of the game as a virtual museum: the Art Collection represents the holdings of some seven institutions, but 39 of its 50 come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[7] The images are clearly adapted from the Met’s online catalogue, and they come with abbreviated versions of the Met’s descriptions (fig. 13). To read them is to learn, for instance, that the natives of Veracruz may have used mirrored costume elements to connote high rank, that one could construct an expensive commode out of layered brass and tortoise shells, and that Hendrik Richters made some of the finest oboes of the early eighteenth century. ACIV combines the collecting of the amateur antiquary with the authority of a curated museum exhibition and thus (potentially) elevates the cultural status of the game. The objects and information add an educational element likely outside the general horizons of expectation for a pirate-themed, action-adventure virtual experience — particularly one like that advertised in Abstergo’s cliché-laden Devils of the Caribbean trailer.

NOTES

[1] Swann quotes Lorraine J. Daston, 461.

[2] “Initially pursued as an elite cultural form, the collection was soon adopted — and adapted —by ambitious, middling sort men” (Swann 194). Though less than middling, Kenway is certainly ambitious.

[3] The database supplies Beckford’s first and last names but not his rank or titles. The manuscript pages were “stolen sometime after 1705”; Beckford’s death in 1710 makes him rather than his son, also Peter, their most likely original owner.

[4] Vine quotes John Aubrey (4).

[5] “This act of the imagination,” writes Peter N. Miller, “lies at the heart of the antiquary’s reconstructive ambition” (31).

[6] This theorization of content and medium belongs to Marshall McLuhan; see Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (8).

[7] The institutions are not identified within the database, but the objects and their homes are easily located online. The other six are: the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the Royal Gallery, Windsor; the Whydah Pirate Shipwreck Museum, Provincetown; the Science Museum, London; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; and Staatsgalerie Schleissheim, Munich. Two items, the beaver pelt and Scherer’s Globe, could not be positively placed.

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Atlantic Slavery and Ludic Freedom

Seth Rudy


Atlantic Slavery and Ludic Freedom

The game is not, though, equally willing to allow for ambiguity with respect to what lead writer Darby McDevitt calls the “delicate subject” of slavery. McDevitt explains: “slavery is a theme, but I didn’t want it to be sensational…The books I read were full of horror stories, and I tried to work in some of those, at least anecdotes and stories, and make it a background fact of life” (Campbell). ACIV accordingly treats slavery as too delicate a subject to risk the contingency of ludic experience.[1] Though in some respects the game allows what Bogost calls “free-form transitions” between play styles — defined in part as the ability to “orient one’s conception of right and wrong in relation to a whole host of activities” — where slavery is concerned, ACIV resorts to “crude prohibition” (154-56). The game, in other words, limits ludic freedom at the expense of historical authenticity. ACIV’s twenty-first century narrative overwrites eighteenth-century realities regardless of the ways in which the resultant foreclosures contradict the parameters of play in other aspects of its simulation; the fiction of the Animus thus reveals itself as such wherever and whenever the narrative overrides the possibility or the probability of “free” interactions between players and the facts of the early eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade.

Slavery was the sine qua non of Golden Age piracy in its final decade. The end of the War of the Spanish Succession left thousands of sailors adrift, and Johnson specifically identifies “the Returns of the Assiento, and private Slave-Trade, to the Spanish West-Indies” as a major reason why “these seas are chose by Pyrates” (26). “To many white pirates,” W. Jeffrey Bolster writes, “the majority of blacks were pawns, workers, objects of lust, or a source of ready cash,” and though able black sailors “like … Kidd’s quartermaster were welcome in the Brethren of the Coast, it was with the understanding that black and white pirates preyed on black and white victims” (15-16).[2] In 1718, at a time when up to a third of the vessels journeying to Western Africa were harassed by pirates — slavers making the best pirate ships — black sailors constituted the majority of Blackbeard’s crew (Linebaugh and Rediker 165).[3] A General History specifically mentions slaves, slavery, or the slave trade 31 times, and the word “negro” or one of its variants 50 times — four more times than “death” — or approximately once every 14 and nine pages, respectively.

In short, chattel slavery does not readily recede into the background of life in the West Indies during this period. It was indeed often the immediate business of piracy — a “fact of life” necessarily among those foremost in the minds of pirate crews whenever they intercepted prizes laden with human cargo. Though, as Rediker observes, “formerly enslaved Africans or African Americans who turned pirate posed questions of race” just as “women who turned pirate called attention to the conventions of gender,” the game largely skirts the questions raised by the intersections of slavery and piracy and instead imposes upon its simulation moral codes and fiscal positions inconsistent with the realities of the time (Villains 14).[4] There is no authentic history of Golden Age piracy the game could present that would not put the player in a position to engage in slave trafficking, and though ACIV makes the Trinidadian slave-turned-pirate Adéwalé quartermaster of the Jackdaw, Kenway’s ship, and later sees him too inducted into the order of the Assassins, the game never compels the pair, the player, or indeed any pirates from Johnson’s history to confront even the possibility of such engagement.

A contradiction therefore emerges in the space between the players and the pirates whose lives they experience through Kenway’s memories. Though the main plot points must unfold in a particular order, the open-world format permits a degree of choice with respect to side missions.[5] Players can choose to accept or reject various assassination contracts and ship-based missions, and in the “Kenway’s Fleet” metagame they can determine which if any naval engagements they wish to undertake in order to build their fortunes by securing trade routes and transporting commodities. The morality of those choices, though, is entirely pre-scripted and prescribed. This, for example, is contract 25 (fig. 9):

Fig. 9: “Assassination Contract 25.” Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013).

Fig. 9: “Assassination Contract 25.” Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013).

Contract 03 is somewhat more straightforward (fig.10):

Fig. 10: “Assassination Contract 03.” Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013).

Fig. 10: “Assassination Contract 03.” Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013).

The game includes 30 optional assassination contracts, which if successfully undertaken add to the player’s account a cash reward of between 30,000 and 45,000 reales. Targets include smugglers, grave robbers, corrupt judges, tyrannical officers, maniacal captains, and an assortment of would-be evildoers affiliated with the Templars, but fully five of the 30 send Kenway in pursuit of slavers whose manners and business the contracts describe as “rotten,” “brutal,” “villainy,” “particularly cruel,” and “unusually sadistic.”

All five missions roundly condemn the slave trade — a position mandated by the tenets of the Assassin Order. None, though, identify any of the targeted slavers as pirates. The missions thus follow the narrative in securing the slave trade behind a cordon sanitaire that for the most part protects players from this part of the pirate’s life. Little or nothing is said about slavery even within a circle of friends that includes Blackbeard, whose Queen Anne’s Revenge was the French slave ship La Concorde before he captured it, and Bartholomew Roberts, who served as second mate aboard a slaver and turned pirate when Howell Davis took the ship in 1719.[6] Once made captain in his own right (following Davis’s murder by Portuguese slavers), Roberts “so despised the brutal ways of slave-trading captains” that he ordered or himself gave a “fearful lashing to any captured captain whose sailors complained of his usage” (Rediker, The Slave Ship 22-23). Kenway apparently need never be exposed to similar experiences in order to arrive at similar conclusions; nor does the player ever get to hear of them. Though players can refuse to accept any or all of the contracts, they cannot change their impetus, and any slaves freed in the wake of a slaveholder’s assassination either automatically fill empty slots in the Jackdaw’s crew or vanish into the background.

Even deeper in the “background,” in a metagame accessed through but not actually part of the primary historical simulation, the game simply erases slavery and slaves from its picture of Atlantic commerce. As commodore of a fleet of captured ships, Kenway can (under the player’s direction) dispatch crews and cargoes to dozens of ports, including those of the Triangle Trade. Each dot indicates a port at which the player can exchange goods for ship upgrades, artifacts, treasure maps, and cash. Trade routes extend as far north as Galway, London, and Bristol and as far south as South Africa. The above map (fig. 11) highlights Cape Verde and three West African ports associated with it: Dakar, Bissau, and Ziguinchor. All four were established sites of the slave trade before, during, and after the period in which the game is set; so too were Benguela and Luanda, represented by the coastal dots to the southeast.[7] The icons at the top of the map, though, show that the holds of Kenway’s fleet contain only rice, tobacco, cocoa, wine, and olive oil. The map thus shows the sites of slavery, but not what put those sites on the map in the first place.

Fig. 11:  “Kenway’s Fleet” metagame map.  Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013)

Fig. 11: “Kenway’s Fleet” metagame map. Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013)

With respect to slavery and race, then, the game abandons the strategic ambiguity it established and ultimately maintained regarding the questions of gender and sexuality raised by Bonny and Read. Rather than risk players’ creating “incorrigible social meaning” by attempting to profit from slavery, as some undoubtedly would, ACIV — no doubt following the North Star of profitability to Ubisoft — fixes Kenway’s moral compass.[8] The designers’ decision to downplay or remove the slave trade from the game and to resolve Kenway’s involvement with slavery as an absolute and a priori rejection rather than a flexible series of financial calculations more in keeping with the nature of historical piracy clearly reveals the primacy of narrative control over even those operations the outcomes and potential significations of which remain separate from the main story. The game could but does allow for eighteenth-century actions that should be but are probably not beyond players’ willingness to undertake — even if such restrictions critically undermine the integrity of a fictional framework premised upon the possibility of experiencing a realistic past.


NOTES

[1] As Andrew Elliot and Matthew Kapell explain, “ludic” “carries with it the implication of spontaneous or aimless play” and emphasizes “the sense that games are not designed as artifacts only to be looked at or understood narratively like films or television” (3). More broadly, the ludic facilitates or encourages exploration and meaning-making rather than the strictly linear progression through assigned tasks; see W.W. Gaver, et al., “The drift table: designing for ludic engagement.”

[2] Woodard recounts the story of the Whydah Gally, a 300-ton three-master with room “for 500-700 slaves or a large cache of plundered treasure.” The ship “had everything a pirate might want” and was taken in 1717 by the pirate Samuel Bellamy (156-58). A “Whydah Gally style bell” appears in the game as a collectible but comes with no note of the ship’s purpose.

[3] For pirates’ preference for slave ships, see Arne Bialuschewski, “Black People under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718–1723.”

[4] The omission received notice in major outlets. Chris Suellentrop, for example, writes that ACIV “virtually ignores the vital role that chattel slavery played in the economy of” the “Caribbean” (“Slavery as New Focus for a Game”).

[5] Mary DeMarle refers to this design as a “gated story”; see “Nonlinear Game Narrative,” in Game Writing: Narrative Skill for Videogames.

[6] Blackbeard neither kept nor sold the “miserable human cargo” aboard La Concorde, but he did leave them on Bequia (part of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), “where they would soon be rounded up by the French captain and his men” (Konstam 191).

[7] The Portuguese in Cape Verde had relied upon slave labor since the sixteenth century; the cotton plantations there ensured that the islands remained important to the slave trade throughout the 1700s (Barry 40-42). For the histories of Benguela and Luanda in the period, see Roquinaldo Ferreira, “Slaving and Resistance to Slaving in West Central Africa.”

[8] The phrase belongs to Stephanie Partridge, who argues that, “some video games contain details that anyone who has a proper understanding of and is properly sensitive to features of a shared moral reality will see as having an incorrigible social meaning that targets groups of individuals… [V]ideo game designers have a duty to understand and work against the meanings of such imagery” (304).

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Remediating the “Female Pyrates”

Seth Rudy


Remediating the “Female Pyrates”

A game devoted to the representation of piracy as the subject of popular entertainment in the eighteenth century would have to include those contemporaneously famous figures that Johnson’s own History billed on its title page above every single ship’s captain, including their own (fig. 4). The layout indicates that the actions and adventures of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read are even more “remarkable” than those of the men below; though literally “contain’d” in the chapter on Jack Rackham, under whose flag they sailed, their names and stories have in another sense escaped containment and threatened to disrupt the social and sexual hierarchies of the day. The challenge they posed to normative gender roles in eighteenth-century Europe have twenty-first century corollaries; to encounter Bonny and Read within the historical simulation is to confront the presence of transgressive women in not one but two spaces conventionally viewed as ‘masculine’ or male-dominated: the worlds of eighteenth-century piracy and twenty-first century “hardcore” video game culture.[1] While that simultaneousness introduces a potentially problematic presentism that jeopardizes the perception of that phenomenon as historically accurate, it also re-contextualizes and therefore recreates some degree of the sense and sensationalism of the phenomenon in its original time.

Fig. 4: Title Page, A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd ed. (1724). Smithsonian Library, 39088002097426.

Fig. 4: Title Page, A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd ed. (1724). Smithsonian Library, 39088002097426.

Whereas pirates with hooks for hands and parrots for companionship have maintained near-iconic (albeit comic or operatic) status despite a relative lack of historical precedent, representations of Bonny and Read (or characters like them) have experienced precisely the opposite. Their stories, as Diane Dugaw writes, “continued to be popular reading fare well into the nineteenth century” as part of a larger preoccupation with lower-class “gender disguising heroines” (183). Their place in popular culture, though, has since dwindled, especially in comparison to their male counterparts — even those who owe their apparent immortality almost entirely to fiction. While “their cross-dressing adventures were not as unusual among early modern women as previously believed,” Rediker adds, “many modern readers must have doubted them, thinking them descriptions of the impossible” (Villains 166). To those members of the hardcore gaming community most likely to have had their first encounters with Bonny and Read through this medium, and even more so to those gamers whose gender and perspective are already in alignment with those of Edward Kenway, it therefore seems likely that ACIV’s representation of what Rediker calls “not the typical, but the strongest side of popular womanhood” in the early eighteenth century would appear improbably modern (Villains 174) — a sociopolitical anachronism rather than an historicized representation of phenomena separated from the world as they know it by three hundred years of patriarchal dominance, to say nothing of the continuing influence of entrenched dynamics in video game culture and the distortions of the Disney industrial complex.[2]

At first gaze, the game would seem to support that perspective by wrapping its female pirates in the trappings of modern marketing strategies that heighten their conventional sexuality at the expense of the destabilizing power of gender amorphousness. In comparison to their depiction in Johnson’s text, for example, Ubisoft presents a physically slighter, more “feminine” Read and an overtly sexualized Bonny (figs. 5 and 6).

Fig 5_Johnson_Bonny_Read.jpg

Fig. 5: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. A General History (1724). © The British Library Board. C.121.b.24.

Figure 6: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013).

Figure 6: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft (2013).

While such modeling reflects trends within the industry, it also reflects the popular fate of Bonny and Read in the eighteenth century.[3] In 1725, Hermanus Uytwerf published a Dutch edition of A General History featuring a different interpretation of the by-then already famous female pirates (fig. 7). The engravings in Historie der Englesche zee-roovers (1725) display both women with wilder hair, smaller noses, thinner faces, narrower trousers, and — most unambiguously — exposed breasts. Ubisoft’s Bonny and Read, then, are not necessarily more sexualized than were Johnson’s.[4]

Fig. 7: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers (1725) © The British Library Board. 9555.aaa.1.

Fig. 7: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers (1725) © The British Library Board. 9555.aaa.1.

Their remediation of the female pirates as portrayed in these works creates the possibility of an historical experience the authenticity of which derives in part from its playing out again in a new social context. Sally O’Driscoll offers an overview of the engravings’ original significance:

The swift visual repackaging of Bonny and Read can be read as a process of sexualization, part of the cultural work that made Bonny and Read into glamorous, notorious, and malleable figures used to reframe and normalize excessive or problematic female behavior. But it can also be read as the sign of an emerging fascination with the female body qua body — a fascination that is accompanied by a detailed rhetoric of investigation. The eighteenth century’s concern with the female body is made manifest through a willingness to interrogate the material reality of the female body, its uses and functions, its social meaning. The pirates’ breasts are not simply a sign of their femaleness: they are a clue to the nature of womanhood itself (a concept that changed drastically during the course of the eighteenth century), an ambiguous signifier of what women are or should be — and a reminder of how far these particular women have strayed from the ideal. And in yet another layer of meaning, the pirates’ breasts offer pleasure: the narrative frames them in such a way that the audience can enjoy them — we are given permission to commodify and consume the images of female bodies displayed for our amusement (359-60).

The issues raised by Johnson’s history and the visual repackaging of Bonny and Read in the eighteenth century are raised again by the remediation of that repackaging in the twenty-first. The social meaning of the female body remains fraught, particularly in a world notorious for the often exaggerated proportions and misogynistic treatment of its female characters but which is increasingly becoming a contested space as player demographics and demands continue to shift — promising (or, to some minds, threatening) to destabilize the established social order of core game subculture and stereotypical notions of what women can, are, or should be within it.

Ubisoft’s simulation reproduces a version of the two histories’ intertextual dynamic entirely within itself. The bodies of Read and Bonny are not as interchangeable in the game as they appear in the engravings, which differ greatly across the texts but not across the images within them. Unlike the Bonny of Johnson’s text, for example, ACIV’s Bonny never cross-dresses; the game thus foregoes the possibility of her passing as male. The game here seemingly follows Uytwerf’s translation in superficially eradicating what O’Driscoll calls the “frisson of ambiguity” surrounding the women in Johnson’s original (359). Indeed, Kenway first encounters Bonny serving drinks to and staving off the advances of a drunken Rackham; players thus immediately see her in a stereotypically gendered role and wearing revealing attire while under the implied sexual threat of a man. Kenway’s very presence in the scene furthermore suggests, albeit obliquely, his greater suitability as a match and by extension the possibility of her eventual normalizing domestication.

Almost as immediately, however, the scene restores a degree of gender instability. When Rackham grabs her by the arm and asks, “dear lady, what do they call you?” Bonny responds, “Anne when they’re sober, a jilt when they’re sauced, but never ‘lady.’” She rejects the epithet as well as the man who would impose it upon her, and though Kenway sits within blade’s reach, she gives no indication that his intervention is wanted or necessary. As she pulls away from Rackham, he simply spills out of his chair and onto the floor in inebriated impotence. Despite her circumstances and appearance, Bonny neither sees herself nor allows the player to see her as a damsel in distress.

The game’s characterization of Read, meanwhile, amplifies the frisson of ambiguity beyond even what Johnson achieved. Whereas A General History boldly advertised the names and narratives of both its female pirates, ACIV conceals those of Mary Read until the fifth of 12 memory sequences. Kenway knows Read only as “James Kidd,” the illegitimate son of William Kidd. They fight in tandem (Read is also an Assassin), and at no point before she reveals her identity does any character hint at having had doubts. Johnson insists the same held true amongst her actual shipmates.[5] More importantly, messages posted by players to online forums reveal that Read also passed as Kidd beyond the diegesis. A post in an Assassin’s Creed subreddit, for instance, asks if anyone else “found James Kidd attractive,” and while many of the 83 responses insist that Kidd’s “feminine voice” and “feminine features” revealed the truth immediately, others “just assumed that he was a physically underdeveloped guy” or “a teenager whose voice hadn’t developed yet.” One player wrote, “when I first heard Kidd speak, I remember thinking that the voice actor sounded quite feminine, but I didn’t even consider that the character might be female…Since I was so busy pondering the gender of the voice actor (rather than the character), the twist caught me by surprise” (“Did Anybody Else…?”). In this case, the ambiguity transcends the game and the historical world it simulates to trouble issues of gender in the “real” world and the making of the game itself.

Together, Ubisoft’s Bonny and Read collapse the conceptual distance between the representation of women in the game and the representation of women in gaming — a collapse facilitated by a metanarrative that refashions the Animus into a game console. If recognized, then this alignment allows players to experience the significance of the female pirates as immediately rather than only historically relevant, just as readers might have in 1725. If players have misidentified the characters as “impossible” anachronisms, then that immediacy becomes all the more poignant, as implied by this brief exchange within the same subreddit thread (fig. 8):

Fig. 8: Screen capture. Assassin’s Creed IV subreddit. Reddit (2014).

Fig. 8: Screen capture. Assassin’s Creed IV subreddit. Reddit (2014).

The first poster’s grudging acknowledgement that “historical accuracy” legitimizes the reveal of Read’s gender indicates an initially strong and negative presentist experience, whatever its exact substance or significations. Of course, players also remain free — again, just as readers did in 1725 — to enjoy Read and Bonny as female bodies displayed for pleasure and amusement. Comments on the attractiveness of Bonny, Read, and Kidd unsurprisingly pepper the message boards along with occasional and perhaps only tenuously ironic addenda about players questioning their own sexuality and finding reassurance in the reveal.

That interpretive freedom, though necessary to the remediation of eighteenth-century literary and graphical encounters with the female pirates, entails the risk of endorsing or perpetuating stereotypes that diminish their transgressive potential. If on the one hand the script allows Bonny, who vanishes from the historical record after pleading her belly to the authorities in Kingston, to escape and serve as Kenway’s quartermaster, then on the other hand it dresses up the record of Read’s death in a Jamaican jail with a shift, stays, and dark red lip coloring. Both women do at a critical moment become the damsels in distress they initially refused to be, and of the two, only the less sartorially and sexually disruptive gets to live.

These reversals would seem to authorize a final reading of the female pirates as “safely” domesticated. “Yet, the narrative,” as O’Driscoll writes of A General History, “cannot convince the reader of this interpretation because it undercuts itself; Read’s pirate comrades claim that she loved being a pirate, and quote her saying she would never give it up. Read dies at the end…and so does not have the chance to choose an ending that would foreclose the ambiguity of her tale” (364). The same holds true for the Read and Bonny of ACIV. Read’s last words promise Kenway that she will always be with him, but they immediately follow her challenging him to do his part for the Assassin Order as she has done hers; it is unclear to which she is the more devoted. Bonny, meanwhile, finally refuses Kenway’s invitation to return with him to England as well as the possibility of remaining with the Assassins herself. The game, then, may impose upon Bonny the outward trappings of conventional femininity and leave Read to die in Kenway’s arms, but the story does not in itself reduce them to simplistic gender stereotypes. As in A General History, their meaning remains ambiguous, and in Ubisoft’s remediation they not only retain but also gain new power to destabilize.

NOTES

[1] Steven E. Jones notes “the homosocial ethos of much of hardcore gaming” and an industry logic that in general “sees hardcore gamers as gendered ‘masculine.’” In contrast to hardcore gamers, “casual gamers” are those “interested in fun, including women in particular” (142-45). Neither demographic is monolithic. See also Melissa Terlecki, et al., “Sex Differences and Similarities in Video Game Experience, Preferences, and Self-Efficacy: Implications for the Gaming Industry”; Adrienne Shaw, “What is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies”; and Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games.

[2] The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have in the last ten years featured four female pirates: Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann, Zoe Saldana as Anamaria (The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest), Takayo Fischer as Mistress Ching (At World’s End), and Penélope Cruz as Angelica (On Stranger Tides). Of the four, only Mistress Ching represents an identified historical personage; Ching Shih (1775-1844) led a large and organized force in the South China Sea. The other three do don traditionally masculine attire, but the films do not establish any of them as cross-dressing with the intent to pass as men.

[3] “Content analyses of video games and video game advertisements have consistently found that women are underrepresented, more frequently sexualized, more attractive, less powerful, and dressed more scantily than males” (Miller and Summers 735). See also B. Beasley and T. Collins Standley, “Shirts vs. skins: Clothing as an indicator of gender role stereotyping in video games.”

[4] This in no way means that the game does not perpetuate potentially harmful stereotypes of and attitudes toward women; nor does its winking self-reflexivity necessarily absolve Ubisoft for following in the wake of Uytwerf’s Zee-Roovers when history offered an alternative.

[5] “Her Sex,” Johnson writes, “was not so much as suspected by any Person on Board till Anne Bonny, who was not altogether so reserved in point of Chastity, took a particular liking to her,” at which point Read revealed herself to Bonny to “explain her own Incapacity that way” (162).

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Piracy as Popular Entertainment

Seth Rudy

Piracy as Popular Entertainment

Though Ubisoft has solicited the expertise of military historians, investigative journalists, and university professors, the creative license taken in the name of game design has generated feedback ranging from blogpost observations of historical anachronisms to internationally reported accusations of revisionist misprision and cultural bias.[1] Creative license, though, has been part of the history of Golden Age piracy since the days of Golden Age pirates. On the one hand, to recapture that history is to recapture the sensationalism of its contemporary depiction. On the other hand, sensationalism by its very nature strains the bounds of credibility. In other words, reproducing the familiar and frequently outsized features of pirates and piracy — even those features that were part of the popular conception of the Golden Age in or about its historical moment — risks damaging the perception, if not necessarily the fact, of the game’s historical veracity. ACIV’s more apparently authentic representation of piracy, then, ironically depends upon what amounts to, in some respects, a less actually authentic representation of piracy. This contradiction creates a liminal space in which the game can simulate more of the early eighteenth century than scenery and swordplay. By insisting upon a relatively high degree of historical accuracy while jettisoning some of the accrued excesses of popular culture, the game restores the possibility of credulity in the face of the sensational.

The modern pirate mythos owes a great debt to Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724).[2] Acknowledged by lead writer Darby McDevitt as a primary source for the game, the first edition of A General History offered readers biographical overviews of sixteen pirate captains and their crews; a second volume published in 1728 added another ten. Seven of these appear in ACIV as significant non-playable characters (NPCs), as do other figures mentioned or profiled in the text but not given their own chapters. In addition to the notorious ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham, Bartholomew Roberts, and Edward Teach (Thatch, according to the game, but Blackbeard to all), players interact with Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Benjamin Hornigold, Major Stede Bonnet, and Woodes Rogers, first Royal Governor of the Bahamas. Their stories, which Johnson claims to have “had from the authentick Relations of the Persons concern’d in taking the Pyrates, as well as from the Mouths of the Pyrates themselves,” made A General History a bestseller responsible in no small part for the enduring image of Golden Age piracy (a4).[3] The text, Colin Woodard explains, “is riddled with numerous errors, exaggerations, and misunderstandings,” but many of them went undetected for more than two centuries (329). Therefore, what Marcus Rediker labels the “not entirely accurate” portrait of the pirate as “a man with a patched eye, a peg leg, and a hook for a hand” had ample time to develop and secure a seemingly permanent place in the rogues’ galleries of historiography and popular entertainment (Villains 180, 73).

That portrait may have originated in Johnson’s work, but it scarcely appears there. The word “hook” occurs only once in the second edition, in reference to Sandy Hook; in none of the engravings does a pirate sport an eye-patch; and of the four legs recorded lost, Johnson describes only one (belonging to an unnamed crewman under Edward England) as having been replaced by a wooden prosthesis. ACIV similarly has no hook-hands or missing eyes, and at zero it has even fewer false limbs than A General History. Indeed, it has one less than ACIII, which features a “habitual drunkard” actually named Peg Leg who holds clues to the location of Captain Kidd’s legendary buried treasure. The presence of such a character (or caricature) in the earlier game makes its absence from the installment properly devoted to pirates all the more conspicuous. The omission suggests a concerted effort to de-mythologize an icon that began life as a cameo in one chapter of an extensive history of far more significant personages. The peg-legged pirate is “authentick” but not authentic; he has through repeated appearances in popular culture become an ahistorical appendage to pirate lore, like Long John Silver’s shivered timbers, Robert Newton’s exclamations of “arr,” and Douglas Fairbanks’ impossible descent of a square-rigged mast via a knife in the sail. Whereas Robert Louis Stevenson could take inspiration from the one-legged “Fellow with a terrible pair of Whiskers” and the damning manner of an executioner (Johnson 123), ACIV had to remove him from history altogether in order to preserve its integrity as a creditable simulation of the history from which he was removed.

The team’s attempts to validate its version of the Golden Age as authoritative extend to its meta-fictional construct, the setting of which allows for more direct commentary on the content recovered through the Animus and by extension on the game’s relationship to its subject matter. During the course of exploring and hacking into the systems of the Abstergo Entertainment facility in Montreal, players encounter a teaser for an upcoming production based partly upon their own research (fig. 3). The piece begins with perhaps the most recognizable (and now largely self-mocking trope) of the teaser trailer genre. Opening with “in a world” immediately announces that the subject of piracy, at least in Abstergo’s hands, is creatively bankrupt, and what follows is indeed a series of the most familiar and least laudable clichés distilled from a century-long history of pirate movies defined for the last decade largely by the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.[4] The title of Abstergo’s Devils of the Caribbean unavoidably recalls that of the Disney blockbusters and suggests their guilt by association.

The Ubisoft team responsible for ACIV — not at all coincidentally also headquartered in Montreal — knows, and knows that its players know, the competing popular image of piracy; it relies on that knowledge to effect its satirical condemnation via a travesty that revels in its own ridiculousness. The flat, modern American accent over-articulating the silent “h” in hola to a group of “ladies” by a beachside bonfire emblematizes the teaser’s depiction of piracy as nothing more than the high-spirited, alcohol-fueled pursuit of money, violence, and sex; it becomes an eighteenth-century version of Spring Break. The juxtaposition of that caricature with the supposedly historicized world the player has spent hours coming to know via the Animus endows Ubisoft’s version with greater authenticity despite what would and should otherwise be the disqualifying absurdity of a framing fiction involving secret societies, global conspiracies, and ancient civilizations. The game relies upon the players’ familiarity with even more outlandish historical fictions to strengthen its own claim to historicity; the evil Abstergo produces a movie that obviously amplifies the sensational to the ridiculous, which leaves ACIV’s merely sensational depiction closer to one that could pass for historical truth.

Much of what ACIV recounts are indeed the sensational facts of the source texts. While in the Animus, players participate in Blackbeard’s audacious blockade of Charleston, hear the gentlemanly Stede Bonnet admit he “has no art for sailing,” and see the body of Jack Rackham gibbeted at Plumb Point outside the entrance to Port Royal in Jamaica, as described in chapters three, four, and seven of Johnson’s history, respectively.[5] As Kenway scales the towers of a fort at Nassau, he can hear Woodes Rogers reading verbatim from George I’s proclamation offering pardon to any pirates willing to turn themselves in, the text of which Johnson includes in his introduction.[6] Players also, of course, have countless opportunities to play out the parts of a pirate’s life that make for more conventional gaming. Swords are crossed, treasures are sought, and all manner of soldiers, sailors, and civilians come to a variety of bad ends. Kenway can even procure mugs of rum at local taverns; if commanded by the player to drink several in a row, the game introduces motion blur and horizontal tilt to simulate inebriation. At five drinks, the screen fades to black and Kenway wakes up in a haystack, thereby unlocking the “Hungover” achievement.

ACIV, then, does not entirely eschew the baser attractions of going what Johnson called “a-pyrating” in favor of a too supercilious political, social, and economic history of piracy. The nature of an interactive game, though, is such that players can often choose to what extent they wish to engage with such attractions. Much of the treasure hunting occurs in side missions unnecessary to advancing the plot, and apart from the swaggering inebriation of Calico Jack displayed in the cutscenes, most of the drunkenness is relegated to nameless louts waiting in the backgrounds to join Kenway as hired NPC muscle. When aboard Kenway’s ship, the player decides which and how many enemy vessels to attack and how to dispose of their cargoes and crews once sunk or captured. Kenway even has options in his capacity as an Assassin; though the narrative demands that murder must be done, the player can accept or reject any of the game’s additional assassination contracts. Simply put, many of the pirating clichés one would expect to appear in a work of popular entertainment have a place within the Animus, but the simulation resituates them as parts rather than the whole of Golden Age piracy. Most if not all players will certainly indulge in more boarding actions, tavern visits, and bloodletting than the story absolutely demands, but the game nonetheless allows them to chart a via media between the extremes of distorted caricature and corrective historiography.

NOTES

[1] Experts consulted for ACIV include Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates, and Mike Loades, a military historian, documentary television presenter, and weapons expert. Ubisoft enlisted Jean-Clément Martin and Laurent Turcot, historians from the Sorbonne and the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, respectively, to consult on Unity. In addition to the myriad posts, threads, and reviews attending a major title release, ACIII and Unity in particular attracted mainstream media attention for their respective depictions of nationalist jingoism and capitalist propaganda. See, for example, Erik Kain, “Watch the Terrible 4th of July ‘Assassin’s Creed III’ Live-Action Trailer’” and John Lichfield, “French left loses its head over Robespierre game.”

[2] The work originally appeared as A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. “Johnson” is most likely a pseudonym. In his Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1932), John Robert Moore attributed the work to Daniel Defoe; the claim remained controversial. See P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens’s The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. Arne Bialuschewski more recently claimed it for Nathaniel Mist (“Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates”).

[3] Unless otherwise noted, all page numbers refer to this edition.

[4] The pirate movie genre reached a critical and financial nadir in Renny Harlin’s disastrous Cutthroat Island (1995); see Richard E. Bond, “Piratical Americans: Representations of Piracy and Authority in Mid-Twentieth-Century Swashbucklers.” The success of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), somewhat unexpectedly rejuvenated it; Disney has (in spite of diminishing returns) slated the fifth installment in the series, Dead Men Tell No Tales, for release in July 2017. The company’s Treasure Island (1950) also gave to the public a version of Long John Silver without which International Talk Like a Pirate Day (annually celebrated on September 19th) would not be what it is.

[5] Johnson writes, “the Major was but ill qualified for the Business, as not understanding maritime Affairs,” and more simply, “the Major was no Sailor” (91-92).

[6] Rogers delivered the King’s proclamation, known as the Act of Grace, at Nassau in July 1718 (Johnson 33-34).

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy | Enter the Animus

Seth Rudy

Enter the Animus

The Assassin’s Creed series makes the movement between worlds an integral part of its game mechanics. In none of the games do players play the past directly. Instead, each installment operates as a frame narrative in which players enter history through the Animus — a virtual reality machine that allows users to relive and record past lives through the genetically encoded memories of those that lived them. An overarching story situates each adventure within a timeline extending from the near future to 75010 BC, when Adam and Eve rebelled against an older but far more advanced “First Civilization” that originally engineered human beings on Earth as a workforce. Humanity triumphed in the war that followed, but two groups emerged from victory with different visions of the future: the Assassin Order, which champions free will and individuality, and the Order of the Knights Templar, whose members seek to “perfect” civilization by bringing it under their control. As the games reveal, their conflict has been the unseen driving force of human history for more than two thousand years. The Animus remains at its center, for it is the key to recovering the lost First Civilization artifacts needed by the Templars to impose their New World Order.

Beneath the byzantine storyline lies a simple but fantastic conceit: the near-lossless remediation of historical experience. To achieve the complete set of goals for a given memory sequence is to have attained what the Animus and game call “full synchronization” — the reliving of events exactly as those events were lived in the times of the playable avatars. Violating the rules of the game — whether by directing those avatars into areas designated out-of-bounds, failing to achieve specific mission goals, or in any way causing them to die before their time — results in what the series refers to as “desynchronization.” The Animus treats such violations as the player having strayed too far from the avatar’s “actual” experiences; in essence, the historical simulation crashes and the player must restart the memory.

Such crashes, as well as all the information and interfacing options normally provided to enhance the experience of play (including maps, health meters, inventories, tallies of points or money earned) seamlessly integrate game design and mechanics into the fictional framework of the Animus technology. At the same time, though, they quietly call attention to a gap between the promise and the possibility of an absolutely authentic historical experience. The times and places to which the Animus gives access, no matter how richly detailed or historically accurate they appear, are not actually the past; they are marked by the fact of the machine as simulations of the past within simulations of a present accessed via yet another machine — the player’s actual game console. The Animus thus serves as a reminder of an ineradicable distance and difference between past and present even as it creates a sense of approximate overlap.

In the first three games, players enter the Animus via a specific avatar: series protagonist and Assassin descendant Desmond Miles. These installments maintain a third-person perspective of Miles and the Assassins whose memories he relives; players control the main characters’ actions but for the most part view the worlds they occupy from behind and above them (fig. 1). ACIV, however, removes the Animus technology from the darker corners of the ancient conspiracy and reinstalls it in the new entertainment division of “Abstergo Industries,” a Templar front-company. For the first time in the series, the third-person perspective of a specific twenty-first century avatar vanishes in favor of the first-person perspective of a nameless and faceless Abstergo employee (fig. 2). Players now enter the Animus directly from a workstation in Abstergo Entertainment headquarters; charged with gathering scenes from the past for an upcoming “virtual experience” set during the Golden Age of Piracy, they use what amounts to an in-game game console to look over the shoulder and play out the life of privateer cum-pirate Edward Kenway.

 

 

 

 

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Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy

Seth Rudy

Introduction

IN ITS annual earnings report for 2014, the French multinational video game developer and publisher Ubisoft announced that it had shipped more than 11 million copies of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (7). Set roughly between the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and the death of Bartholomew Roberts in 1722, the best-selling ACIV is the second of four major installments in the franchise set in the 1700s: the events of Assassin’s Creed III, released in 2012, take place during the American War of Independence, while Assassin’s Creed: Rogue and Assassin’s Creed: Unity (both 2014), take place during the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution, respectively. Downloadable content and spinoff games expand the series’ coverage to the mid-1730s (Freedom Cry), the decade following the French and Indian War (Liberation), and an alternate history of the 1780s in which George Washington is crowned king of a new American monarchy (The Tyranny of King Washington). Together, these games have provided hundreds of hours of immersive play to tens of millions of people across the planet.[1] With respect to the computer and video game segments of the popular entertainment market, Ubisoft all but owns the eighteenth century.

The entire series’ engagement with history necessarily resonates in the modern world. As Ian Bogost suggests, the very nature of game is such that the world of the player is not separate or separable from that of the simulation. Rather than the artificial and self-contained spaces described by play theorist Johan Huizinga as “magic circles,” Bogost explains, games create “a two-way street through which players and their ideas can enter and exit the game, taking and leaving their residue in both directions.”[2] This “gap” in the magic circle allows for the ideas created within and conveyed by both worlds to interact with and inform each other (135). Simply put, ACIV cannot keep the twenty-first century out of its version of the eighteenth nor its version of the eighteenth century out of the twenty-first.

The flow of ideas through the hermeneutic gap at once limits and enhances the game’s ability to capture and convey an authentic sense of the past it simulates. ACIV’s treatment of pirates and piracy as popular culture, its investment in verisimilitude, and its express concerns with its status as both sensationalistic entertainment and potential vehicle of knowledge remediate similar phenomena that obtained during the same period in which the main action of the game takes place. Such specific resonances have the capacity to generate in modern players ideas and sensations analogous to those discussed and experienced by their eighteenth-century counterparts. In other words, beyond the iconic landmarks, tall ships, and famous figures one would expect from a simulation of the Golden Age of Piracy — experiences in the “eighteenth century” — ACIV remediates experiences of the eighteenth century.

Interactivity and immersion, however, are not without risk, and the traffic of ideas does not go unregulated. If in some respects players remain free to choose their own actions and draw their own conclusions about what they have seen, heard, read, and done, then in others their options and experiences are closely circumscribed by game mechanics and narrative fixity.[3] As this article will show, the success of the game in bringing the eighteenth century to life in the twenty-first therefore varies across and throughout the simulation; the authenticity of experience depends not on any single overreaching feature or function of the game but rather upon the specific relationships of the game and its players to a given historical phenomenon. In what may be its most eighteenth-century gesture, ACIV directly invites players to reflect upon this dynamic by introducing a meta-narrative framework that calls attention to itself as a game, to its players as players, and to its history as simulation.


NOTES

[1] Several installments also feature multiplayer modes that extend game play; these modes, along with the seven novels published by Penguin Books and reams of fan fiction, are beyond the scope of this inquiry.

[2] See Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens.

[3] Narratology and ludology — theorized as a duality perhaps as early as the 1950s, certainly by the 1980s, and according to Jesper Juul utterly exhausted as such by the early 2000s— have been more usefully conceptualized as complementary or overlapping (“The definitive history of games and stories, ludology and narratology”). Espen Aarseth, for instance, writes that, “to claim that there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories. And yet…the difference is not clear-cut, and there is significant overlap between the two” (5). Henry Jenkins has similarly defined a “middle ground position” from which to examine “games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility” (119).

 

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Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750, by Christopher F. Loar

Reviewed by Jason Pearl

In 1519, on a beach in what became Veracruz, Hernando Cortés staged a now infamous display of power in front of five emissaries sent by Montezuma. Horses were made to charge, bells to ring, cannons to boom. This was a performance, not an attack, a carefully choreographed spectacle, and the Aztecs are said to have “lost their senses and fainted away” (Leon-Portilla 26). As Tzvetan Todorov once put it, Cortés’s use of weapons was “of a symbolic rather than a practical nature” (115).

Art imitates life in Christopher Loar’s new book, Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750, which shows that such displays of power were thought to be necessary in England, too, where unruly multitudes—domestic savages—threatened the liberal political order gradually replacing absolutist monarchy. The writers Loar discusses, including Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood, all speculated about how commoners might be made civil or governable, how they could be ruled without direct violence, or simply with less of it. The answer, in many cases, involved gunpowder, but less as an instrument of death than as a sign of an almost magical authority—hence the book’s title. Of course, gunpowder remained unpredictably combustible. In natural philosophy, it was not understood fully until later in the eighteenth century, and guns themselves could be “law forging and law destroying, divine and satanic all at once” (5).

Loar puts Cavendish, Behn, Defoe, Swift, and Haywood in dialogue with a variety of thinkers: Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, on the one hand, and Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben, on the other. Fictions of intercultural contact, the argument goes, revisit very directly those moments of initial political subjection crucial to the natural rights tradition. At the same time, the literature under analysis anticipates current ideas about biopolitics and political theology, particularly Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, and Agamben’s category of the homo sacer. Loar’s engagement with conceptual issues explains why the book has less to say about eighteenth-century political controversies or such disparate historical phenomena as public hangings and pistol dueling, but the gunshot topos certainly deserves the sustained attention it gets, and this is precisely what makes Political Magic stand out next to recent monographs such as Victoria Kahn’s Wayward Contracts (2004), Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire (2008), Elliot Visconsi’s Lines of Equity (2008), and Lauren Benton’s Search for Sovereignty (2010).

The history Loar tells is abstract and foundational. How does a pre-legal, pre-political people become a collective of legal, political subjects? The answer: original laws come from elsewhere, from an outsider with power, or at least the appearance of it. That is why colonial fictions allow for the elucidation of “a universal politics” that closes the distance between cores and peripheries (3). What was happening in the New World—civilizing subjugation—had happened in the Old World during the Roman conquest, and for some that mission never ended, though modern times called for less violent means. We tell ourselves this was an era of disenchantment, when science overcame superstition, but European colonists encouraged naïve awe in the peoples they conquered, and at home vulgar credulity was exploited by skillful political practices that promised but strategically deferred violence. A gunshot lasts a second, but that second is politically formative, its effects reverberating long afterward, perhaps as long as civil society itself.

The first chapter, “Enchanting the Savage: The Politics of Pyrotechnics in the Cavendish Circle,” examines the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and William Davenant, each of whom attempted “to represent sovereignty’s exteriority to the order it founds,” each investigating “the modes in which such an anomalous sovereign can reshape and create a political sphere that is both obedient and free” (36). All three endorsed an absolutist politics, but they also sought to “amplify sovereign power through indirect and largely nonviolent means” (36). Hobbes, we are reminded, never elaborated the steps from savagery to civility. Davenant thought dazzling theatrical spectacles might do the trick, literally a trick. In “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” (1656), Cavendish imagined gunfire doing it—giving Loar his first instance of guns used as political magic. Most compelling is the argument that this shorter narrative and The Blazing World (1666) both idealize female sovereigns not in spite of but because of their femininity: while male rulers are vulnerable to all the corruptions internal to the state, women, precisely because of their liminal political status, can stand outside it, untainted, disinterested.

Chapter two, “Fire and Sword: Aphra Behn and the Materials of Authority,” looks at Behn’s two plays The Widdow Ranter (1689) and The Roundheads (1681) and at her novel Oroonoko (1688), focusing on not just gunpowder but also the burning glass used by the English settlers in Surinam to instill wonder in the native tribesmen. Neglected by most critics, this episode is crucial to the colony’s political strategy; afterward, the English become to the Indians divinely legitimized authority figures, rather than outnumbered military adversaries. Behn, though, like Hobbes, Davenant, and Cavendish, was interested primarily in the problem of “rabble management,” that is the imperative to manage the English rabble, and her three works here dramatize the tragic, seemingly irretrievable, costs of failing to do so (102). Their lesson, unsurprisingly, is that sovereignty depends on discipline effected by fraud and force, on a ruler’s ability to stand not only outside the law but also above it. Unlike James II, the modern king must be “cynical, distant, unromantic,” qualities Oroonoko too lacks before he is executed and his dead body becomes another kind of political fetish, “a sign of the dangers of the opposite pole—raw force—in the practice of government (102, 103).

“Talking Guns and Savage Spaces: Daniel Defoe’s Civilizing Technologies,” the next chapter, and perhaps the best in the book, builds on a previously published article about Robinson Crusoe (1719). Here, Loar also looks at The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720). As for the first, it is shown that Defoe “uses gunpowder in part to underscore the way that British liberty emerges from and depends on civility-making violence” (107). The Farther Adventures and Singleton reimagine this violence more skeptically: “Gunpowder no longer operates as a mysterious sign of divinity or even a tool for carving out a civilized space in the wilderness; it now becomes more closely associated with the ungoverned human passions detached from sovereign authority” (120). In these later texts, therefore, “gunpowder increasingly blurs the line between savage and civilized people and between legitimate sovereignty and mob rule” (120). Particularly intriguing is a discussion of the strange episode in which Singleton and company lay siege to a fortified tree trunk, a sovereign space ultimately penetrated by so much frenzied, relentless gunfire. Loar concludes that the fall of the fort signifies the permeability of sovereign space and implies “the need for formal state structures to exert force and to control the means of violence” (141).

Chapter four, “Doctrines Détestables: Jonathan Swift, Despotism, and Virtue,” turns to Gulliver’s Travels (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729), the Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), and A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701). This section gets its title from Swift’s marginal note in response to Jean Bodin’s argument for absolute and indivisible sovereignty in Six Books on the Commonwealth (1576): detestable doctrine, yes, but maybe also necessary. As Loar argues, “although Swift damns absolutism and tyrants, his writing cannot seem to leave behind the problems to which tyranny appears as a partial solution” (145). We therefore find uncomfortably unironic ideas in A Modest Proposal and ambivalently imperialistic beliefs in Gulliver’s Travels, a text that also has much to say about gunpowder and technological violence. Especially compelling here is a discussion of the flying island that pairs well thematically with Defoe’s treatment of forts in Captain Singleton. As with the tree trunk in Madagascar, Laputa maintains its sovereignty by defensive violence that ultimately renders it defenseless. Looking at the famous canceled passage on the flying city’s destruction, Loar concludes that sovereignty becomes “a quasi-colonial and violent form of intimidation” that finally results in “the death of the political order and civility itself” (178).

“Savage Vision: Violence, Reason, and Surveillance in Eliza Haywood,” chapter five, transitions to the middle of the eighteenth century, when, as conventional wisdom has it, sovereign violence gave way to more distributed forms of authority. Loar pushes against this view, concentrating on two Haywood novels that have received relatively little critical attention, at least until recently: The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) and The Invisible Spy (1755). A version of this discussion of Eovaai appeared recently in article form. Both novels “attend to questions of self-monitoring, autonomy, and sovereign violence,” as well as “the ways that law and civility are, or are not, guaranteed by various forms of surveillance and violence” (182). The discussion of politically cathected objects now expands to include magical devices designed to reform behavior, especially women’s behavior: the sacred telescope in Eovaai and the invisibility belt in Invisible Spy. Ultimately, however, these narratives reveal the insufficiency of surveillance alone, betraying “a fundamental pessimism that leavens their efforts to imagine a self-monitoring society and a rational citizenship for men and women alike” (184). Both texts “allow us to observe a more highly developed model for how sovereignty might leave its violence behind—but cannot” (183).

The conclusion, entitled “Coda: Enemies,” confronts Schmitt’s argument in The Concept of the Political (1927) that political community entails a fundamental distinction between friends and enemies, friends coexisting in a sphere where violence is prohibited, enemies always potentially challenging one another in extreme and even deadly conflicts. As Loar writes, “We might rather imagine a utopian politics that understands peace and political community as perpetually and constitutively threatened, not by enemies but by the very impossibility of any absolute security” (228). It is a welcome note of encouragement in this book of bracing ideas, a book that at times brings to mind the incisive skepticism of Jonathan Lamb and Sandra Macpherson.

Of course, all good work leaves readers wanting more, leaves them eager to pursue lines of inquiry beyond the grasp of any book-length study maintaining its focus on a coherent range of issues. I, myself, wondered if the literature of piracy and fantastic voyages might offer alternatives to the deceitful and violent forms of sovereignty to which the texts Loar examines seem either committed or resigned. Granted, his primary concern is with fictions that reimagine contact between colonists and savages. Moreover, although Loar demarcates his timeline clearly, setting off the literature he discusses from the later Enlightenment, I found myself curious how the relationship between savagery and sovereignty changed when savagery was ennobled, romanticized. How, specifically, did the history of British fiction and its figurations of sovereignty reflect this development?

All in all, Political Magic is an important book that should interest specialists in literature, history, political philosophy, and postcolonial studies. The research is meticulous, the readings careful and confident, the prose lucid and elegant. On page after page, I was struck by the subtlety and sophistication of Loar’s ideas. Perhaps the most significant achievement of Political Magic is the way it shows us a number of familiar texts and makes us look at them—all together—in brand new ways. I had read most of these novels before without fully noticing their preoccupation with guns and gunpowder, let alone the linkage of guns and politics. Thanks to Loar’s book, I will never think about this literature, or teach or write about it, in quite the same way.

Jason Pearl
Florida International University


WORKS CITED

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

Kahn, Victoria. Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2004. Print.

Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of the Mexico. Trans. Lysander Kemp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. Print.

Loar, Christopher F. “The Exceptional Eliza Haywood: Women and Extralegality in Eovaai.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45.4 (2012): 565–84. Print.

—. “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.1–2 (2006): 1–20. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Print.

Visconsi, Elliott. Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. Print.

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Realist Latitudes: Textilic Nationalism and the Global Fiction of the 1720s

Samara Anne Cahill

“The History of Places is in many respects concern’d in the Trade, and the Trade … in many things concern’d in the History.”
Defoe, “Preface” to Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis ii-iii [1]

MODERN society is “uniquely individualist” and emerged due to “the rise of modern industrial capitalism and the spread of Protestantism” (I. Watt 60). This claim is the nucleus of Ian Watt’s well known “triple-rise theory” of the novel: the genre of modernity, characterized by a close attention to the specificities of everyday life that he termed “formal realism,” arose in conjunction with the rise of the middle class and of Protestantism. Moreover, Watt identified Daniel Defoe as England’s first true novelist because “his work offers a unique demonstration of the connection between individualism in its many forms and the rise of the novel. This connection is shown particularly clearly and comprehensively in his first novel, Robinson Crusoe” (62). Watt’s theory has come under fire from so many quarters for so many years—including objections to its teleological bias (John Richetti), its androcentrism (Jane Spencer), and its Anglocentrism (Margaret Doody), to list only a few—that it almost seems churlish to attack him now, almost 60 years after The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) was published. Watt was, in any case, rather heroically attempting to define one of the most slippery and central genres of modern fiction.

But the problem with seeing the novel as the result of a perfect storm of individualism, capitalism, and Protestantism is that the formal realism that Watt takes as his object of study was not a foregone conclusion: many of Defoe’s contemporaries in England were critical of, or at least ambiguous about, individualism (particularly when it clashed with traditional hierarchies), of capitalism and the new credit-based economy, and of Protestantism. Robinson Crusoe as isolated, conflicted Protestant and homo economicus represented one among many alternative models of English identity in its relation to the rest of the world in the crucial decade of the 1720s. Indeed, Rachel Carnell has argued that “many narrative techniques now associated with narrative realism were part of the cultural discourses competing to determine which political version of selfhood would be perceived as normative (10) and warned that twenty-first century readers

should not assume that the dominant Whig political individual was necessarily becoming an abstracted and universalized entity by the middle of the eighteenth century merely because the language of formal political treaties was becoming increasingly abstract. … Certain eighteenth-century narratives … are difficult to categorize as either partisan propaganda or proto-novels; the very difficulty of categorizing these works underscores the discursive interplay between political and novelistic discourse during this period. (37)

Carnell’s analysis focuses on Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Eliza Haywood. Taking her argument as my starting point and extending it to include canonical novelist Jonathan Swift and Jacobite novelist Jane Barker, I argue that the “partisan propaganda” and “proto-novels” of the 1720s that addressed the consumption and legislation of foreign textiles demonstrate how contested the ultimately triumphant Whig individual of canonical realist fiction was. This argument relies on the concept of “textilic nationalism,” a term I coined to describe Jane Barker’s accretive use of references to foreign textiles to formulate a model of a patchwork England that ought to “patch” Jacobite exiles into the national fabric while cutting certain elements out (anyone opposed to the Stuarts; this might include the Dutch, Hanoverians, South Sea stockjobbers, certain Protestants, etc.) (Cahill, “Novel Modes” 163-84). In other words, “textilic nationalism” describes the use of metaphors of textile production and trade to model the English nation as culturally hybrid.

For instance, in a particularly compelling scene in Barker’s final novel, The Lining of the Patchwork Screen (1726), analyzed more closely below, her semi-autobiographical heroine Galesia tries to sell her allegorical virtues, represented as outlawed Indian textiles, to the women of London. They rebuff her sales representative and threaten her with legal action. With this rejection Barker associates Indian calicoes (functioning as literal objects of trade and metaphors for the contraband virtue of exiled Jacobites) with true Englishness and contradistinguishes this virtuous imported contraband from the domestic production of a corrupt Hanoverian England. Swift, in The Drapier’s Letters, “A Modest Proposal,” and his political writing uses the textile trade to articulate the proper boundaries of the Irish nation. But in doing so he also delimits English nationalism—Ireland and England share a king, but the citizens of both nations are equal and independent subjects of that king. Defoe, by contrast, argues for the restriction and subordination of both Irish and Asian textile imports for the sake of the weaver, the common man of England.

If Barker, Defoe, and Swift did formulate competing models of textilic nationalism, as I contend, then a number of their similarities and divergences—particularly surrounding the issue of how to strengthen the national economy through protectionist legislation targeting foreign textiles—raise interesting questions about the domestic focus of the canonical English realist novel. Though first-person narrators of all three novelists express horror at the excesses of colonialism, the marginalization of Barker’s fiction had consequences for the “realistic” inclusion of non-Westerners in the English body politic. Similarly, Swift himself, despite the popularity of Gulliver’s Travels (1726; 1735), was reviled for what was perceived as the excessive misanthropy of Book IV. Defoe’s fiction was in some cases canonized (Robinson Crusoe, 1719) and in others not (Captain Singleton, 1720).

Since Barker is the least known of these three authors it is important to point out that she used a variety of techniques to conceal while also revealing her Jacobite investments. These complex communication strategies in several cases overlap with those described by Carnell in her analysis of Elizabeth Haywood’s repository of techniques to articulate her “cosmic” Jacobitism. For instance, Carnell highlights Haywood’s tendency (1) to develop character (in order to emphasize the importance of discerning friend from foe) rather than to develop plot, since narrating contemporary events would reflect the current Hanoverian political dispensation; (2) to suggest the value of benevolent political inequality and deference culture; and (3) to rebut stereotypes of Jacobites as hot-blooded and irrational (148-52). Barker uses these techniques, too, but she also complicates “realist” expectations by using a global context to undercut the “neutrality” and “ostensible objectivity” of both “Whig political history and Whig prescriptive realism” (Carnell 157) and, at least for the secular twenty-first century reader, by seriously threatening a sinful nation with divine apocalypse. The exclusion of Barker’s Jacobite realism resulted in a much more domesticated and insular canon than might otherwise have evolved in England.

My focus on the global textile trade converges with the recent pivot in eighteenth-century scholarship to studies of the Indian Ocean and Far East.[2] It also dovetails with Margaret Doody’s argument in The True Story of the Novel that Watt’s theory centralizes a Whiggish, individualistic, Protestant, and English economic progressivism that gives rise not so much to a neutral “formal realism” but rather to a “Prescriptive Realism” of English domestic fiction that had the particular ability “to exclude.” Doody explains further that the canonized realist fiction of the eighteenth century

puts a stop to immigration and emigration. It does not on the whole care for ethnic mixing. The domestication of the supposedly realistic novel is not a matter only of gender, nor of gender and class, but of gender, class, and race. … It hardly seems coincidental that the cult of the ‘real’ and the ‘normal’ in fiction should have taken fiercest hold in England and that its rise coincides with the hardening of true Whig hegemony and the rise of British imperialism. (292)

Significantly, this domesticated canon curtailed Defoe as well as Swift and Barker (not equally, of course—scholarship on Barker has proliferated at an accelerating rate in the last 10 years but she is not canonical). Robinson Crusoe returns to England having spent decades in total isolation, established a plantation, profited from slavery, and accumulated a tidy fortune large enough to warm the heart of any colonial empire builder. Yet while Captain Singleton, too, accumulates a hefty fortune (partly from slave labor and piracy) he manages to learn about the diversity of African tribes, the value of local knowledge and skills, the utility of communal sharing of wealth, and, ultimately, must return to England in disguise, passing as a foreigner to the extent of never speaking his own language in his own country for fear of revealing his criminal past. This is an astonishing fate for an Englishman and suggests ballsy narrative gamesmanship on Defoe’s part.

Captain Singleton is, despite many similarities, unlike much of Defoe’s fiction or, indeed, much of the domesticated English canon. In his section on Captain Singleton in The Life if Daniel Defoe, John Richetti observes “the adventure novel in Defoe’s hands at least offers something like an alternative to the radically individualized perspective that obtains in his other fictions and that would come to dominate the domestic novel later in the eighteenth century” (227). And Srinivas Aravamudan complements Doody’s argument noting “Defoe points in the direction of a global transnational realism, one that the English novel ultimately did not end up taking, instead favoring the closed-door domestic fiction” (60). In other words, some of Defoe’s greatest narrative risk taking—and the risks that might have been expected to complicate the solidification of an individualist narrative of English wealth accumulation through colonial exploitation—did not make it into the canon.

Swift’s inclusion in the domesticated canon is, from this perspective, unusual. As an Anglo-Irishman he was critical of English colonial policy and satirical in his portrayal of an English traveler who tours the world only to acquire insecurity and alienation from his own culture and species. But his inclusion in the canon makes more sense in light of the following considerations: the controversial Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels resulted in Swift’s condemnation as a misanthropist; the inflammatory anti-colonial description of the Lindalinian rebellion was suppressed for over a century;[3] and, as Danielle Spratt has argued, though many scholars have commented on Books III and IV of Gulliver’s Travels they have “underreported the significance … of Swift’s economic discourse” (138). As Spratt points out, Swift was keenly concerned about the financial exploitation of Ireland in the 1720s and this concern permeated both his fiction and non-fiction writing of the period. According to Spratt, “by viewing Gulliver as an economic projector in line with the modest proposer and the Drapier we gain a fuller understanding of the particular economic and colonial concerns of the Travels” (138). My focus is more on Swift’s investment in the textile trade rather than on colonialism and speciesism broadly considered, but my argument largely coincides with Spratt’s. Swift’s narrative gamesmanship debunked the conventions of realist fiction (particularly Defoe’s) but it also called into question the political self-construction of England as a nation with the power and right to subordinate Ireland.

Jane Barker remains to be justified as a member of this tripartite textile discourse. Though not canonical Barker has received incisive scholarly attention in recent years from Toni Bowers, Kathryn King, Tonya Moutray McArthur, Rivka Swenson, and other scholars interested in Tory feminism, Roman Catholic English writers, or Jacobite novelists. Recently there has been a slight uptick in studies of the commercial aspects of Barker’s fiction. Within the context of examining Barker’s narrative gamesmanship through trade references, Constance Lacroix’s argument is particularly compelling. In Lacroix’s view, Barker negotiates between her own allegiance to a “ruralist civic humanism” (292) and “harmonious agrarian patriarchy” (276) and the need to adapt to the new commercial ideal of “capitalist investment and credit-based finance” (272) in the wake of the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715. This is particularly clear, as Lacroix notes, when considering the shift in dedicatees across the course of Barker’s “Galesia” trilogy: in 1713 Love Intrigues was dedicated to the Countess of Exeter while the two later “textile” novels and “more democratic miscellanies” —A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (1726)—were dedicated to “anonymous ‘readers’” (271). Lacroix argues that in creatively negotiating her traditional rural allegiances and London’s commercial reality Barker’s semi-autobiographical heroine Galesia “demonstrates the social goodwill and adaptability that contradicts the Whiggish caricatures of backwoods Tory-Jacobites” (292). Lacroix’s is a sophisticated argument that shows Barker to have been a canny political fiction-maker if not, ultimately, as successful a novelist as Defoe or Swift—if canonization is the index of success. My own recent work on Barker coincides with Lacroix’s conclusion, though I focus on Barker’s use of the patchwork and the tea-table as interconnected synecdoches of cultural hybridity that valorize a Stuart-associated Anglo-Portuguese-Indian trade network (Cahill, “Novel ‘Modes’”).


Global Gatekeeping

What was at stake in Defoe’s, Swift’s, and Barker’s fiction and non-fiction of the 1720s was the concept of “England” itself: Who could belong and who could not (or should not)? In this light, Aravamudan’s point that Defoe eschews rural England in his fiction (though he was clearly very familiar with it, as is evident from his nonfiction) takes on a sharp significance. According to Aravamudan,

Defoe places the global as the connective tissue between the overseas and the urban, replacing any potential naturalization of the rural in relation to the urban in the context of the nation. This move emphasizes global mercantilist contexts rather than domestic agricultural ones. It is as if Defoe is indicating that the true economic hinterland of eighteenth-century London as metropolis was the world, rather than the immediate countryside. (60)

Defoe’s allegiance to the subjectivity of Londoners may partially account for Swift’s and Barker’s reactions to his fiction. Swift protested that Irish citizens were loyal subjects to the English king and ought not to be considered outsiders in the administration of protectionist textile legislation. In the incendiary fourth installment of the Drapier’s Letters (“A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland,” October 13, 1724) Swift’s narrator dismisses charges by English propagandists that the Anglo-Irish and Irish are “disputing the King’s Prerogative” by jibing “God be thanked, the best of them are only our Fellow-Subjects, and not our Masters” (55). More specifically rebutting the twin accusations that Ireland is England’s dependent and yet disloyal to the English king, he declares, “I am so far from depending upon the People of England, that, if they should ever rebel against my Sovereign, (which GOD forbid) I would be ready at the first Command from his Majesty to take Arms against them; as some of my Countrymen did against theirs at Preston” (62). Swift uses the drapier, a common textile worker, to serve as the mouthpiece for the Irish common people in jockeying for recognition as loyal subjects of the English king without political or economic subjection to England. As I argue below, this put him in direct conflict with Defoe, who had recently taken up the cause of the London weavers against the encroachments of foreign textiles (Irish, Asian, and European alike). Indeed Aravamudan says of Defoe’s propaganda on behalf of the weavers that these “pamphlets espouse a strident economic nationalism. English weavers (many of whom Defoe knew intimately at Spitalfields from childhood and as a wholesaler of woolen cloth) became the model for a long-suffering Everyman” (51). In their non-fiction political writing both Swift and Defoe used the figure of the textile worker to focus concerns about an English nationalism still being negotiated, in part, through the international textile trade. Textiles were cathected by concerns about national economic and political health as well as concerns about gender, consumption, and taste.

For Barker, too, Defoe’s fixation on London as the center of his fictionalized English subjectivity in his canonical fiction would have been a problem.[4] Barker consistently aligned herself with the English countryside against the corruptions of the urban space of London. Her heroine Galesia crafts a luxurious hybrid “patchwork” screen and a lining for the screen across the final two novels of the trilogy that now bears her name.[5] Thus, like Defoe and Swift, Barker also used the figure of a textile worker to articulate a specific model of national community. Galesia’s text converges with domestic labor to such an extent that it blurs the distinction between text and textile: she literally stitches her manuscript poems and recipes into the titular screen. Further, the screen and its lining are not only objects within the text but also serve as presiding metaphors for overlapping concerns: the state of the English nation, women’s labor, Jacobite fiction, and Barker’s investment in sumptuary hierarchy as an index of Stuart loyalty. For example, Galesia’s Jacobite mother flies into a rage when a servant usurps her mistress’s clothing—and position in the household—with the permission of her mistress, an “unaccountable wife” who refuses to denounce her servant’s usurpation even at the behest of the Stuart queen (Screen 144-49). Later, the wearing of “sumptuous Apparel” signals the national joy of the Stuart era while the death of Charles II reduces the nation to tears and brutishness “as if Dooms-day had discharg’d it self of a shower of black walking Animals; whose Cheeks are bedew’d with Tears” (Screen 153). In line with her traditionalist allegiance to deference culture, Barker approves of a social hierarchy of elites and loyal subordinates whose status is mapped onto their sumptuary display.

The individual Englishman (or woman) is centered in Defoe’s canonical fiction in a way that he is not in Swift’s canonical Anglo-Irish fiction or in Defoe’s and Barker’s non-canonical English fiction and this is highlighted by the novelists’ different positioning of the Englishman within the context of global trade.[6] I will particularly focus on how the inter-implications and overlaps of their fiction and Swift’s and Defoe’s non-fiction political writing suggest the important role that representing the international textile trade played in outlining the contours of English nationalism in the 1720s.[7]

A selection of Defoe’s objections to the global textile trade shows that Defoe’s advocacy of protectionist legislation entailed a colonial (or at least proto-colonialist) attitude both to Ireland and to non-European cultures. I begin with Defoe’s depictions of the trade relationships between Englishmen and various global others before turning to what can, in part, be taken to be Swift’s Anglo-Irish response and, finally, to Barker’s even more marginalized Jacobite tackling of Defoe’s progressive, though complex, mercantilist version of English selfhood. Apart from brief allusions to Robinson Crusoe (and, to a lesser extent, Captain Singleton) and Gulliver’s Travels, the main objects of analysis will be Swift’s and Defoe’s textile-focused propaganda and Barker’s two textile-focused novels A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies and The Lining of the Patch Work Screen.


Defoe’s Textilic Nationalism

To get a clear sense of Defoe’s subordination of the Irish and Asian textile markets to English national interests, a consideration of Defoe’s rhetoric in the Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis (1728) will prepare the way for an analysis of “A Brief Deduction of the Original, Progress, and Immense Greatness of the British Woollen Manufacture” (1727). In the “Preface” to the Atlas, Defoe announces that “England … is the Center of the World’s Commerce at this time” (iii). But there is a telling binary that he sets up between the Americas—like a “chain’d Slave” (Atlas 99) they provide inexhaustible wealth to Europe—and Asia, which, sieve-like, drains all of Europe’s coffers of silver. In Defoe’s formulation, all European states are denied the endless wealth that the Americas offer because Asia needs few European goods and requests mostly specie thereby draining Europe of its silver. Until the situation was rectified, Defoe argued, “the enriching of all India, China, and Persia, and the impoverishing of Europe in general” would be the result (100). In a near reversal of his previous statement about the centrality of England, he now claims that this “Commerce, if not some time or other check’d, will always keep Europe low, which would otherwise be the Center of all the Wealth of the World” (100). Further, saying that the East India trade’s “unnecessary Manufactures” are to the detriment of “our labouring Poor,” he concludes that all “Asiatick Commerce” is to blame (100). Europe, and particularly England, would be the Center of the World if only Asia would give way. And after describing how the manufactures of Great Britain (wool, hard-ware [metals, wood, etc.], linen, and silk) are more “universally acceptable and useful all over the World, than those of any other Nation whatsoever” (100) he soon argues, contrariwise, that the

importation of Callicoes, Muslins, and other East-India Goods, which before the late Act for prohibiting the Wearing and Use of painted Callicoes and East-India Silks, was so monstrous great as to become a publick Nu[i]sance to the British Manufacture[r]s, and almost ruin’d the poor Weavers and Spinners all over the Nation. However, the Quantity consum’d here, still appears to be very great. (Atlas 107)

The English textile products are so “universally acceptable” to their own people that even an Act of Parliament can hardly slow down the demand for an alternate product. Defoe’s inconsistency makes him vulnerable to ridicule and his xenophobia ironically puts him on the wrong side of English consumerist demand.

Asia”—reluctantly classified by Defoe, following convention, as one of the four “Quarters” of the globe, along with Europe, Africa, and America—is not the only commercial region that renders Defoe’s glorification of England ambivalent (Atlas 99). In his “Brief Deduction” Defoe uses strong language to castigate English consumers for turning away from domestic production—he considers it a kind of “Felo de se” or suicide (Preface). In an anticipation of his rhetoric in the Atlas, Defoe claims that it is the woolen manufacturers who are responsible for making England the “Center” of trade and the “most… powerful Nation in the World” (2). As Maximillian Novak has said in relation to one of Defoe’s other works written around this time, “Defoe was trying to spur English exploration and colonialism” (637). In “Brief Deduction” it becomes clear why Swift was right to fear an increasingly colonial mindset in England’s dealings with Ireland, for Defoe sees both Ireland and “Asiatick Commerce” as obstacles to English trade dominance. In another anticipation of his rhetoric in Atlas, Defoe argues that the Irish woolen manufacturers had been underselling the English and so prohibiting their exports was necessary: “there was no Remedy: it was apparent, that if the Irish were suffered to go on, they would reduce the Manufacture of England to nothing” (35). Again, Ireland must be prevented from selling its own goods because otherwise England will be “nothing.” So much for England’s “universally acceptable” products. They are acceptable as long as all other desires have been outlawed.

The Irish woolen manufacturers had had to be put down, in Defoe’s view, and the Asian textile manufacture (in which England’s own EIC was deeply involved by this point) had followed due to the calico ban of 1721. This was where the real problem lay, for Defoe believed that it was the English consumer’s desire for Indian and Chinese textiles that was decaying the domestic wool trade:

But I must come nearer home still, and must take the Freedom to insist, that our Manufacture is in a State of Decay too from our Conduct at home, much more than from all Prohibitions and Interruptions abroad. I am not dispos’d to make this work a Satyr upon my own Country, but certainly we are the first, if not the only Nation in the World, who having the best and most profitable Product, and the best and most agreeable Manufacture of our own, of any Nation in Europe, if not in the World, are the most backward to our own Improvement. (49-50)

Other nations could be regulated, the prohibitions of other nations of English goods could possibly be skirted, but there was no remedy for suicidal domestic consumerism. Defoe’s patriotic shaming aimed to cool the desire for foreign textiles that even legislation could not control.

There seems to be no middle ground for Defoe: either England is the “Center” of the world or it is “nothing”; either Asia becomes the same “chain’d Slave” that the Americas are or all Europe will be impoverished. This is not to simplify Defoe’s complex representation of attitudes to global others: Captain Singleton has a fairly sophisticated awareness of the value of indigenous knowledge and skills and of the differences between various African tribes—he determines that some are more resourceful or hostile or friendly or helpful or perfidious than others and he notes that not all tribes speak the same language or have the same cultural practices. There are even moments of partnership or admiration or even affection—as Crusoe’s with Friday or Singleton’s with the Black Prince. But there is never equality. Friday calls Crusoe “Master” and the Black Prince, though he discovered one location of the African gold and is rewarded for it by Singleton, is not an equal co-sharer of the communal treasure as all the Europeans are. The Black Prince receives “about a Pound” in contrast to the initial “three Pound and Half of Gold” to each European (Singleton 97). This exclusion is particularly pronounced since many of the Europeans are Portuguese—a nation to which Singleton professes he has an “original Aversion” (150). Defoe seems curiously unable to imagine Englishmen as members of a global community of equals. Like Crusoe, he can imagine the racial other as a slave or as a master, but not as an equal partner.[8]


Swift’s Textilic Nationalism

As a Church of Ireland clergyman Swift objected to Defoe’s pro-Dissenter nonfiction writing as much as to his fiction. In his defense of the exclusionary Test Act Swift summarily dismissed Defoe’s defense of the Dissenters by pretending not to know his name (“the Fellow that was Pillor’d, I forgot his Name”) and by describing him as “so dogmatical a Rogue, that there is no enduring him” (“A Letter…Sacramental Test” 6). Yet there was more to Swift’s antagonism than religious difference and this becomes clear when comparing Swift’s publications in the 1720s to those of Defoe.

During the writing of Gulliver’s Travels Swift was particularly concerned about England’s economic exploitation of the Irish. Indeed, the conclusion of the novel was delayed by his writing of the Drapier’s Letters according to Herbert Davis (ix). And, as Ciaran Murray, Donald Stone, and Bob Markley have all documented, Swift would have been very familiar with the complexities of European-Asian trade relations through his mentor Sir William Temple. If, as Christopher Flynn has argued of Defoe’s pro-colonial stance (albeit in relation to the North American colonies rather than Asia), Defoe was “able to imagine much of the Western hemisphere as belonging to a community defined by the English language and British commerce” (12), then, as Donald Stone sees it, Gulliver’s anti-colonial stance toward the conclusion of Gulliver’s Travels is “a negative version of Defoe’s travel books” (331). In short, Swift’s fiction could be seen as an “anti-novel” (Hammond and Regan 76) intended to undermine the formal realist fiction popularized by, among others, his opponent in religious propaganda.[9]

Yet perhaps Swift was also concerned about Defoe’s fast and loose appropriation of travel accounts, an appropriation that suggested the malleability of the popular new fiction for ideological world making. As Markley notes, in contrast to Temple and other seventeenth-century commentators, Defoe “transforms the literature of diplomatic and tributary missions into mercantilist fantasies of outmaneuvering a people he depicts as backward, dishonest, and slow-witted” in a “vilification of the Chinese that is without precedent in the vast European literature of the Middle Kingdom” (The Far East 189). Defoe’s hostility to the Chinese, to Indian textiles, and, in the Atlas Maritimus to the Javanese, Malays, and Egyptians—the Egyptians specifically for their global cosmopolitanism (Atlas Maritimus 237)—contradistinguishes him from Temple and Swift. Swift, in contrast, excoriates the Dutch, exiling them from European Christendom by contrasting them negatively with humane Japanese sailors in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels.[10]

Defoe’s frequent though uneven xenophobia toward non-Europeans—Aravamudan notes that readers “encounter an unprocessed mixture of attitudes as different as cosmopolitan detachment and crude xenophobia, a cool tolerance of human difference and also a hotheaded demonization of indigenous others, all issuing from the viewpoint of the same fictional character” (47)—is the counterpart to Swift’s and Barker’s anti-Dutch sentiment and these various antagonisms inform all three writers’ portrayals of trade in Asia. Thus it is not that either Swift or Barker is consistently more enlightened about global “others” than Defoe but that all three novelists worked out their own sense of who and what should be included or excluded from England using the contours of the new global fiction and, specifically, by situating their narrators in relation to the global dynamics of the textile trade.

Gulliver, for instance, is a frustrated colonial consumer. His stinging denunciation of colonial conquest in Book IV signals Swift’s awareness—similar to Bernard Mandeville’s—that perhaps only an exile from fallen human nature would choose to give up the luxury and violence of global trade. The vice of private consumption drives the engine of empire. Gulliver’s frustrated consumption and its colonial implications become progressively evident through his experience of foreign textiles across all four books.[11] He is a man who, once he embarks on his travels, cannot clothe himself as he wants.

In Book I his outfit in Lilliput is a makeshift “Patch-Work,” like those of the ladies in England (53). In Book II even the smoothest of the Brobdingnagian textiles are too rough for him and, moreover, his agency is removed by Glumdalclitch stripping and reclothing him like doll, whether he consents or not (79). In Book III the projectors’ geometric calculations result in an ill-fitting suit (136). And in Book IV he is loath to wear the shirts charitably offered by the Portuguese Captain Mendez (representative of one of the great trade rivals of England and Holland) because “they had been on the Back of a Yahoo” (243). Yet he has no difficulty in literally accoutering and equipping himself with Yahoo skin, tallow, and hair (232, 233, 237). In Book IV Gulliver would rather consume the bodies of the Houyhnhnms’ slaves than accept relief from a trade rival and this is partly the result of not being able to consume his own native goods: separated from domestic consumption, Gulliver becomes monstrous. The importance of domestic consumption of domestic goods was a favorite topic of Swift and links Gulliver’s Travels to the “Drapier’s Letters” and “A Modest Proposal.”

Further, Gulliver’s enforced lack of consumer agency is underscored in a sustained denial of his human, male reproductive capacities. This begins with his tutelage under “Master Bates” in Book I (16) escalates through his sexualized infantilization by Glumdalclitch and the maids of honor in Book II (79, 98-99) to the combined emasculations in Book III of his relegation to conversing with “Women, Tradesmen, Flappers, and Court-Pages” (146) and having to disguise himself as a native of “Gelderland” (a sly dig at the Dutch, 184), and culminates in his horror at what he takes to be the attentions of a preteen Yahoo girl in Book IV (225). Gulliver, though he has sired children in England, is repeatedly denied the status of a reproductive male in his travels. He is, for all intents and purposes, a eunuch, and this is partly why his serious defense of the Lilliputian lady’s reputation is so funny (54).[12]

Gulliver’s inability to people the world is thus coextensive with his inability to consume his own native goods. He is, in this way, less like a male colonist and more like the stereotypical female consumer of anti-calico diatribes who drains the nation of wealth and independence through her desire for foreign cloth. His (forced) consumption of foreign textiles feminizes and alienates him. Extremes tend to meet vertiginously in Swift’s writing and it is no surprise that Gulliver can also be seen as the counterpart of the patriotic textile projector of “A Modest Proposal,” too, who tacitly indicts English exploitation of Ireland by seriously arguing that the best way to save the Irish economy is, among other consumer practices, to convert infant skin into “admirable” high-end gloves and “summer boots” for the upscale market of “ladies” and “fine gentlemen” (2476). This is certainly one way of promoting the consumption of domestic Irish material over foreign textiles but there is a pointed similarity between the patriotic proposer’s intended cannibalism and Gulliver’s outfitting himself with the literal skins of foreign slaves while refusing free textiles from a trade competitor. By this line of reasoning, and given Swift’s defense of the Irish as loyal subjects of the English king, Defoe’s defense of stripping the Irish of their textile trade because it interfered with England’s own livelihood was a perverse form of cannibalism that directly led to an abusive colonial global practice. Victimization of a neighboring nation would lead to global victimization and that is probably why—in his description of royal prerogative as an obstacle to enforcing the acceptance of Wood’s halfpence as Irish currency—Swift associates Ireland, England, and a distant Asian nation as autonomous economic entities mutually protected by the limitations of English royal precedent. As he says, the English king “hath Power to give a Patent to any Man … and Liberty to the Patentee to offer them in any Country from England to Japan; only attended with one small Limitation, that no body alive is obliged to take them” (“People of Ireland” 55-56). Later he insults the Dutch as brazen liars by associating them with his antagonists—Wood and his defenders—arguing that the denial of the consequences of Wood’s halfpence to Ireland is like “a Dutch Reckoning; where, if you dispute the Unreasonableness and Exorbitance of the Bill, the Landlord shall bring it up every Time with new Additions” (66). In a point that resonates with “A Modest Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels he turns English colonial rhetoric against itself, observing of the English attitude to the Anglo-Irish and Irish:

OUR Neighbours … have a strong contempt of most Nations, but especially for Ireland: They look upon us as a Sort of Savage Irish, whom our Ancestors [the old Anglo-Irish] conquered several Hundred Years ago: And if I should describe the Britons to you, as they were in Caesar’s Time, when they painted their Bodies, or cloathed themselves with the Skins of Beasts, I should act full as reasonably as they do. (64)

From the perspective of the Roman Empire the Britons themselves were savages dressing themselves in animal skins. The savagery of the Irish is thus not an essential marker of their identity in Swift’s view but rather a product of the unreasonable, self-interested colonizing perspective of the English. Perhaps this image of the savage Briton is also an allusion to that wild Englishman Robinson Crusoe who blurs the distinction between human and animal consumption by wearing the skins of his animal “family” members (53, 56, 75, 98, 108).

I do not suggest that Swift was a benevolent communitarian. But he seems to have discerned some parallels between the exploitation of the Irish and contemporary colonialist endeavors in non-Western parts of the world. His construction of England envisions a partnership of equals between it and Ireland; an awareness of the hypocrisy and violence of empire (and the facile claims of patriotism that often subtend them); and a rejection, or at least distrust, of the Dutch. His construction of England has these elements in common with Barker’s, though they sharply diverge in their representations of gender.


Barker’s Textilic Nationalism

Like Swift, Barker would have been antagonized by Defoe’s propaganda: Defoe used the threat of the even more marginalized Jacobites as leverage to argue for admission of Dissenters to the military (Backscheider 445). Indeed, as Backscheider notes, from the death of Queen Anne (1714) until “after the Atterbury plot in 1722, Defoe wrote fictions designed to discourage Jacobitism” (442). So it is no wonder that Barker would hit back in her own Jacobite fiction published over the next half decade (1723-1726). Neither is it surprising that Barker, like Swift, would gravitate toward narratives and metaphors of global trade to intervene in Defoe’s fiction. Defoe was a longtime advocate of the Dutch and particularly of King William III. Ton Broos notes that Defoe “wrote more than a dozen tracts supporting [William III’s] foreign policy” (4). Swift and Barker both paint unflattering portraits of the Dutch: Swift’s Gulliver describes them as avariciously cruel in contrast to humane Japanese traders (Gulliver’s Travels, 130, 173) while Barker, more circumspectly, seems obliquely to allude to them in enumerating the multiple causes of the death of “old English”: a “Colony of BUGGS” that “planted themselves in England” with Oliver Cromwell and the arrival of gin (“JINN,” also associated with William III; Barker, Lining, 178-79).[13] Cromwell, William III, and the Hanoverians all represented incursions on the legitimate monarchal authority of the Stuarts, but Barker is canny enough to be most explicitly critical of figures with some historical distance from her contemporary reality.

But despite this shared hostility to the Dutch and to Defoe’s fiction, Barker and Swift portray women very differently. Swift certainly castigates women’s literacy, reading, narrative production, and domestic skills in one of Gulliver’s Travels most recognizable satires of England, the Lilliput of Book I. Indeed, Gulliver compares the patch-working that English ladies do (including Barker’s narrator Galesia) to the ungainly suit constructed for him by three hundred Lilliputian tailors (53); he ridicules female oral history (nurses’ stories, 51), young women’s reading of romances (the palace fire, 46), and manages to make fun of both Lilliputian and English ladies’ handwriting by comparing them (48). Since Barker’s semi-autobiographical heroine Galesia was an older woman who specialized in home remedies, told and read stories, wrote manuscript poems, crafted patchworks, and saw romances as a defense against divine conflagration, Barker most likely did not see a kindred spirit in the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Further, in “Proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture,” Swift dismisses those “Silks, Velvets, Calicoes, and the whole Lexicon of Female Fopperies” (5) and ridicules the “Censure” of “Tea-Tables” (7) while both calicoes and tea-tables are important synecdoches of national hybridity for Barker. So it is not that Swift and Barker were in any sense allies; rather, they both saw Defoe as a threat. All three were propagandists for different religio-political positions (Anglican dominance and Irish rights; greater rights for the Dissenters; acceptance of the Jacobites), and Defoe was also well known for his interest in global trade and protectionism in regard to the domestic textile industry.

Apart from ideological and religious differences between Swift, Defoe, and Barker there is the matter of representing gender in early eighteenth-century print culture. Women played an important part in protectionist rhetoric. As Shawn Maurer has pointed out, Addison’s Freeholder (“the Whig party organ in the early years of George I”) contradistinguished English goods from rivals (especially non-Western or Roman Catholic trade competitors) particularly by focusing on their consequences to women (143). Other aspects of the debate on foreign textiles focused on the vices of luxury and female consumption. Of Addison’s Freeholder No. 4 Maurer says, “all of the countries mentioned in this number—China, the East Indies, Persia, Turkey, Spain, Italy, and France—were involved in trade with Britain during this period, and provided the items, in particular silks and cottons, that were the targets of heated debate” (143). Gender, in other words, was front and center in the rhetoric of protectionism, so Barker’s alignment of her heroine Galesia with Indian calicoes was provocative and calculated.

Gender was not the only litmus test of patriotic protectionism; religion and race factored in, too. Melinda Watt observes that Defoe was one of the most vocal advocates for the domestic textile industry and even described the “use of exotic textiles in terms that one might use to describe a disease” (88). Srinivas Aravamudan also notes the role of xenophobia in Defoe’s critiques of what he perceived as a global trade imbalance in The Manufacturer (1719-1721), his defense of the English weavers (51). The protectionist legislation that resulted from arguments such as Defoe’s shortly predated the global novels of the 1720s. Parliament passed The Act Prohibiting the Use and Wear of Printed Calicoes in March 1721.

Yet Defoe’s limitation in recognizing the integrity of global others, at least in his canonical fiction, is what makes some of his non-canonical work (like Captain Singleton) and Barker’s novels so compelling. In the Galesia trilogy Barker condemns the realist fiction—or “HISTORIES at Large”—of writers like Daniel Defoe. Her own “HISTORY reduc’d into Patches,” resulted, as Rivka Swenson argues, from a fragmented aesthetic of Jacobite exile—a “complicated form to express a complicated subjectivity” (56). Though many were English citizens, the Jacobites were considered a national security threat from the Revolution of 1688 until at least the Battle of Culloden in 1746.[14] Barker supported the Stuart monarchs in exile, at one point even involving herself in a Jacobite conspiracy (King 9). Yet in her fiction she always urged unity and favored tropes of community and sociability. As she says in an oft-quoted passage, when one sees

a Set of Ladies together, their Sentiments are as differently mix’d as the Patches in their Work: To wit, Whigs and Tories, High-Church and Low-Church, Jacobites and Williamites, and many more Distinctions, which they divide and sub-divide, ’till at last they make this Dis-union meet in an harmonious Tea Table Entertainment. (Screen 52)

From the outset, Barker maps the act of patchwork—the uniting of diverse materials—onto a model of an ideologically diverse but harmonious national unity. Yet her argument is not disinterested. As I argue in “Novel ‘Modes,’” the ladies’ tea table and the patchwork “screen” and its “lining” are interlocking synecdoches of cultural hybridity and through them Barker aligns an older Stuart-associated Anglo-Portuguese-Indian trade network against the financial innovations of William III and the Dutch. This enables her to support the Stuarts without expressing outright hostility to the Hanoverians, though mediating her vision of monarchal legitimacy through William III (long dead by then) does implicitly deny Hanoverian legitimacy.

In a significant scene of failed global exchange toward the end of the trilogy, Galesia uses the rhetoric of fashion and lowbrow patriotism familiar from the anti-calico pamphlets to ridicule the ladies of the court and City who reject the Indian calicoes she tries to sell them. The calicoes themselves are of a hybrid deictic status representing both textiles materially present to the characters (they are described as “curiously wrought,” Lining 279) and atemporal allegorized female virtues such as humility, chastity, and piety that Jacobites, invested in a cyclical model of history, anticipated would be rewarded upon the return of the Stuart king (Swenson 66). This deictic hybridity is a technique that dovetails with Carnell’s analysis of Haywood’s complex strategies to articulate a Jacobite realism. Tacitly, Barker suggests that female (and Jacobite) virtue must be imported into the contemporary world of fashionable London. Only then will England be saved from impending apocalypse.

Yet ladies of the court demure, explaining that though the goods are “safely brought over” they cannot buy them since “that kind of Merchandize, was quite out of fashion” (279). The “rich and haughty Dames” of the City are more blunt. They tell Galesia’s saleswoman that they have plenty of “Home-made” wares and so need none of her “right Indian” kind. Moreover, they threaten her that “to come into the City with your prohibited Ware, is Insolence in a high degree; Therefore be gone, before my Lord Mayor’s Officers catch, and punish you according to your Deserts” (282). Their hostility is an echo of Daniel Defoe’s excoriation of Indian textile imports in a number of pamphlets and in Atlas Maritimus. Elsewhere, as Paula Backscheider has argued, his pamphlets are “Whiggish in their concern for trade, their general support for the allies (especially the Dutch), [and] their passionate opposition to the Jacobites” (316). No wonder that Barker explicitly opposes her fiction to that of Defoe’s, rejecting Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders by title. Barker, Swift, and Defoe all engage England’s international textile trade to articulate national identity in the wake of the Jacobite invasion attempt (1715), the passing of the Calico Acts (1721), and the Wood’s halfpence controversy (1722-1724).

Like Defoe and Swift, Barker also portrays a European man’s experience of slavery. Yet Barker portrays this unequal relationship culminating in an equal friendship between Europeans and non-Westerners. The final novel in the trilogy, Barker’s Lining is essentially a series of inset narratives that are conveyed to her narrator Galesia by visitors to her chamber. The first inset narrative features a long-lost friend of Galesia’s, Captain Manly, who recounts his adventures in evolving from a rakish ne’er-do-well in England before the Revolution of 1688 to a sincere Christian penitent after he is captured by pirates in the Mediterranean and enslaved. By the end of his tale, Captain Manly has collected a cosmopolitan crew of Christians—himself, an ambiguously affiliated and half-hearted Christian; Father Barnard, a pious Roman Catholic priest; and an unnamed Muslim “Turkish Lady” (201) who owns them as slaves before freeing them when she converts to Christianity. This cosmopolitan Christian community is both progressive in urging the incorporation of one marginalized group, Jacobites—and, theoretically, non-Western Christians—into the English body politic, and stultifying, in reinscribing England—and friendship, for that matter—as a Christian-only space. Like Swift and Defoe, Barker’s model of England is encompassing, but not all-encompassing. The novelists articulate different rather than universally accepting models of cultural hybridity. A unified and harmonious England has very different contours and demographics within each of these three perspectives.

At first Galesia cannot recognize Manly, a silent, ghost-like man, because of the liminal state of twilight. She admits she “could not well determine whether he was a Person or a Spectre” (181). The play of light sources—she sees him, obscured but partially illuminated, between “moon-shine” and “fire-light”—foreshadows the complexity of Manly’s religious, political, and cultural affiliations in the following tale. Surprisingly, it is only after repeated requests by Galesia to identify himself that Manly finally does so, offering his narrative to explain why his appearance is so much altered. These episodes raise the possibility—indeed the likelihood—of mistaking friends for enemies and vice versa in the distinctly international and religiously and politically fractious forum of Mediterranean relations between European and Ottoman powers. Again, this technique coincides with Carnell’s analysis of Haywood’s privileging of character development (is the character a worthy friend or a perfidious foe?) over plot development in order to focus on Stuart virtues rather than the concrete, “realistic,” quotidian details of Hanoverian England.

Manly establishes his libertine credentials straight away in narrating his life to Galesia. He describes his profligate younger life; his marriage of convenience to a wealthy woman he does not love; his taking of a pretty mistress, Chloris; his political difficulties during the Revolution of 1688; his subsequent exile on the continent; his capture by Mediterranean pirates; his enslavement; and his escape with the priest and their owner. Once they all escape from Algiers they seek refuge in Venice where the lady decides to join a convent. To Manly’s surprise they meet Chloris who, like Manly, has repented of her former licentiousness and devoted herself to a life of piety and prayer. Rejoicing at her wise decision, Manly returns home to England to find that his estranged wife has died, leaving him a fortune that allows him to resume his place in the English body politic as a gentleman who may now, though the outcome is necessarily left ambiguous, be of “Service” to his “King” (Lining 194).

Thus two wealthy women (Manley’s wife and his owner) and two at least temporarily disenfranchised men (Manly and Father Barnard) mediate a complex network of moral and religious conversions as well as cultural translations and migrations. The ghostly apparition may turn out to be a long-lost friend; the estranged, deceased wife may turn out to be a providential benefactor intent on reconciling an exile to the nation. Within this framework, Barker suggests that the feminine spaces of the convent, home, or tea table are where the religio-political hostilities of England can be defused. Barker constructs a narrative that shows the stranger who appears, unidentifiable, between moon-shine and firelight—who can pass as a human or a ghost—as an old friend, someone with hard-earned, private, exilic knowledge, a knowledge that needs to circulate in England’s body politic for the public welfare.

The question at the heart of The Lining of the Patch Work Screen is this: at the threshold between firelight and moonshine, will England recognize its own? Galesia’s ultimate reunion with her friend and benefactor (another unnamed Lady) at the novel’s conclusion suggests that it is women’s intimate, private knowledge that can save the nation. Manly-ness is seen in England as a threat and it is up to spectral women to reconcile exiled men to the nation through the mediation of text. Between the wife’s will and Galesia’s novel, women’s textual space welcomes the exile back home and, if Manly can find acceptance, perhaps his friends could as well. But if women’s textual salvation can work, then the English reading public must desire her Jacobite “HISTORY reduc’d into Patches” and not the “HISTORIES at Large” like those of Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and “Moll Flanders” (Screen 51). Barker underscores this in an apocalyptic vision toward the conclusion of Lining: Galesia and her friend are protected from a monstrous fire by their virtue but, following as this scene does on the heels of Galesia’s condemnation of modern fiction, the implication is that her fiction offers a salvation to all from “the general Conflagation [sic] … when the Almighty will purge the World from its Dross, by Fire as heretofore he did from its Filth by Water” (Lining 252). The Jacobite exile and “patchwork” Jacobite fiction represent the “old” England that can be resurrected if the reading public desires it.


Conclusion

Thus Swift, Defoe, and Barker used the global textile trade to articulate competing models of cultural hybridity: Defoe articulated empire (with some important qualifications); Swift critiqued colonial exploitation and defended Irish economic independence (thereby indirectly commenting on the boundary of English nationalism); and Barker envisioned a domestication of cosmopolitan, Jacobite-affiliated exiles. The canon lost something by not including Barker’s Jacobite projection of an England providentially reunited. However unrealistic an apocalyptic scenario might seem to twenty-first century readers it was within the realm of probability for many Londoners, as responses to the London earthquakes of 1750 suggest.[15] This was not fantasy for Barker, but a realistic providential vision of what might happen to her contemporary London. What she proposed was an integrated England of citizens, exiles, and non-Western refugees.

Barker does not propose an enlightened tolerationist utopia—her ideal is a Christian England under a Stuart monarch—but it is significant that of these three authors who use cultural hybridity as represented by the textile trade to explore national identity, only Barker includes a non-Western figure, the Turkish Lady, who remains a friend—an equal—of oppressed Europeans even after they have escaped enslavement. Though Swift’s Gulliver experiences virtual slavery in Brobdingnag nothing prompts him to apply his experience to that of the Yahoos suffering in the Houyhnhnms’ slave-based economy. Nor does Defoe’s Crusoe seem capable of identifying with, or defending, or seeing the equality of his fellow slave Xury once he is in a position to make a profit from a fellow European. Captain Singleton is an outlier here. But even in this novel, fairly progressive in its portrayal of the complexities of and differences among African tribes and individuals (like the Black Prince), there is, as Aravamudan has pointed out, a scene of “perverse cruelty in excess of the profit motive” in which Singleton’s men and his friend William Walters delight in the extermination of indigenous people (61-62). The murders are never seriously interrogated within the text. The chill of this extermination surpasses even the arguments in favor of the Yahoo genocide in Gulliver’s Travels—the Yahoos were seen as pests (228); the natives in Captain Singleton’s episode were wiped out because the Europeans wanted the “Satisfaction” of triumphing through brute force over more tactically clever adversaries (Singleton 207-14). It is worth noting in relation to this episode of the “artificial Tree” (“the cunningest Piece of Indian Engineering that ever was heard of,” according to Walters) that Robinson Crusoe also defends himself by constructing a sort of artificial wood—he disguises his camp behind a collection of shrubs and trees meant to appear to be growing without human intervention (117)—and that Gulliver also seeks refuge by a tree trunk when trying to escape the ordure flung at him by Yahoos provoked by his preemptive attack on an unarmed member of their group (190). The boundaries between savage, human, animal, European, and non-Western other are blurred in Swift’s and Defoe’s fiction.[15]

All three novelists criticize colonial excesses—Gulliver excoriates European colonial empire building (Gulliver’s Travels 248); Crusoe abhors the Conquistadores (Robinson Crusoe 124-25); and Barker’s Galesia deplores the delicacies for which Europe and the Indies must be “ravag’d” (Screen 95). All three express horror at colonialism, yet all three also present troubling portrayals of non-Europeans. Gulliver’s Yahoos are never really humanized. This is particularly clear in the episode with the Yahoo girl in which Gulliver sounds more like an avant la lettre Humbert Humbert ignoring a slave’s plea for help rather than the victim of unwanted sexual advances (she “embraced me after a most fulsome manner” and was “enflamed by Desire, as the Nag and I conjectured,” 225; emphasis added). Defoe alternates between tolerance and xenophobia yet represents without serious critique the selling of a former comrade as a slave (Xury) and the murder of indigenous people at no profit to the murderers. Barker portrays Muslims in a negative light unless they ultimately convert. None of these novelists was universally accepting of cultural others—each of them excludes some group. Yet Barker’s exclusion from the canon represents a missed opportunity to envision racial others as part of the English body politic. In linking the Turkish Lady with the Jacobite exile and Indian calicoes with English welfare, Barker envisioned England as a potentially global community. For this reason, Barker’s global fiction of the 1720s, informed, as was Swift’s and Defoe’s, by England’s growing awareness of cultural difference and cultural similitude through the textile trade, ought to be incorporated into the canon of the early English novel.

Nanyang Technological University


NOTES

[1]  Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis was co-authored and was, as the author of the “Preface” acknowledges, a compilation of other sources, but the annotations to the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online entry attribute the “Preface” and pp. 1-320 (and possibly the Errata) to Defoe. Paula Backscheider and Robert Markley treat it as Defoe’s work and Maximillian Novak says that the “section of Atlas Maritimus treating British trade was, more or less, an encomiastic reworking of what he [Defoe] had said in his Plan of the English Commerce” (688).

Many thanks to the editors—Katherine Ellison and Holly Faith Nelson—and to the anonymous reviewers of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries for their rigorous, generous, and collegial feedback on an earlier version of this article. Thanks also to Regulus Allen, Gabriel Cervantes, Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, Eun Min Kim, Kit Kincade, Roger Lund, and many other participants of the 46th annual ASECS conference in Los Angeles, the 4th biennial Defoe Society Conference (Nature in the Age of Defoe) in Bath, and the 14th International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Rotterdam for their comments on conference papers related to the material in this article. Finally, grateful thanks to Sher Li Ong for her research assistance with the Atlas Maritimus and thanks to Ada Wong, whose research and comments on Swift, Molyneux, and the Drapier’s Letters throughout our discussions of her Final Year Project influenced my thinking on several points.

[2]    See particularly Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi’s introductory essay to the Fall 2014 issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies: “The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century”; much of Robert Markley’s work from The Far East and the English Imagination (2006) to his 2015 article in Genre on Alexander Hamilton’s New Account of the East-Indies (1727); and Nancy Armstrong’s recent public commentary on the importance of trade networks to the development of the novel (MLA 2014).

[3]   The Earl of Orrery accused Swift of indulging “a misanthropy that is intolerable” and held that in “painting YAHOOS he becomes one himself.” Sir Walter Scott, in an early instance of the psycho-biographical criticism that plagued Swift studies for many years, damned Swift with the ostensibly charitable allowance that “the soured and disgusted state of Swift’s mind” was probably “even then influenced by the first impressions of that incipient mental disease which, in his case, was marked by universal misanthropy” (Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Rivero 309-13). Of the Lindalinian Rebellion section Albert J. Rivero’s editorial remarks, “these five paragraphs did not appear in any of the editions of Gulliver’s Travels published during Swift’s lifetime and were not printed as part of the work until G. R. Dennis included them in his London edition of 1899” (258n).

[4]   Defoe’s narrator’s relationship to London, and to England as a whole, is much more complex and conflicted in Captain Singleton and perhaps this explains why that novel is not as canonical as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, or Roxana. A focus on London delimits perspectives on the relationship between London and the rest of the nation and between London and the world beyond England (including Ireland, Europe, India, Africa, and Asia).

[5]   The term “Galesia Trilogy” is not Barker’s but was adopted by modern scholars to refer to the three novels centered on her unusual Jacobite heroine Galesia.

[6]    Significantly, Captain Singleton, not acting in accordance with Defoe’s injunctions in his nonfiction, does trade amicably with the Chinese and in calicoes and silks.

[7]   Barker’s Jacobite manuscript poetry is her most forceful and unqualified articulation of her Jacobite loyalties but, as manuscript poetry, it serves a function distinct from that of Swift’s and Defoe’s prose political writing. However, she does draw on the metaphor of equating text with a sacred, unifying material in her published translation of Archbishop Fénelon’s work as The Christian Pilgrimage (1718). In this nonfiction devotional text describing meditations on the “Stations of the Cross,” as in the Galesia Trilogy, she professes herself to be fearful of offending English popular sensibilities. But she nevertheless emphasizes that the translation is a textual transubstantiation of Christ’s sacred and brutalized body (one that will form a new unity once resurrected): “THESE STATIONS represent to us, our Lord JESUS CHRIST, in the divers States and Circumstances of his PASSION. As a Book of divers Leaves, which, according to St. Paul, is the Book of the Elect, marvellous in all Kinds, it is not as other Books, printed on Paper, but on the Flesh of Jesus Christ, GOD-MAN: Nor is it written with Pen and Ink, but with Thorns, Nails, and Blood, whose Binding is no less admirable than its Impression, being beaten with innumerable Strokes of the Feet, Fist, Sticks, Whips, and Hammers” (“The Author’s Preface” n.p.).

[8] A significant complication to this argument is Singleton’s praise of the Chinese merchants (200), though they do trade with Singleton and his pirates under duress and are, in that sense, not on an equal footing.

[9] Hammond and Regan also note “Swift’s considerable distance from Defoe on the issue of trade, and the extent to which this was informed by the off-centered and anti-metropolitan nature of his perspective” (77).

[10] “As for the Egyptians, who are suppos’d to be the most civiliz’d of all the Africans, they are a perfidious, thievish and murdering Race; and have as little of Humane [sic] left among them as can be allow’d to make them conversible, and as can be expected from a mixture of Saracens, Mamalukes, Turks, Jews, Negroes, and Arabians”(Atlas Maritimus, 237). All instances of the long ‘s’ have been silently modernized.

[11]    While Book IV was composed before Book III, it is nevertheless placed after it in the published text. I take this placement to be Swift’s intention. For the out-of-sequence drafting of the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels, see Lund, “Contextual Overview,” 17.

[12]   For further discussion of “Master Bates” and Gulliver’s sexuality, see Fox, “The Myth of Narcissus in Swift’s Travels.”

[13] For more on Swift’s flattering representation of the Japanese in contrast to the Dutch, see Chapter 7 (“Gulliver, the Japanese, and the fantasy of European abjection”) of Markley’s Far East, 241-68.

[14] Some scholars of Jacobitism argue that it was a political reality even after the ’45. See Bowers, “Jacobite Difference and the Poetry of Jane Barker,” and also Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766: A Fatal Attachment.

[15] On this point, see Cahill, “Porn, Popery, Mahometanism, and the Rise of the Novel.”

[16]   James E. Gill has written extensively on the blurring of species boundaries in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels and in classical antiquity. See his “Theriophily in Antiquity: A Supplementary Account”; “Beast over Man: Theriophilic Paradox in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’”; “Man and Yahoo: Dialectic and Symbolism in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’”; and “Pharmakon, Pharmakos, and Aporetic Structure in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to … the Houyhnhnms.’”

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—. The Lining of the Patch Work Screen. The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker. Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 175-290. Print.

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—. “Porn, Popery, Mahometanism, and the Rise of the Novel: Responses to the London Earthquakes of 1750.” Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 2 (2010): 277-302. Print.

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—. “Man and Yahoo: Dialectic and Symbolism in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms.’” The Dress of Words. Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond. Ed. Robert B. White, Jr. Lawrence, KS: U of Kansas Libraries, 1978. 67-90. Print.

—. “Pharmakon, Pharmakos, and Aporetic Structure in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to… the Houyhnhnms.’” Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essay on Eighteenth-Century Satire. Ed. James E. Gill. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995. 181-205. Print.

—. “Theriophily in Antiquity: A Supplementary Account.” Journal of the History of Ideas 30.3 (1969): 401-12. Print.

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—. The Far East and the English Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

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—. “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” 1729. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen Ed. M. H. Abrams. 7th ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 2473-79. Print.

—. “A Proposal For the universal Use Of Irish Manufacture, in Cloaths and Furniture of Houses, &c. utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Every Thing wearable that comes from England.” Dublin: Printed and sold by E. Waters, in Essex-street, at the corner of Sycamore-Alley, 1720. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Web. 1 July 2015.

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Daniel Defoe and the Scottish Church

Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker

DANIEL DEFOE published on the Church of Scotland over a considerable period of time and from a particularly complex position. The works of Defoe that dedicate significant attention to the Scottish church are chiefly published between the years 1706 and 1717, first appearing shortly before the Union of 1707. In these works Defoe balances his pro-British position in the Union negotiations, his private dissenting beliefs, and the anxieties of both his Scottish and English readers that the ‘true religion’ would be under threat if and when Scotland and England incorporated. Despite this precarious balance, Defoe’s works on the Church of Scotland are remarkably consistent: they admire its sacred origins and evolution, endorse its doctrine and discipline, defend its past and present actions, and argue for its protection through the Union. This stability of opinion suggests that while Defoe’s positive stance on the Church of Scotland is politically motivated in part—given his commission from Robert Harley to eliminate Scottish resistance to the Union—his view of the church does not simply shift with the political winds of the moment. It may well be true, as Evan R. Davis contends, that Defoe was “[t]he most strategic manipulator of national identity,” including religious identity, “in the union debate” (140n14) and that Defoe’s commendation of the Kirk at certain historical moments “was solely for propaganda effect to put the Scots in a good humor,” as David Macree claims (77). Nonetheless, Defoe’s stable view of the Kirk in works published over a twelve-year period, continuing long after the Union, imply that his writings on the subject are also oriented toward his own personal religious beliefs.

Although Defoe had both political and personal reasons for praising the Kirk, his civic hopes rather than his confessional stance—his desire for a united Britain—first inspired him to rewrite the history of the Church of Scotland and to produce numerous polemical works on its current state. Defoe had to write at length on the Church of Scotland in the early eighteenth century because the violent history of religious conflict and coercion during the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration still haunted the present, disturbing his ability to weave together a modern British nation during Union negotiations. As W.R. Owens notes, despite the best intentions of Charles II, religious division was raw in the years following the Restoration. He writes, “[A]ll efforts at agreement and a tolerant religious policy were swept aside by the determination of the Cavalier Parliament of 1661–1678 to settle old scores” (9). In a similar vein, Anne Whiteman reminds us that “the ferocity of the attack on the bishops at the beginning of the Great Rebellion bred its own reaction” (qtd in Owens 87). The residual anger in England at the Dissenters, which manifested in a series of prohibitive and repressive Acts in the early eighteenth century, was a real obstacle to a union that would recognize and empower a Presbyterian church in Scotland. In an age of print media, in which alarmist English voices widely circulated criticisms of the Kirk to undermine the Union and many Scottish clergy rapidly spread claims that the Union threatened the Kirk and Solemn League and Covenant, it was vital to Defoe that the history of religion in Britain be rewritten to reduce anxiety and permit new models of religious tolerance to evolve.1 It was also crucial to the Union project that Defoe intervene directly in the fast moving political debate of the moment to map out his vision of an incorporated nation that would comfortably and practically accommodate two churches under one monarch. These writing projects allowed Defoe to establish, in the process, the legitimacy and worth of a Presbyterian worldview.2

Building on the early work of such scholars as David Macree and the more recent research of D.W. Hayton and N.H. Keeble, editors of the latest editions of Defoe’s Scottish writings, this essay examines Defoe’s detailed defense of the Church of Scotland in terms of its historical development as an institution and its contemporary standing against the backdrop of the Union and its aftermath. It closely attends to the strategies used by Defoe to link the past and present in his narration of the Kirk in the interest of engendering and maintaining what he sees as the best possible future for the British nation. It further proposes that the nature and extent of Defoe’s ongoing defense of the Kirk suggest that he also sought to promote Presbyterianism as a more evolved form of Christianity.

4 These three works engage in what Robert Mayer calls “genetic” history: works that chart the history of a subject from its inception onward in an attempt to understand it (163). As Defoe explains at the beginning of A Short View, “the only way to come at a Clear Understanding of Particulars, was to go back to their Generals; to search the Original of things, and see from thence not how they are represented, but how they really are in their meer Nature, and Native Circumstances” (3). Likewise, in the History of the Union, Mayer finds Defoe “promis[ing] to trace the origins of the idea of the Union back to ‘the very original of it,’ so as to reveal ‘all the several steps which have been taken’ that led him to conclude that the Union was ‘the only harbor the ship of state could safely come to an anchor in’” (Mayer 163; Defoe qtd. in Mayer 163). Such passages support Mayer’s conclusion that “Defoe repeatedly insists upon the need to trace the development of a problem, an institution, an idea, or a person, from its beginning” (163).

Defoe’s search for ecclesiastical origins responds—as he often informs us—to the “noise” of misinformation from English historians that he fears has caused many to believe that the Episcopal structure of the Church of England is “a farther Reformation of the Church, meaning the Church of Scotland” (Memoirs 176). Defoe notes that English historians consign the Scottish church to an earlier stage in the reformation trajectory, viewing it as less evolved and more errant than the more advanced, and thus holier and purer, English church. He calls to mind the English image of the Scottish church as a young man who has died prematurely: they maintain that “Presbytery was often hatch’d in Scotland and nursed up. But was never Major, never came to be of Age; alluding to a young Man, who tho’ carefully brought up, dies before he attains to the Age of One and Twenty” (Memoirs 324). Defoe argues that according to this flawed history the Scottish church has failed to advance. He invokes this argument only to counter it by “turn[ing] the very accusation” made by the agents of the English church “back against them” (Burton).5 It is the English church, he says, that took a ‘wrong-turn’ in the evolutionary process and ended up Episcopal. It is the English church that failed to properly evolve and is thus inadequately reformed. In A Short View, Defoe explains that this evolutionary failure caused “our English Church [to be] reformed into Episcopacy, and a Pompous Hierarchy, rather than a Calvinistical Parity” (8). In contrast, he writes, the Scottish “Reformation being made by the People themselves….they reform’d at once into the compleat Model, both as to Discipline and Worship” (16, 17). Having witnessed the flawed English ecclesiastical model, the Church of Scotland was able to forge a more pure and holy Church.

The history of each stage of the development of the two churches, Defoe argues, is inextricably connected to the socio-political context in which it emerged. Therefore, he considers the manner of the birth of each church, concluding that the Kirk is inevitably purer because it was tainted neither by power nor personal desire. Whereas the Scottish church totally disassociated from the unacceptable Catholic royal representative, “the Regent the Queen Mother” as well as “the Pomp, the Magnificence, and the outside of the Matter” (Short View 8), the Church of England was firmly coupled with a somewhat more problematic monarch, “Henry VIII, A meer Tyrant, a Man of no Religion in his inside, and but very little in the out side” (Short View 7). Had he been a different sort of king, Defoe explains, an “Enlightened” man full of “Religious Zeal” rather than a “Fury” of a different sort, he would have “erected the true Gospel Supremacy of Christ Jesus” (Short View 6). But he was not and the result is “brooding Snakes of Ecclesiastick Tyranny, which this part of the World has been plagued with ever since” (6). In his Memoirs, Defoe explains that the deferral of the full reformation of Scotland because of its split with the Regent gave “Scotland … an unforeseen Advantage, viz. That … they had Leisure … to see the Defects of the English Reformation” (11). Thus, Defoe claims that the Kirk is no youth who died before reaching maturity, but rather a woman in the prime of her life, and he details the “Flourishing and Glorious state she is now in” (Memoirs 333). To reveal her true state, Defoe must strip off the misshapen garments in which she has been forcibly and falsely clothed by unreliable historians. As he writes in the Memoirs, the Kirk “has been represented to the World in so many monstrous Shapes, drest up in so many Devil’s Coats, and Fool’s Coats, charged with so many Heresies, Errors, Schisms, and Antichristianisms by the Mob of this slandering Generation” (2).

To establish his credibility as a reliable ecclesiastical historiographer in such works on the Scottish church, Defoe represents himself as a rational and objective historian who privileges what Mayer describes as Baconian historiography—history that claims to be “the repository of matters of fact” (26). Defoe’s “advocacy of the union,” Mayer argues, “taught him a good deal about the efficacy of [ostensibly unbiased] historical argument as a means of persuasion” (160).6 For example, in Part II of the Memoirs, when recording the suffering of the Kirk in the early years of the reign of James I, Defoe writes of his account of the Hampton Court Conference (1604), “it is necessary the Reader should have it faithfully and fully stated; I say, for this Reason, I shall impartially relate the Fact …. [for] above all, that the Truth of Fact may impartially be handed down to Posterity, that they may have a true Notion, and be able to make a right Judgment of so remarkable an Event” (158, 159). Defoe pulls off this portrayal of himself as a disinterested recorder of past events here and elsewhere in the Memoirs by shifting between temporal and spatial concepts. He is not only a skilled chronicler of times past, as noted above, but also a skilled cartographer and navigator of Scottish culture, on which disturbing English fantasies have been projected. At the inception of the Memoirs, Defoe explains that the Scottish church is now a “Terra incognita, a vast Continent of hidden, undiscovered Novelties” (1). Like the ‘dark continent’ of Africa, the Scottish church has been represented as “monstrous,” demonic, and threatening, that which should be feared and avoided, but Defoe’s corrective rhetoric notes that it is rather like the Americas prior to discovery, an unknown territory full of precious things in wait of unearthing (1). Defoe, by extension, is an explorer who can cut through the “Mists and Darkness” cast over this ecclesiastical “Terra incognita”—that “thing[] so near” that is “so entirely hid from us” (41, 1). He can properly map out and traverse this religious landscape to make it known to and navigable by others, so it will not be overlooked or forgotten. In so doing, “things of…Consequence” will be rescued “from the Grave of Forgetfulness” (Preface).

As it happens, for Defoe those things forgotten about the Presbyterian Church in Scotland or erased from English memory are (rather predictably) almost entirely praiseworthy. In chronicling and navigating the Church of Scotland’s past, Defoe accentuates its civilized nature by turning to the discourses of bravery and zeal, reasonable action and lawful duty, suffering and sacrifice, and spiritual and ecclesiastical refinement. He routinely situates Reformed Scots in both “glorious Scene[s] of Action” and “dismal Scene[s] of Suffering” as they boldly, but dutifully and peaceably, cast off “the burthens of Ceremony, Forms and Hierarchys,” despite persecution and death, leaving only “Purity in both Worship and Discipline” in their Church (Preface, Memoirs; Short View 22). The intrepid drive of the Church of Scotland for religious purity is exemplary, Defoe argues, because it is scripturally sound and popular in nature (Short View 10). It is the “People of Scotland” who “express[ed] their Detestation of the Innovations which had been put upon them before” and demanded that the Kirk be restored to its primitive state (Memoirs 184–85). For Defoe, the Scottish People have managed, thereby, the near impossible: to cleanse the Church of the stain of history so that it now resembles the Primitive Church of the early Christians (Short View 23). As a result, Defoe argues with some hyperbole, the Kirk is “the best regulated, national Church in the World,” as chiefly, though not solely, measured by “the Soundness and Purity of her DOCTRINE, the Strictness and Severity of her DISCIPLINE, the Decency and Order of her WORSHIP, [and] the Gravity and Majesty of her GOVERNMENT (Memoirs 2). By unveiling the Scottish church in this fashion, Defoe emphasizes its difference from the Church of England as an institution and theological entity, yet in an unthreatening way. He evokes sympathy for the Kirk’s past sufferings, blunting claims of Episcopal suffering at Presbyterian hands in Scotland; and he suggests that members of the Scottish church are very like those in the English church in their desire to worship a Protestant God and to be faithful to their national church.

In an inversion of the naturalized hybridity and mongrel tendencies Defoe previously celebrated and encouraged in regard to the Union and in his poem The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1700), Defoe privileges purity and natural development in discussing the Scottish church with both the language of fact and fear. In setting forth this history of the Church’s “compleat Reformation,” inspired by the populace, Defoe repeatedly stresses that, unlike the English church, “the Church of Scotland was in its original PRESBYTERIAN,” despite the fact that “the first Reformation” has been made to “look as if it had been Episcopal” (Memoirs 90, 49). Ergo, any attempt throughout history to introduce episcopacy to Scotland is an unnatural act, carried out by, or generative of, “Motley” or “mongrel” bodies, terms that appear in relation to attempts to persecute or impose any alien policy or practices on the Kirk (Memoirs 76−77, 87, 153). For Defoe, such an imposition is akin to an invasion of toxic weeds in an ecclesiastical Garden of Eden, hence the need for present Scottish ministers to commit “to pull[ing] it up by the Roots” (Memoirs 89). That Defoe establish this historical point is essential for contemporary debates on the kind of Union that should occur and the nature of the two distinct parties to be incorporated.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scots were often painted as a bloody, irrational, and lawless lot in resisting the rightful monarch’s religious policies.7 Having established the Kirk as “natural,” Defoe can then associate past royal policies with the unnatural and the criminal in order to defend Scottish Presbyterianism. Defoe argues that the few “Tumult[s] and Rebellion[s]” in which Presbyterian Scots found themselves were caused by “Unjust” and “Unnatural” “oppressions” that rendered them desperate and uncharacteristically “[d]istracted” (Memoirs 148−49). Citing “a known Scots author,” Defoe describes, for example, the High Commission set up in Scotland during the reign of Charles II as “a Hotch-potch-Mongrel-Monster of a Judicatory . . . against the Laws of GOD and MAN, Illegal in its Constitution, and Arbitrary in its Procedure” (Memoirs 151). Forced to contend with such mongrel and monstrous bodies, the peaceful and charitable Church of Scotland made every effort to resolve disputes amicably, according to Defoe. Citing in A Short View a letter of 1566 “from the Assembly of the Church of Scotland, to the Bishops in England,” Defoe reminds his reader that the “Church of Scotland …did not at all break off their Charity from the Persons of the [Episcopal] Bishops and Pastors, whom they still call’d Brethren, and own’d they profess’d with them the Lord Jesus” (19−20). While representatives of the Church of Scotland exhibited a bold defiance in keeping the true faith, they preferred to make “peaceable Applications” to reigning monarchs rather than to take up arms against them; they were always eager “to hearken to Reason” (Memoirs 36, 25). Scottish Presbyterians defended themselves physically against immoral laws or unlawful policies only as a last resort, Defoe informs us, since “Nature … dictate[s] to all People a Right of Self-Defence, when illegally and arbitrarily attack’d in a manner not justifiable either by the Laws of Nature, the Laws of God, or the Laws of the Country” (Memoirs 159). While judged harshly in their own time, the light and truth of history reveals that the Scottish Presbyterians saw what the blind English failed to see, according to Defoe: “What a shame it is to us, and how much to the Honour of these persecuted People, that THEY could thus see the Treachery and Tyranny of those Reigns, when we saw it not” (Memoirs 276).

An advantage to presenting the Scottish church as a distinct, unpolluted entity with its own natural origins is that in doing so its members can be differentiated from the English Dissenters, alleviating concerns that the Union might empower Dissenters south of the border. Defoe frequently downplayed any sense that there was a past or present unity between Scottish Presbyterians and English Dissenters or even between English dissenting groups in order to make them appear less of a threat. In the Review of November 17, 1705, Defoe writes,


The Dissenters, however, considered under one Denomination, are not, nor ever were in England, one United Body; they differ in Interest, as they discord in Opinion; the Charity they profess, even one for another, does not abound; they never acted in Concert in any one thing as I remember….In short, they are not a Body; they are a dispers’d Multitude, without Form, without Engagement, without Correspondence, and indeed without Agreement… (2.733)


In emphasizing in the Memoirs that the Church of Scotland has always been deeply embedded in a national (Scottish) culture and ideals, and that it is not aligned with this motley crew of English Dissenters, or with England at all, Defoe hopes to show that it has never been, nor will ever be, involved in a quest to undermine the Church of England.

9 When, for example, refuting the claim of anti-Union Scots that the Union threatens the Church of Scotland’s security, Defoe turns his opponents’ argument on its head, asserting in both forensic and fiery language that the Kirk is presently in “a precarious, unsafe, and unsettled Condition” from which only the Union can save it (Essay III 98). Once the Union is in place, “’[t]is for ever rendered impossible to Overthrow the Settlement of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland; But by Subverting the constitution, by absolute Arbitrary Government, and the openest Bare-Fac’d Tyranny” (Essay III 96).

Defoe continues to blend the language of logic and emotion when proposing that in order for Parliament to “Overthrow the Settlement,” it would have to “Dissolv[e] “their own being” or “Annihilat[e] their own Body” (Essay III 96−97). Disturbing terms and images are incrementally built up, one upon the other, in painting this picture as Defoe moves toward a rhetorical climax that highlights the heinousness and improbability of the repeal of the Act or Treaty set in place to safeguard the Kirk: “it can never be altered but by meer Tyranny, Perjury, Violence and Usurpation” (Essay III 102). Though Defoe admits that anything is possible, including the “overthrow” of the Kirk, he often returns to the discourse of probability, characteristically citing figures to prove that after the Union, there will be insufficient members of Parliament to annul an Act or Treaty involving the Church of Scotland’s security. Any claims made to the contrary, he insists in the sixth Essay, are improbable, illogical and absurd and their proponents cannot win an argument by “strength of Reasoning” (188). To increase the authority of this argument and to voice the intensity of his feelings on the subject, Defoe routinely repeats words and phrases, lifting them from the Act for Securing the True Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Government (1707) when needed, as is evident in the following passage from The History of the Union:


By the UNION then, and the several Acts of Parliament, for the Security of the Presbyterian Church, which are Confirmed by and made Part of that Union—; The Purity and Uniformity of the Worship, Discipline and Government of the Church of Scotland to be Preserved to the People of Scotland WITHOUT ANY ALTERATION, Mark these Words, I Repeat them again, WITHOUT ANY ALTERATION to all Succeeding Generations. (“The Preface” xxviii) 10

In defending the ways in which the Union benefits the Kirk, Defoe not only stresses the security it offers but also regularly reminds both his Scottish and English readers that it solidifies and guarantees ecclesiastical difference, often pointedly avoiding the language of incorporation when describing the impact of the Union on religion in Scotland and England. In his sixth Essay (1707), which as D.W. Hayton notes “focused on religious issues” and “on Presbyterian opinion,” Defoe derides the notion that

the Union of two Nations in their meer Civil and Politick Concerns, can affect their Religious Concern….These Things are not only divided and distinguish’d in their own Nature, but they are expressly distinguish’d in the Treaty it self, which professes to unite the two Kingdoms in their Civil and Politick Capacity, as to Oeconomy, Government, Interest and Commerce; but expressly reserves to each, the Separate State and Absolute Independency of all their Religious Affairs. (191)

The trope of a united, healthy, and vital body politic upon which Defoe often depends in his general defenses of the Union is in such passages abandoned or openly repudiated in relation to religion.

However, paradoxically, Defoe’s discourse of ecclesiastical difference is sometimes offset by the language of resemblance as he struggles to articulate declarations and generate tropes in support of “the beneficial intersection of related yet distinct entities” (Alker and Nelson 43). In the first Essay, which Hayton explains was “ostensibly written to persuade the English of the virtues of Union” (9), Defoe suggests that there is a form of synthesis already between the churches because both state churches are Protestant, “Orthodox in Principle, and equally opposite to Popery, and Antichristianism” (49). Defoe intricately crafts in several of his Essays the precise relation of the churches he is at pains to delineate elsewhere, noting that the national churches of England and Scotland are alike in “Religion” but dissimilar in “Religious Circumstances” (49). In his fourth Essay, which sought to alter Scottish anti-Union sentiment voiced by the likes of George Ridpath (Hayton 21),11 Defoe takes a similar representational approach, announcing that

there is not an Oneness of Ecclesiastical Interests, as to the respective Principles of the Churches, as Episcopal and Presbyterian, but there is an Oneness of their General Interests as Protestant; and it will for ever Unite their Interests, so as to make them one Body, with one general Interest, against all sorts of Superstition, Atheism, Idolatry. (117)

In this passage and elsewhere, Defoe repeats that the two churches constitute one Protestant body of Christ, figuratively speaking, even if the Union cannot or should not “Literally” or “Mathematically and Numerically” merge them into a single body (117). In this way, Defoe is skillfully able to maintain that the Union “will make them one Body” metaphorically—benefitting both in the process given their similar “General Interests” and need to differentiate themselves from the Catholic Church—while ensuring that their two bodies remain literally different, neither altered by the other (117).

Defoe justifies the need for these two distinct ecclesiastical bodies with a tentative theory that is akin to that of the Fortunate Fall. He maintains that the breach between the churches may well be a felix culpa, or “fortunate fall,” because it has rendered British Christians more virtuous:

Perhaps these Things are suffer’d in the Church of Christ, for the Exercise of Charity, Forbearance, and mutual Temper, of Christians, to prevent worse Inconveniences, which from the Pride of Prosperity, the Power and Glory of an united Church, might, in Conjunction with Human Infirmity, have risen in the World. (Essay I 54)

In light of this “fortunate fall” there is an opportunity for communion or confederation without incorporation, which Defoe indirectly depicts through the powerful Miltonic image of going hand-in-hand after the Fall, in a gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation. “Charity, Forbearance, and Love” will characterize the churches who, though two distinct bodies, “agree to go Hand in Hand, the direct Road to Heaven” (Essay I 55). And yet, though they are depicted figuratively holding hands after the Union, Defoe reminds his reader in his sixth and last Essay that “the Business of the Union is not to bring them together, but to keep them asunder; not to bring them into one Government, but to secure them in their being two” (191−92).

Those who would attempt to undermine this happy, if complex, ecclesiastical confederation are demonized by Defoe who maintains, especially in The History of the Union, that anti-Union discourse circulating in Scotland is the product of an unholy Trinity—the Jacobites and the Episcopal and Popish parties— as well as a sinister body of powerful gentlemen, “fatal people” who devilishly united these forces through an act of “monstrous conjunction,” deceiving “honest, well-meaning” Presbyterians along the way: “they undertook to join Cameronian and Persecutor; Presbyterian and Papist; Protestant Succession and Jacobitism; parties as opposite as the elements, as distant as the poles” (History of the Union 220, 219, 220).12 Relying on the suspicions of his readers, the individuals who make up this body are presented as dangerous fear-mongerers, alarmists who stir up “an unspeakable disorder in the minds of the people.” It is these parties who falsely deceived the pious Scots into believing that the Union would allow Parliament to “encroach upon the Church” of Scotland (History of the Union 222). Defoe insists that the arguments of such nefarious parties are not only irrational, but perverse. In a similar fashion, in his third Essay, Defoe casts aspersions on the “Church of England Men, High-Church hot Episcopalian Disputants” who claim that the Church of Scotland’s security is threatened by the Union. To warn off the Kirk from giving ear to these men, Defoe turns to analogy, proclaiming that to listen to their opinions on the Church of Scotland’s security is analogous to a goose trusting a fox who wants to eat it (105). The Scottish church, Defoe consistently maintains, should instead rest assured in its current “Civil Right” to “Ecclesiastic Immunity” confirmed by the Union (“The Preface,” History of the Union xxviii).

It was not enough, however, for Defoe to establish the distinct nature and secure status of the Church of Scotland while imagining it walking hand-in-hand with its English compatriot. He also had to dedicate an enormous amount of textual space to combatting the misrepresentation of the Church of Scotland as a present-day persecutor of Episcopalians. As with his historical writings on the Kirk, Defoe’s works on the contemporary Church of Scotland must expose “false Reports” of the Scot as a brutish oppressor and produce a new narrative of events that relies only on “true Matter of Fact” in order to close the “Breach between the Nations” (Scot’s Narrative 360, 357, 360). English churchmen before and after the Union argued that the Kirk was intolerant of Episcopal Dissenters and cruelly persecuted them, a topic relevant to Defoe not only as an apologist for the Kirk, but also as a Dissenter from the Church of England. Defoe had to balance once again the roles of “objective analyst” and “partisan religionist” in defending the Church of Scotland while recognizing religious Dissenters’ right to freedom of religious belief within certain parameters (Richetti 82).

In his ironically-titled An Historical Account of the Bitter Sufferings and Melancholly Circumstances of the Episcopal Church in Scotland (1707), Defoe lucidly and characteristically sets forth his objective: “to clear up the Reputation of the Church of Scotland among her Friends,” which will be carried out by “an Impartial Account of the general Proceedings of the Church of Scotland, in the Matter of Establishing the Presbyterian Discipline, and Deposing Episcopacy” (271, 276). In a later document on the same subject, The Scot’s Narrative Examin’d (1709), he renders the account of a persecutory Kirk unreliable by labeling it the narrative of “Jacobite Clergy,” thereby associating it with the unnatural, disorderly and treasonous subjects who have been ousted by the government from their church livings “for refusing to take the Oaths to the Government” (Historical Account 282). Defoe thereby conflates the present-day “Scots Episcopal-Man” with the Jacobite dissenting clergyman who has been rightfully deposed by civilized and necessary political means—“and not at all [by] the Act or Concern of the Church of Scotland” (274−75, 283).13

Defoe supplements his systematic reasoning on this subject with insinuations of the monstrous acts of the Jacobite Scottish Dissenters, whom he markedly distinguishes from English Episcopalians. Some of these acts, he cautions, should never be named in the interests of “the whole Protestant Body of Christians in the World,” but he does link them with unnatural sexual deeds, including incest, repeated fornication and adultery that would lead to “Confusions in Families” if allowed to develop unimpeded (Historical Account 290, 292). Appealing to the fears of his readers, Defoe resolves near the end of An Historical Account that “Tolleration” of those Jacobite clergy who are the “Refuge of the Vitious, the Skreen of the Adulterer, [and] the Protectors of Immoral and Prophane Persons” is nothing less than the ruin of the family, the foundation of every nation (292, 293).

In his efforts to distinguish English and Scottish Episcopalians, and to disparage the latter, Defoe censures Episcopalian ministers who have been deposed in Scotland to undermine any circulating victim narratives. Each deposed minister—and he lists them name by name—is rendered not a victim of conscience, but a “Scandalous, Ignorant or Immoral person” (Historical Account 278). In The Scots Narrative Examin’d, Defoe provides an appendix, “Containing an exact Draught of the several Proceedings lately made against the Episcopal Ministers in the city of Edinburgh,” to support his case with what he views as irrefutable evidence of guilt (Scot’s Narrative 345). In case this legal documentation is held insufficient to prove that “[n]o Man was ever since the Revolution, Deposed by the Church, meerly for being Episcopal” (Historical Account 279), Defoe appeals to legal fact: the Church of Scotland cannot persecute or depose the Episcopal clergy on matters of conscience, because it does not have the lawful power to do so (Historical Account 281).

Despite Defoe’s criticism of Episcopalian Dissenters in Scotland, as well as his clear attempt to distinguish them from English Dissenters, in An Historical Account he at the very least feigns sympathy for them in the interest of defending Dissenters generally. He assumes the role of advisor “to both Kirk and Dissenters,” arguing that the Kirk should continue “by their Moderation, Charity, and Tenderness” to “suffer and permit the Episcopal Dissenters to Exercise their separate way of Worship, without Exerting their Power of Government to their Disturbance” (292, 295), while the Dissenters should act as true “Christians and Ministers” and simply “stand just where” they “are and be satisfied”; to ask for more, such as “Legal Tolleration,” is to merely entangle themselves in the legal web in which English Dissenters have found themselves (Historical Account 293). In showing a measure of sympathy to the very few ‘truly Christian’ Dissenters in Scotland, Defoe hopes to prove his impartiality and even-mindedness while carving out a legitimate space for Dissenters in British society. He accomplishes this while still upholding the “naked Truth” that the Scottish government suppressed Jacobite clergy and conventicles for the security of the nation and that all other Dissenters have been allowed to speak and hold meetings (Scot’s Narrative 357, 358). The narrative of the “Persecution of Episcopacy” in Scotland is thereby cleverly replaced by Defoe with the narrative of the “Prosecution of Jacobitism” (Scot’s Narrative 314).

14 These accounts are undergirded by Defoe’s claims to be an ‘impartial’ historian and journalist uniquely equipped to chronicle the times and navigate the terrain of the Kirk. His accounts are not only rendered more persuasive by this appeal to his character, but also by his skillful use of both reasoned argument and passionate literary figures. These rhetorical strategies serve Defoe well as he works out for the reader how, despite a shared DNA, the national churches of Scotland and England are, and will remain, distinct from each other in a united nation, ensuring the security of both religious bodies as well as individuals who legitimately dissent from them.

Though there is no doubt that Defoe was partially motivated to mount such a skilled and passionate defense of the Scottish church for political reasons, the extent to which he consistently and enthusiastically defends the Church of Scotland in his writing until 1717 suggests that his personal beliefs also came into play. After all, more than once Defoe suggests that the Kirk is a complete model of the true Christian Church, with its fully realized Protestantism. In reflecting on God’s special blessing on the Kirk from its inception onward, Defoe writes in the Memoirs, safely published many years after the Union,

such was the signal working of divine Providence, as has been seen more than once in the Case of the Church of Scotland, that the Oppressions and Persecutions of this Church were made the Means of overturning, not the Bishops only…but even the King himself, and all his Family….God so ordered it even from the Beginning of the Reformation in Scotland, that no Men, or Party of Men, have ever yet fallen upon the Church of Scotland, but it has been at length their own Destruction; the Church has been like the Stone in the Gospel, and on her religious Establishment may be written, as is upon her Banners, Nemo me impune lacessit [No one attacks me with impunity]. Ever may it be so and may her Enemies take the Warning, that they never more make the Attempt. (173, 191)

In contrast to the “Primitive Plainness” of the Church of Scotland, which likely resulted in such divine favour, stands the Church of England with its “Pomp and Jingle” awaiting “further Inlighten[ment] from Heaven” and “Compleat Reformation” (Short View 32; Essay VI 195). In such phrases we surely hear the voice of Defoe the committed Presbyterian alongside that of Defoe the strategic Propagandist.15

Trinity Western University

Whitman College

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Daniel Defoe’s Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (1716): A Critical Edition

Edited and Introduced by Nicholas Seager

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography


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— — —. “Bibliography of Daniel Defoe.” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 859.

Wotton, William. A Vindication of the Earl of Nottingham from the Vile Imputations, and Malicious Slanders, which have been cast upon HIM in some late PAMPHLETS. London: J. Roberts, 1714. Print.

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

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Daniel Defoe’s Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (1716): A Critical Edition

Edited and Introduced by Nicholas Seager

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

SOME
THOUGHTS
OF AN
Honest Tory, &c.

Having laid down these Explanations, I descend with plainness to the Subject before me, and I must begin with some Argument to remove the Novelty which the Title may seem to carry with it. I must acknowledge to my Readers that being a Tory I had my share of Prejudices against the Whigs in many of their Proceedings in former Times,[21] and therefore to say nothing else of it, for that will be no part of the present Discourse, was as ill prepar’d to think well of their Measures in several Things in the last Administration of that Party, as any one could be.

And yet I must take the freedom with my Friends the Tories to say, that I was most sincerely an Enemy in my Thoughts to the Change of the Ministry, made by her late Majesty about the Year 1711.[22] and that I as much oppos’d and exclaim’d against it in my low Sphere, as any Whig of them all, tho’ perhaps with some less Excursion[23] against the Person of her Majesty, for whom I preserv’d an inviolable Affection and Duty.

It is true, my Satisfaction at that time was the greater by the Assurances many of us receiv’d personally from the Ministry themselves, of the sincerity of their designs in the affair of the Protestant Succession; But our Astonishment rises in Proportion Now, when we see the same Men openly appear for that Interest, which they then took too much pains to have us believe they abhorr’d; and upon the Word of an honest Tory, I protest to you I think they have taken Pains to have us believe them the most perfidious Men alive, seeing Time has let us into the whole matter, and we have obtain’d now that better way of knowing Mens Intentions, viz. by their Actions.

Wherefore to let you see that there are Principles of Integrity which we Honest Tories retain, and that altho’ we may have been mistaken and misguided, that yet we are as the Whigs formerly call’d us, Revolution Tories still; I, speaking for one in the Name of the rest, think it very proper to acknowledge we have been imposed upon as to some People in the late Ministry, and to let you see how, and by what Methods the honest People of this Nation have likewise been deluded, and are now drawn into the worst of Crimes, Rebellion; and to bear our Testimony, as the Quakers call it, against it; and all this without any Impeachment of Principle as a Tory.

You know very well it was always our Practice to yield Obedience to the higher Powers,[24] and I have often told you that I thought it was not my Duty to enquire into who the Sovereign employ’d, or what secret Measures those who were employ’d took for administring the Government, so they did not break in upon the Constitution; that I would go along with every Ministry as long as they led me by the Rule of the Law, and that the Liberties, Religion and Constitution of my Country was not infringed.[25] But I hope you never understood by this, that I would join with a distracted Set of Men to bring in the Pretender; and that when the Laws of the Succession had taken place upon the Queen’s Decease, I would break out in open Rebellion against the rightful and lawful Possessor of the Crown.

No, No, I must beg your pardon for that, the Notions of Government which the Tories, as far as ever I was a Tory, always pretended to, will by no means allow of this; if others can act contrary to them, and from Non-Resistance fly to Rebellion, I have nothing to say to that, an Honest Tory will still be an Honest Tory, and be Obedient for Conscience-sake.

Nor does all I have said formerly to you in behalf of the late Ministry, oblige me in the least to deviate from my Pretensions now, for the Case is very plain, I believed them honest to the Constitution, as they protested upon their Honours they were, I believed the Pretender was not in their design, as they solemnly swore he was not: if they dissembled and I was deceived, the Misfortune was mine, but the Crime was theirs: But what is all this to the Case? There is a great deal of difference between being wicked and being deceiv’d; there is a great deal of difference between being a Friend to the late Ministry and being for the Pretender; the Question is now quite altered, and now the Case is come to a Point the Honest Tory tells you plainly, that tho’ he had favourable Thoughts of the late Reign and the Measures then in Hand, yet now it is come to an Eclaircissement,[26] and that those Measures are running on to Rebellion and the Pretender; he begs your Pardon, he has nothing to say to them or for them: The Protestant Succession is the Rock the Church stands upon, and which, if overthrown, it must fall with; by that he resolves to stand, and in Defence of it, as King William said to Sir William Temple, to die in the last Ditch:[27] And thus you have the brief Description of the past and present Conduct of an Honest Tory.

But after all this, I cannot but desire that you and I should spend a few Thoughts concerning the differing Conduct of our other Tory Friends at this time, and what has been the Springs and secret Wheels which have hurried them into other Measures, and into measures so different from those Principles of Loyalty and Submission to Government, which they, and especially their Ancestors, so avowedly profess’d: And in doing this, if we happen to expose some of our good Friends, and of whom we had reason to expect better Examples, we have nothing to do but to be sorry for them, and pray for their Reformation.

I’ll let alone the Retrospect which might be made into the time of the last Ministry, and the Conduct of the last Reign, and begin with the present Reign just where they began with us, viz. at the first coming of the King, when his Majesty Landed at Greenwich,[28] where he was attended with the greatest appearance of the Nobility and Gentry of the Nation that has been heard of a long time.

It was here that We Tories saw first what we was to expect; for I must acknowledge, that till that very Moment we flatter’d our selves, tho’ I acknowledge I never saw the reason of it, that we were so considerable, as that if we went in to the King, his Majesty was obliged to come over to us. I need not tell you the reason of that Delusion, you will see much of it in the Consequences of Things, and in the mean time you may resolve it all into this, viz. the Great Opinion we had at that time, that the Tories were infinitely the majority of the Nation, had the Governing Interest, and that no wise Prince would be so hardy[29] as to attempt to disoblige them, much less to suppress them, and least of all to pretend to hold a Ballance between them and the Whigs.

Upon this Foundation we thought our appearing universally for the King, was to be accepted as a piece of good Fortune to his Majesty, with a surprize of Satisfaction; and that there was no room to doubt but the King would be ours if we would but vouchsafe to be his: It was upon this Notion, no doubt, that at a Meeting of some who I thought were Honester Tories than they have appeared to be since, when it was taken notice of how the King had singled out the Whigs to commit the Regency[30] to, till his Arrival, and when some pretended to resent it, it was answer’d, you may remember, that those Things happen’d from the Measures and Usage of the late Princess Sophia’s Court,[31] and some hot Men who had imposed upon her; but that his Majesty, who was a Sagacious and Wise Prince, would soon alter those Measures when he came hither, when he should see what a mean[32] part of the People the Whigs were composed of, and when he should be truly informed what would be the Consequence of disobliging the Church; and therefore during the short Power of the Regency, we bore up our Spirits with wishing the King were arrived.

I confess I had some differing Thought of these Things, even at that time; and I used jestingly to tell them, they thought too well of themselves, and that I believ’d the Princess Sophia had a truer Notion of their Strength than they had of their own; and that if the King knew them as well as I did, he would never have the least Apprehension of their Power, when ever he thought it for his Service to disoblige them; and that as the first Measures were taken from the same Notion, I told them I believ’d his Majesty had the same mean Opinion of their Power, that I thought they ought to have of themselves; the greatest of their Forces consisting in Men of the Gown rather than Men of the Sword; and their best Weapons being the Tongues of Clergy, by which they fancied they could engage the Hands of the common People; but that if they did so, they would find it of small Force against a Prince mounted, and in actual Possession of the Throne, and would put them under infinite disadvantages if ever they came to try their Hands that way.

This was all, as above, in the infancy of the Regency, whose Proceedings the Tories began to resent mightily, and therefore we all used to say, That we wish’d his Majesty was come, not doubting but he would shew us the difference between a Gracious King and a Regency made up of a select number of Noblemen, most of whom, if not all, we esteem’d our Enemies.

But they were soon convinc’d of their Mistake, when upon his Majesty’s landing at Greenwich they found his Measures already concerted in favour of the Low Party;[33] that his Majesty perfectly knew his Friends from his Enemies, and was not at a loss who to choose, or afraid to single out those he resolv’d to trust, and venture the Resentment of the rest.

Nothing was more Undutiful as well as ridiculous, than the Rage some Gentlemen thought fit to be in upon the first Steps the King made at his entring upon the Administration; I reduce them to two for the avoiding a long List, I mean, displacing the Tories, and dissolving the Parliament;[34] it would be talking too like them to give you any part of their Language in the first Transports of their Passions, how his Majesty had at one Blow disoblig’d both the Army and the Church; that no Prince ever could support himself in those Circumstances; that he would soon find his Mistake, and that if he did not change his Measures in a little time he would see the Scepter would shake in his Hand; and the Crown to be too heavy for his Head; to turn out the D— of O—-d![35] said they, a Man so ador’d by the Army, and so beloved by every private Centinel, that he could carry them with a turn of his Finger which way he would! and to do it in so disobliging a manner, they said no Prince would ever have taken such a Step, and they did not doubt but some of those who gave that Advice would find time to repent it, and his Majesty would soon find occasion to resent their serving him so ill.

I confess, I us’d to be very plain with them on these Heads, and told them, I found they were resolv’d to bury themselves in the Ruin of their own Opinions. I told them, I wondred they could expect his Majesty should take any other Steps than those he had taken, or that he should not put himself and his Administration into those Hands who had upheld his Interest in the former Reign,[36] when the Danger of setting up the Pretender had been so universally believ’d to be the Design of the others. That suppose it had been as they alledg’d all along, (viz.) That they had no real Design to favour the Pretender, yet they must own they lay under the Scandal of it; and it was too generally receiv’d, both Abroad and at Home, to justify the Conduct of any Prince in the World, that should venture himself upon their Fidelity, till Time and a long Series of good and peaceable Behaviour, should satisfy him of their Integrity. That Statesmen suspected, are like Maids slander’d, tho they may be Innocent, yet no Body will marry them till the Scandal upon their Character is remov’d: So they could not expect the King should throw himself upon the Fidelity of those Men, and put the Administration into their Hands, till the Scandal of their former Conduct was remov’d, and their Innocence was clear’d up. And as to the Danger of Dismissing them, and the Influence they could have in the Nation to make the Administration uneasy, I told them, I thought they remembred their own Maxim better than so; that in the Time of their late Administration, they found the Pulse of the Nation run as high against them, as any Ministry had done since the Revolution.[37] That the Whigs were grown popular, the Fears of the Pretender artfully spread among the whole Nation, had drawn great Numbers of the Nobility, Gentry, and especially the Wealthiest part of the Nation from them; And they themselves were miserably broke and divided, acting in no Concert, and little Confidence one with another: And yet, as I told them, I had heard a certain Minister of State say, That “Give him but the Queen and the Army, he would answer for a Parliament and the People, in what ever Scheme of Administration he had a mind to introduce.”

I reminded them of the several Reigns of King Henry VIII. King Edward VI. Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth, in all whose Times the Administration was carry’d on successfully, in executing the several Measures of changing Religion alternately this Way or That, as the Kings or Queens thought for their Purpose; to Day for the Pope; to Morrow for demolishing all the Religious Foundations; in this Reign to pull down Popery, in the next to set it up; in one Queens Reign to persecute the Protestant Reformation with Fire and Faggot, and in the next to restore it with a high Hand. I reminded them how Queen Elizabeth brought in the Reformation, even with the Administration of a Popish Council and with a Popish Parliament.[38]

Above all, on a particular occasion at one of these Meetings, a Gentleman of my Acquaintance turn’d freely to some of them and ask’d them this close Question; ‘You talk, said he, of the King’s disobliging the Army and the Church by embarking with the Whigs: but what then Gentlemen? said he, we must take it for a Misfortune, and must wait peaceably for a time to open his Majesty’s Eyes and if possible, to bring him to believe us, as we believe our selves, to be honester Men and better Friends to his Interest than the Whigs; but as for Resentment! what can you pretend to? or who have you next? You know there’s no body next but Popery and the Pretender, and you can’t for shame so much as mention those Names to the People: If indeed, continued he, there had been a popular beloved Prince, who had been a Protestant bred, whose Title to the Crown would have born a dispute, and for whom you might have had some pretence to declare, then something might have been said; but for the Pretender! Gentlemen, said he, have you not abjur’d him by Name! has not every Man of us declar’d openly, that we never had the least Thought of him! have we not thought our selves abused and injur’d to the last Degree, to be so much as charg’d at a distance with favouring a Jacobite, and encouraging the Friends of the Pretender; there is therefore no room any more for us to name him now, than there was to name him before, unless we should tell the People that we had play’d the Hypocrites all this while, and should now throw off the Mask and declare our selves, owning that we had all along been in the Popish Interests, tho’ for Reasons of State we thought fit to disguise it; and if we do thus, said he, who do ye think will join with us? All the Honest Tories, who never went that length, will disown us, and acknowledge they have been imposed upon: For my part, said he, nothing appears to me more horrid, and I must declare my self against you in it, for the Pretender can never be the meaning of an honest Man, after such Protestations, Asseverations and Abjurations, as we have publickly made and taken to the contrary: neither will you ever be able to look God or Man in the Face with such a Cause on your Hands, the common People of England will be against you as one Man, and you will only sink your selves and your Friends in the attempt, and which is worse, you will fall with the greatest Infamy in the World, and the Name of a High Church Man will be made odious to the whole nation.[’]

A great many of the grave, sedate and most valuable Tories receiv’d this Discourse with a Satisfaction, which an Argument so just must necessarily produce upon thinking Men, and several of them acknowledg’d that they were of his Opinion, and that his Discourse had made such Impressions upon them that they could see nothing but Madness and Destruction in the views of the other Party; that the Kings Measures were[39] no other that what, the former Conduct of the Tory Party considered, they had reason to expect from a Prince whose Wisdom and Sense of Government no Man had room to reproach; and that as for the Notion of his Majesty not being able to support those Measures, they own’d they were foolish and ridiculous, and tended to nothing but Sedition, and perhaps a Rebellion in favour of the Pretender, which they not only could not joyn in, but could not think of without Horrour.

I was glad always to find my Opinion had the Sanction of other Mens Approbation, especially of such Mens Judgment who I knew to be true Friends to the establish’d Liberties of their Country, and who upon all occasions had appeared faithful to the Revolution; and it pleased me the better, because many of these Men had the Misfortune as well as I, to have had a better Opinion of the late People than we all now begin to see they deserv’d, and I doubt not, had they sooner been alarm’d by the opener Conduct of those Men, they would as I did, always have declar’d their abhorrence of every step in favour of a Popish Interest, or in prejudice of the Protestant Succession.

But if we were alarm’d at the Motions of those People in Discourse, who shew’d themselves Malecontents in the first Steps of the Administration, I was perfectly astonished when in subsequent Discourses soon after what I have related above, I found my self upbraided with my triming Prudentials,[40] and found the Stile of the Talk among them quite alter’d, especially among two sorts of People, 1. The Gentlemen turn’d out of Places,[41] and 2. The Clergy.

When they spoke of the Pretender, I observ’d they had new Notions, or at least [a] new way of expressing themselves; they were not come yet to a downright Discovery of their design, and to speak plain English, but they began to prepare themselves for it by a particular way of Treating the Affairs of the Succession with an Air of indifference, and bringing themselves to a Jacobite Style by Degrees. When they mention’d the Pretender, they left off the contemptible Epithets they us’d to give him, and with a favourable Accent and a kind of Compassion for his Person would often wish him in Heaven, or that something might be done for him: When they talk’d of the Succession, they would throw out such Expressions as these, viz. ‘that if it was his Right why should any one hinder him of it? that if he could get the Crown why should he not wear it? that it is true, they had been against him, and it was all one to them who had the Crown, and if Providence gave it him let him Reign a Name of God, and the like.[’] Then if the King and his Protestant Line was named, they would rise by Degrees, complain of the Church being trampled on by Foreigners and Hereticks; that the Pretender was as much a Protestant as any one could desire, and would, no question, declare himself so as soon as it was convenient; and the Church would be in no more danger that way than this.

I must own this was new Language to me, and it made me sometimes look about me to see if these Words came from the same Mouths from whom I had so often heard other Language in former Times upon occasion of the same Discourses; and oftentimes I failed not to reproach them with it. They told me it was no Impeachment of Principle to talk thus, that they were discharg’d of their Oaths and Abjurations by the Conduct of the Whigs, and that they were driven by force to an indifferency, and if it were to a quite taking Party on the other side, it was no more than might be justified, and the like.

I observ’d the Clergy fell in violently with these Notions, and the Name of the Pretender began to be mention’d on all Hands with a quite different Air than before, and with a Concern that gave room for any one that was not blind, to see that the Tables were turn’d with them, that their Politic Principles had not sunk so deep as to reach their Consciences at all: that they pretended to think themselves discharg’d by his Majesty’s having left them out of the Ministry, from all Obligations to their Sovereign; nay, even from those of Duty and Obedience, a Principle I assured them an Honest Tory could by no means agree to.

From henceforward there was little to be done with them by Words, but I told them plainly, they were gone from all the Measures and Foundations they had formerly builded upon, or at least pretended to; that now they were no longer to be called Tories but Jacobites, and that I expected the next Step would be Rebellion if want of Power did not prevent: They were not asham’d tacitly to acknowledge, that want of Power was indeed their only Grievance, and sometimes with more Sincerity than Discretion, would acknowledge that they had a dependance upon their Measures, that they should in a little time bring over the common People from the present Attachment they seem’d to have for the House of Hanover, and from the Person of the King in particular, and that they were resolved they would not fail in the design for want of Application.

Indeed, this gave me and a great many Honest Tories at that time in Town, whose Sentiments agreed with mine, such a Shock in our good Opinion of these Men, that we drew out of their Society, and cared not to keep them Company after it. But we soon found in the Country to our Surprize, the mischievous Consequence of their Endeavour; for we found the Clergy all over England taking the Hint by Correspondence, enter’d immediately into their Resentments and pursued exactly their Measures, spreading by secret and Treasonable Insinuations among the People, the vilest Notions, the most scandalous Principles, and the corruptest Resolutions, that it could be imagined Men were capable of receiving, and this with an unaccountable Success.

Immediately we found all our poor Country People, who were before busied about their rustick Affairs, and whose Talk generally related to the plain Business of their Farms, and the Rates of Corn and Cattle, all changed; and getting into little Clubs and Cabals, talking the Parsons Politicks over at second Hand, and discoursing of the indefeisable[42] Right of the Pretender.

By accustoming one another to these Things, I soon found the Pretender was not so much their Aversion as he used to be; Popery grew less terrible, and the Government of a Popish Prince’s became so familiar, that the common People ask’d what it was King James was depos’d for; and when it has been purposely answer’d by halves, that it was for being a Papist, they would cry that’s very hard, and that it was the height of Persecution; not considering that King James was opposed as a Tyrant more than as a Papist;[43] and that even in Matters of Religion, it was not so much his own share in Popish Idolatries that disgusted the People, as his illegal and apparent attempts to impose those Idolatries upon his People, and to bring the Protestant Church into Subjection to the Church of Rome: That these Designs of his were evident by such overt Acts as could not be disguised or concealed; such as the invading the Privileges of the Universities, and obtruding Popish Students, Fellows and Heads upon Protestant Colleges,[44] the setting up a High Commission Court to dispossess upon frivolous and unjust Pretences, the whole Body of the Clergy of the Church, and impose such as they thought fit with Non-obstante[45] to the Laws of the Land and the Canon Ecclesiastick.[46]

Nor were the common People only prepar’d thus to think hard of the deposing a Popish Prince; but those very Thoughts made way in their Minds to give the setting up another Popish Prince a better Reception: In a Word, the Minds of the common People began to be weaned from those frightful Ideas which they had justly formed in their Imagination of Popery and Popish Government; and by this means they ripened up the ignorant Countrymen to general Disaffection, Legitimating of course all the attempts which should afterwards be made by Tumult and Rebellion in Favour of that Person, and of that Cause, which they were first made to believe had the most known Indisputable Right and the justest Foundation.

From these Principles, and by these Methods it has come to pass, that the Country People of England have been so much imposed upon; but that which makes it yet more horrid, and which best accounts for the surprizing Progress of the Delusion is, that the Clergy were the Men by whose Agency this whole Matter has been carry’d: How punctually they correspond with one another over the whole Nation; how readily they imbrace the Principles and pursue the Measures handed down to them from above; how zealous in the Mischief, how active in spreading the Poison of Disloyalty these Gentlemen have been, you may make some Judgment of, by observing how universally the People of England began to talk the same Language over the whole Kingdom as it were at the very same time, and how soon the People were turn’d; as it may be call’d, from a general Rectitude of Principle and an Affectionate and Dutiful Submission to the King, his Family and Interest, to a retrograde Aspect, fill’d with dark and hellish Degeneracy of Principle, ripened up for Mischief, and ready to spend their Blood for the hastening on the Ruin of their Country and Posterity.

Nor was this Poison spread only among the common People, but even among the Nobility and Gentry, too much Impression was made, and some of the best Families and greatest Estates in the Nation were either originally in, or were speedily brought over, to a Debauchery of Principle, and to a mistaken Notion both of their Duty to their Sovereign, and of the Obligation of those Oaths and Abjurations which they had solemnly taken, and which till this occasion happened they held themselves bound by.

I must acknowledge to you, that if the abusing the Judgment of the common People seem’d strange to me, this spreading of the same absurd Notions among the Nobility and Gentry was perfectly surprizing, and led me to a more than ordinary Curiosity in my Enquiry after the Agents, by whose particular Dexterity such Advances could be made in so short a Time; and the Sum of my Enquiries amounted to this and no more, That there was with you at London a close concerted Confederacy, between a few of the Principals of those who we are not to call the Outed Party, consisting of about three or four Noblemen, about twenty Gentlemen of good Quality, and among them three or four warm dignify’d Clergymen.

These being to the last Degree enrag’d at what had unexpectedly, as they call’d it, happen’d to them at Greenwich; and giving a loose to their Resentment, upon their being turn’d out of Favour, and at seeing the Whigs put in; abandoning at once all their Concern for their Country, their Posterity, their Duty, their Religion, or their Conscience, resolving every thing to be just and lawful which might carry on their Design, enter’d into the first Confederacy against the present Government, and thereby into a Confederacy against as well our Ecclesiastick as Civil Establishment.

It would require some Head better acquainted than I am with that part, to give the secret History, as well of the Conduct of those Confederates, as of their Names; and as I know you have not been ignorant of either, I could wish you would return the Friendship I shew you in this Letter, by giving, as I know you can, a brief Account of the several Intreagues, Consultations, and Resolves of that eminent Cabal, with their Measures for executing those Resolves, which would be a very profitable as well as diverting History, and make that part which we see carry’d on in the Country here appear less strange to us; for we well know that our Clergy have receiv’d not only their Intelligence, but even their Orders and Instructions from your Parts.

Nor is it to be forgotten how we found in the Country, that the inferior Clergy receiv’d a surprizing Supply of Scandal by a late famous Pamphlet, printed by the Order of the Cabal at London, and sent diligently down into all the several Counties of England, by which at once it was found, that the Gentlemen were furnish’d at the same time with the same Topicks, the same Reasons and Arguments against their Duty; which Reasons and Topicks of Discourse were respectively adapted to the Use of all the Pulpits and all the Ale-Houses in England: This Pamphlet was call’d English Advice to the Freeholders.[47] And so faithful were the Servants of the Party to their Employers, that no Rewards could purchase the Discovery, so as to bring them to Justice; tho we hear in the Country, that the Government know very well who was the Writer of that zealous Part of High-Church Loyalty, and will take their own time to resent it.

This Alarm was calculated for the Election of the Parliament,[48] and it was in our Country[49] made much use of upon that Occasion; insomuch, that they boasted that tho they lost by the Election in the Towns, they gain’d in the Countries, tho even in that they were mistaken too: but this will be allow’d, that by the incessant Clamour, about that Time rais’d by the Clergy and their Emissaries, they really gain’d ground upon the Loyalty of the People, debauch’d their Principles, and laid a Foundation for all that Tumult and Disorder that has since broke the Peace of the Country, and occasion’d all the Blood with has since been shed, or that may be shed in this unnatural Quarrel.[50]

It was indeed wonderful,[51] to see how soon they had turn’d the Heads of the common People, and how those, who but a few Days before had been as forward as any Body to toss up their Caps for King George, who had abhor’d, as well as abjur’d the Pretender, and whose Blood run chill at the very Name of Popery, were to be seen now pulling down Meeting-Houses,[52] huzzaing for High-Church, and shaking Hands with their Popish Neighbours, as People all embark’d in the same Cause: And least it be thought hard of one who calls himself a Tory, and who you know has been so true to the Church, and such a Friend to the Clergy, to load the Clergy with the Crime of deluding these poor People; I beg of you but to make one Observation with me upon it, viz. Whether many of the said poor People, who will be brought to Justice for their Rebellion,[53] do not load the Clergy with it at the Gallows: For which Observation I doubt not, you will have Opportunities enough.

It is true, there have been other Instruments made use of to Debauch the Principles of the People, besides the inferior Clergy; the High-Church Party have had their Emissaries a long time at work, to spread Disaffection among the People, and there has not been wanting Instruments among the Gentry, and even among the Nobility, and some among the Ladies too, of which I may speak in time. But I remember how what a plain, honest, homely Fellow said once in our Neighbourhood, had a very strange Effect upon the People round about him, and answer’d, at that time, all that the Jacobite Gentlemen could say. It seems they were railing at the Government, and at last, centering their Scandal upon the Person of the King, and among the rest, at his Majesty’s being a Stranger,[54] and unacquainted, &c. Well, says the Countryman, why then if the King is a Stranger, belike other People move him to act in a manner as you do not like. Yes, yes, said the Jacobite, it is his Ministry do it all. Well but says the Countryman, “Must we dislike the King for what his Ministry do? Perhaps when he comes to be better acquainted he will put you in their Room, pray how shall we be sure you will do better? Yet you will think it hard the King should be reproach’d with Ignorance for putting you in, and we shall think it as hard he should be charg’d with your Mistakes; therefore our way is first to do justice to the King, and then to enquire, when any Faults are found, who are to be blam’d for them.”

This Answer is so natural, and so adapted to the common Understanding, that it would presently have conquer’d all the Attempts of that Party, had there been no other Agents at work; for nothing was more evident than the Injustice of reproaching the Sovereign upon the Conduct of his Servants; when at the same time they granted, tho that was not true either, that the King being a Stranger was not acquainted with the Persons Capacities and Merit of those he was to chuse them out of. Now tho it is true, that his Majesty’s Conduct has prov’d, that he perfectly knew the Characters of the Nobility and Gentry who he employ’d, as likewise of those he declin’d, of which the very separating them one from another at his first coming was a Proof; yet were it as they say, still the Force of the Argument is doubled upon them, viz. That it is unreasonable in them to endeavour to alienate the Affections of the People from their Sovereign, for any Mistakes of his Ministry.

This therefore had never gone the Length with the People, as we since find it has, had not the inferior Clergy taken up the Cudgels, in what they call the Cause of the Church, and brought Religion into the Quarrel, as I have said before. I must confess, tho I love the Church as well as any of them, yet we have been formerly so tir’d with this politick Clamour of the Church’s Danger,[55] when we our selves knew the Cheat, and that there was nothing at all in it, that I could by no means lay any stress upon it now; and this I must say, that it gave me a strange, tho’ I doubt a true Idea of the Honesty of our Clergy from that time forward; and I am at a great loss to imagine what kind of Conduct that it will be rational for me to expect from them, will ever be able to restore them to my Charity.

In a Word, the Idea’s I entertain’d of them were such as these, viz. That too many of them deserv’d the Character of that Pope, who when he saw the vast Sums which were brought into his Treasury by the Sale of Indulgences, cried out with more Sincerity than Religion, Heu! Quantum profuit hæc Fabula Christi? What a strange deal of Mony we get by this Fable of Christ?[56] And I thought that our Clergy may well turn the Words and say, Alas! How easily do we embroil this Nation whenever we please, by this Fable of the Danger of the Church?

Certain it is, that the same People have raised the same Cry upon several Occasions, some of them as inconsistent one with another as Light is with Darkness; and you and I know well enough when the Fable of the Danger of the Church, did good Service to the Whig Cause at one time, and to the Tory Cause at another.[57]

But of all the occasions that ever were laid hold of, to complain of the Danger of the Church, I must own there never was one circumstanc’d like this, for it is so naked, the Hook is so bare, the Pretences are so weak, and the true design so visible, that really it shocks even us Tories, I mean, such of us who have some remains of old Principles left, and who have not harden’d ourselves against the Convictions of our Reason: In a Word, it is impossible to reconcile us to such Conduct as we now see the generality of our old Friends, as well Clergy as Laiety, submit to:

For Example,

  1. To take all the Oaths, Declarations and Abjurations, and Swear that they from their Hearts willingly and truly abjure the Pretender by Name, and yet at the same time drink his Health, pray for his Coming, and persuade the poor People to believe he has the only lawful Claim to be their King.
  2. To speak of the Danger of the Church under the Reign of a Protestant Successor, and propose the delivering the Church from that Danger by a Popish Pretender.

These things have quite shockt us honest Country Tories, and we are quite aground; we want mightily to know what you London Tories think of it; for in short, if we have not some better Arguments to resolve our Doubts, we shall all turn Whigs in our Opinion of the inferior Clergy, and think they have lost all Sense of Religion and Loyalty, Justice and Honesty; and in the mean time I assure you we are all ready to draw our Swords for King George, and to stand by the Constitution and the Protestant Succession to the last drop; for as we own[58] the King, so we abhor Rebellion and a Popish Pretender.

F I N I S.

NOTES

[21]   former Times: the Whigs had last been preeminent from 1708 to 1710.

[22] Change of the Ministry … about the Year 1711: the ministerial revolution of 1710–11 saw Anne’s removal of the Whig-allied Sidney Godolphin (1645–1712) and Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), and the appointment of Robert Harley (1661–1724) as First Lord of the Treasury in May 1711, after the Tories’ victory in the 1710 general election. Harley effectively led the government until his resignation in July 1714.

[23] Excursion: “an overstepping of the bounds of propriety or custom” (OED); euphemistically, an insult.

[24] Obedience to the higher Powers: the Tories were associated with “passive obedience” to the monarchical will.

[25] I thought … infringed: compare Defoe’s An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715): “It was not material to me what Ministers Her Majesty was pleas’d to employ, my Duty was to go along with every Ministry, so far as they did not break in upon the Constitution, and the Laws and Liberties of my Country” (21).

[26] Eclaircissement: an explanation of equivocal conduct or something obscure; “Eclaricissment” in original.

[27] to die in the last Ditch: not to surrender; to fight till the last. The allusion is to William of Orange’s defense of his native Holland in 1672. See Introduction.

[28] his Majesty Landed at Greenwich: on September 18, 1714.

[29] hardy: “presumptuously bold, audacious; rashly bold, showing temerity” (OED).

[30] Regency: between Anne’s death and George’s arrival, Britain was ruled by a Hanoverian-appointed Regency comprised mostly of Whigs, albeit with a few Hanoverian Tories, like Nottingham (see Hatton 120–21).

[31] Usage of the late Princess Sophia’s Court: the House of Hanover felt slighted because proposals for Sophia or her grandson, the future George II (reigned 1727–60), to reside in England had been rejected, primarily by Anne (Gregg 209–13).

[32] mean: “of a political body, authority, etc.: weak; comparatively powerless” (OED).

[33] Low Party: the Whigs were the Low Church party, committed broadly to toleration of nonconformity; the Tories were the High Church party, committed to High Anglicanism and opposed to toleration.

[34] dissolving the Parliament: on January 15, 1715, prior to the general election.

[35] D— of O—-d!: James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormond (1665–1745), a Tory, was appointed Captain-General of the British forces in 1711, after the removal of the Whig favorite, Marlborough. He was a focal point of Jacobitism after George dismissed him; facing impeachment, he fled to France in summer 1715 where he conspired on behalf of the Pretender. Defoe wrote two pamphlets attacking Ormond in 1715.

[36] those Hands … former Reign: the Whigs.

[37] Revolution: i.e. 1688–89.

[38] several Reigns … Popish Parliament: Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47) initiated the English Reformation. Britain reverted to Catholicism and back again during the reigns of his children, Edward VI (1547–53), Mary I (1553–58), and Elizabeth I (1558–1603), because Mary was Catholic and Edward and Elizabeth were Protestant.

[39] were: “where” in original.

[40] triming Prudentials: to trim is “to modify one’s attitude in order to stand well with opposite parties; to move cautiously, or ‘balance’ between two alternative interests, positions, opinions, etc.; also, to accommodate oneself to the mood of the times” (OED). It was a negative concept, associated with expedient or self-interested compromise of principle.

[41] Gentlemen turn’d out of Places: those removed from political office, the Tories.

[42] indefeisable: indefeasible. This spelling is not unusual in the period.

[43] King James … Papist: when Duke of York, James converted to Catholicism in the late 1660s. Efforts by the Protestant parliament to exclude him from the succession failed due in large measure to the opposition of his brother Charles II (reigned 1660–85) to the Exclusion Bills. As king, James II’s appointment of Catholics to prominent public offices in contravention of the Test Act (1673) and the birth of his son, a Catholic heir, set in motion the invitation to William of Orange to invade.

[44] the invading … Protestant Colleges: James II offended Anglicans by attempting to place Catholics in positions of power at colleges of the University of Oxford.

[45] Non-obstante: a jurisprudential phrase meaning “notwithstanding.” James II acted notwithstanding the laws.

[46] Canon Ecclesiastick: canon law.

[47] English Advice, to the Freeholders of England: this pamphlet, published anonymously at the start of 1715, was by the High Tory Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (1663–1732). It was highly controversial: a reward of £1,000 was offered for information leading to the arrest of its author. See Introduction.

[48] the Election of the Parliament: the general election in early 1715 saw a huge swing to the Whigs, despite Atterbury’s propaganda.

[49] Country: i.e. county.

[50] Quarrel: the 1715 Jacobite rising.

[51] wonderful: full of wonder; amazing.

[52] Meeting-Houses: places of nonconformist worship, allowed by the Toleration Act of 1689. See Monod 173ff on attacks against them in the 1714–15 riots.

[53] brought to Justice for their Rebellion: the Jacobite rebels were tried and many sentenced to death; many were later released or transported following the Act of Indemnity (July 1717).

[54] stranger: foreigner.

[55] the Church’s Danger: During Anne’s reign “The Church in Danger” was a popular rallying cry of Anglican Tories, who feared that the 1689 Act of Toleration undermined the Church of England.

[56] that Pope … Fable of Christ: attributed to Leo X (Pope, 1513–21). See Introduction.

[57] good Service … at another: The “Church in Danger” slogan backfired in 1705 and government swung to the Whigs, but its revival in 1710, resulting in the poorly managed impeachment of the High Church cleric, Henry Sacheverell (1674–1724), produced a Tory upsurge (see Bennett 81–83, Jones 759–71, and Spaeve 14–15).

[58] own: “recognize or profess obedience to” (OED).

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

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Daniel Defoe’s Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (1716): A Critical Edition

Edited and Introduced by Nicholas Seager

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

 

Some
THOUGHTS
of an
Honest TORY
In the Country,
upon the
Late Dispositions of some People to Revolt.
with
Something of the Original and Consequence of their present Disaffection to the Person and Government of the King.


In a Letter to an Honest Tory in London


LONDON:
Printed for R. Burleigh in Amen-Corner. 1716.

(Price Six Pence)

 


 THE INTRODUCTION

As in Matters of Dispute it is always requisite to explain the Terms, so before I proceed to the Case now in hand, I think my self oblig’d to lay down very plainly what I mean, and how I wou’d be understood, when I speak, 1. Of an Honest Tory, for some will hardly allow the Term to be just. 2. Of the Dispositions of some People to Revolt. 3. Of a Disaffection to the Person and Government of the King; and, lastly, who I mean by the King.

And this I do, because as it is just that every Man should be the Expositor of his own Words, so in this time of universal Misunderstanding, it is highly necessary to every Author to be very explicit, that no room should be left to his Enemies to put false Glosses upon what he writes,[13] and to explain Things for him, which they cannot so well do when he has explain’d them already for himself.

By an Honest Tory then, I mean such a Man as the Whigs themselves mark’d out for us in the time of the late Reign;[14] when tho’ they believed that the Ministry, and High Church or Tory Party, were in the Interest of the Pretender;[15] yet they always told us, and that not with Charity only but with Truth, that it was not to be understood of all the Tory Party, but that there were a great many honest Gentlemen, even among the Tories, who were not for the Pretender, and these they themselves christned afterwards by the Name of Revolution Tories.[16] I could quote many Authors for this, besides a Pamphlet said to be written by a Person of Honour, Entitled, Observations on the State of the Nation,[17] where the Case is plainly distinguished. In a Word then, the Author of this Work is to be understood as a Revolution Tory; one, who however he may have been of differing Sentiments from the generality of the People in some time past, is yet sound in his Political Opinion, clear in the Revolution Principle, and by Consequence in that of the Protestant Succession of Hanover,[18] as now possest by, and entail’d upon, The King, and his Royal Protestant Posterity; and this Man it’s hoped may, tho’ a Tory, be call’d Honest for many good Reasons, too many to enter upon here.

By the Words in the Title the Disposition of some People to revolt, it is desir’d to be understood, not that there is a general or a formidable Disposition in the People of this Nation to revolt; but that there is such an unhappy Disposition in some, and that there are Agents at Work busily to spread that Disposition further among the rest; and this cannot be denied; nay, tho’ it should be said that this unhappy Disposition has been spread farther, and encreased to a greater height than was thought could have been possible in such a Nation, and under such an Administration as this we now live under.

By the Disaffection to the Person and Government of the King, I mean much the same with the Disposition to revolt; with the Addition only of those who are actually in Arms against the King, and of those who openly declare themselves in the Interest of the Rebels.[19]

Lastly, by the King I desire always to be understood as a good Subject ought to be, viz. to mean King George; and I chuse to explain it thus to avoid the often[20] Repetition of his Majesty’s Name; as also, that I think no other Name can, but in a criminal manner be added to the Style: and I think the King is a more Honourable Distinction by far, than it would be with the addition of his Majesty’s Name, which would but leave room to suggest, that an Usurper might be lawfully spoken of as King, and have the Honour of his Majesty’s Style added to his Name, which I think cannot be without as much Treason as the Tongue is capable of speaking.


Notes

[13]     false Glosses: This phrase occurs frequently in Defoe’s writings; see An Enquiry into the Case of Mr. Asgill’s Translation [A3v]; Review 1.7; An Essay on the History of Parties 3; An Essay on the South-Sea Trade 9; Reasons Against Fighting 2; Argument Proving 89; Turkish Spy 220; Complete English Tradesman 203, 301; Conjugal Lewdness 112; A New Family Instructor 14.

[14]   the late Reign: that of Queen Anne (reigned 1702–14).

[15]   Pretender: James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), son of the deposed King James II (reigned 1685–88), who led a failed uprising to claim the throne in late 1715.

[16]   Revolution Tories: those Tories in support of the 1688–89 English Revolution, by which James II was deposed by Parliament and replaced with his son-in-law and daughter, William III and Mary II (reigned 1688–1702; William solo after Mary’s death in 1694).

[17]   Observations … Nation: Observations upon the State of the Nation, in January 1712/3 (January 1713), which Defoe thought was by Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham (1647–1730). See Introduction.

[18]   Protestant Succession of Hanover: by the Act of Succession (1701), the monarchy was settled, in the case of both William III and Anne dying without heir, on the next Protestant claimant, Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her heirs. Sophia predeceased Anne, so Sophia’s son became George I (reigned 1714–27).

[19]   Rebels: participants in the 1715 Jacobite rising.

[20]   often: frequent.

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

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Daniel Defoe’s Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (1716): A Critical Edition

Edited and Introduced by Nicholas Seager

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

 

Note on the Text

The copy text used in producing this edition is the Newberry Library’s copy of the first (and only) edition of Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory. I have also consulted the copy held at Senate House Library, University of London, which is identical. Original typography, orthography, and punctuation have mostly been retained, except that the “long s” has been modernized and running left-hand quotation marks have been omitted. Other emendations to the text are noted and my interpolations are in square brackets.

For helpful feedback and practical help in preparing this edition, I would like to thank Katherine Ellison, Holly Faith Nelson, Ginny Weckstein, an anonymous reviewer for Digital Defoe, and Mackenzie Sarna, who completed the first transcription of the text on my behalf.

Introduction to the Edition  |  Note on the Text  |  Front Matter  |  Maintext of Some Thoughts  | Bibliography

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The Prosecution and Trial of Moll Flanders

Jeanne Clegg

[T]he administration of the eighteenth-century criminal justice system created several interconnected spheres of contested judicial space in each of which deeply discretionary choices were made. Those accused of offences in the eighteenth century found themselves propelled on an often bewildering journey along a route which can best be compared to a corridor of connected rooms or stage sets. From each room one door led on towards eventual criminalization, conviction and punishment, but every room also had other exits. Each had doors indicating legally accepted ways in which the accused could get away from the arms of the law, while some rooms also had illegal tunnels through which the accused could sometimes escape to safety. Each room was also populated by a different and socially diverse group of men and women, whose assumptions, actions, and interactions, both with each other, and with the accused, determined whether or not he or she was shown to an exit or thrust on up the corridor.

Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 17401820

THIS ESSAY describes the journey of Daniel Defoe’s first fictional thief through the “interconnected spheres” of the criminal justice system of her time, following her route along Peter King’s “corridor of connected rooms or stage sets,” from the moment of her arrest, through committal to prison by a Justice of the Peace, to a Grand Jury hearing, arraignment, trial, sentencing and beyond. In each of these rooms, Moll Flanders has to negotiate with men and women from various social backgrounds, each of them empowered to make “deeply discretionary choices”; she makes repeated attempts to escape, now through doors offering officially accepted ways out, now through “illegal tunnels,” only to find herself thrust on up the corridor toward “criminalization, conviction and punishment” (King 1-2).

The route is not always clearly posted, and the rules and customs that govern these “judicial spaces” are very different from those that apply in the English system of justice as it has evolved over the last three hundred years, so that this journey is often more bewildering to the modern reader than it is to Moll. In trying to illuminate her way I have drawn heavily on the work of social historians, but also, for closer focus on the experience of actually existing people who resemble Moll, her allies and opponents, on reports of thirty-four trials in which thirty-seven men and women were charged at the Old Bailey with stealing from shops during the two years leading up to the publication of Moll Flanders in January 1722.[1]

As historical records, the Old Bailey Proceedings, thankfully digitalized and searchable, are unreliable in various ways. They give more coverage to sensational cases than to the humdrum non-violent property offences which made up the bulk of prosecuted crime; until 1729 they omit or summarize briefly much of the testimony, often ignoring defense evidence in favor of that brought by the prosecution (Shoemaker, “The Old Bailey Proceedings” 567-68). They nonetheless tell us a good deal about what was said in eighteenth-century courtrooms, and offer many clues as to how the speakers came to be there. Defoe could easily have heard their words for himself by joining the crowds in the Sessions House Yard, and in these years of intense journalistic activity would have known—even if he did not write all those once attributed to him—the stream of crime reports appearing in newspapers such as Applebee’s Weekly Journal, in the chaplain of Newgate’s Accounts of the lives and last days of those condemned to die (also published by Applebee during these years), and in biographies and volumes of select trials. Of these, the Proceedings, by the terms of its license obliged to report all trials, may have been the most helpful to a writer trying to tell convincing fictional lives of thieves in 1720s London, and their popularity makes them an excellent source for understanding the expectations of his early readers.[2] By comparing Defoe’s narrative of prosecution with the patterns that emerge from these reports, we can see which possibilities he chose to develop, which to ignore and which to flout, and we may also make hypotheses about why he made those choices.


1. Fear of Witnesses

Besides justice, judge, grand and petty jury, the main actors in the prosecution and trial of Moll Flanders consist of Moll herself, the prosecutor (a broker in the cloth trade we come to know as Anthony Johnson), and the broker’s two maid-servants. Moll would have not felt out of place among the flesh-and-blood defendants at the Old Bailey in the early eighteenth century, and readers of the Proceedings would not have been surprised to read of Defoe’s supposedly destitute protagonist having taken to shop-lifting. In the course of the seventeenth century shops had come to replace the fair and the market as channels for distributing all goods but trifles and fresh food (Mui and Mui 27), and as the retail trade responded to the growth of the wealthy middling sort of consumer and the demand for leisure shopping, the new, brightly-lit windows for displaying goods, and the counters over which shopkeepers and their assistants negotiated with customers, offered new opportunities for privately stealing.[3] The last decades of the seventeenth century and first of the eighteenth saw dramatic growth in prosecutions of women in general, and especially for shop-lifting, which had been made a capital offence in 1699 (Beattie, Policing and Punishment 63-71). Of the thirty-seven prisoners in my 1720-1721 sample, fifteen were women, and though this figure falls short of the 51.2% peak reached between 1691 and 1713, Proceedings readers would have recognized in Moll a familiar figure, a plebeian woman’s voice of a kind they had become accustomed to hearing (Shoemaker, “Print and the Female Voice” 75).

Johnson and his maids too would have found themselves at home among those who denounced property crime in eighteenth-century courts of justice. In both Essex (King 35–42) and Surrey (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 192-97), and probably in London as well, most prosecutors belonged to middling and lower social groups: tradesmen, dealers, craftsmen, unskilled labourers, servants, and even paupers. The majority were the victims of the thefts, and their witnesses were usually members of their households (including servants and apprentices), neighbors or fellow traders. Almost invariably these people owed their knowledge of the crime to having personally taken part in apprehending the accused. Early modern England usually left it up to private citizens to take the initiative in law enforcement. Many must have decided not to tackle, report or try to trace a suspect; others seem to have done so enthusiastically (Beattie, Policing and Punishment 30, 50-55; Shoemaker, The London Mob 28-30). Some of the willing may have had venal motives. Victims often paid to get their property back, and though the huge statutory rewards for successful convictions of highway robbers, burglars, coiners and so on did not extend to shoplifters, since 1699 prosecutors of these thieves too had been entitled to a ‘Tyburn Ticket,’ an exemption for life from parish and ward office highly valued by middling-sort Londoners (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 52, 317, 330). Many, however, would have acted out of “pure outrage at being robbed”; Beattie suggests that “broad agreement about the law and about the wickedness of theft or robbery helps to explain the spontaneous character of many arrests in the eighteenth century and the willingness of large numbers of ordinary people to lend a hand” (Crime and the Courts 37).

If we have no way of knowing exactly why particular people arrested suspects, we can learn a good deal from the Proceedings about how they came to do so. Of the thirty-seven men and women in my sample, seven were acquitted.[4] Except in the case of Elizabeth Simpson, the Proceedings gives no details about how these verdicts were reached, referring merely to “the Evidence not being sufficient.” In seven further cases in which the prisoner was found guilty, the reporter is equally unforthcoming, stating only that “[i]t appeared that” the prisoner had taken the goods, that “The Fact” was “plainly prov’d upon him,” or that the prisoner had confessed before a justice.[5] In the remaining twenty-three, however, the Proceedings makes it plain that the thief has been caught in one of three, or possibly four, ways. They are either taken by someone present at the scene of the crime, or reported “after the Fact” by an intermediary to whom they have tried to sell the stolen goods, or shopped by an accomplice, or seized by a professional thief-taker.

Most frequently, some person on the spot sees or hears something suspicious, or quickly misses the goods, seizes and searches, or follows a suspect through the streets, perhaps involving others in a chase. We do not always know who this person is. About the “two Evidences” who saw Susannah Lloyd take a checked tablecloth off Nathaniel Clark’s shop counter, the Proceedings tell us nothing (t17200303-38). In several instances, witnesses are identified as members of the prosecutor’s family, usually a wife or daughter responsible for running and guarding the shop. When John Jackson prosecuted Edward Corder, the chief witness was an Elizabeth Jackson who “was sitting in a back Room, about 7 at Night” when she heard someone open a drawer, “ran out and stopt the Prisoner in the Shop, with the Goods upon him, till some others came to her Assistance” (t17211206-6). The wife of prosecutor Robert Fenwick was “in her Parlour behind the Shop” when Mary Hughes came in, but did not tackle the thief in person: “she … saw the Prisoner take the Goods and immediately sent her Servant after her” (t17200115-40). In another case (t17211011-5), Mrs Elson, wife of the prosecutor, was positive that she had seen Thomas Rice put some lace “in his Bosom and run away with it”; she had him followed and searched, but the lace was not found. As long as he or she was inside the shop, a thief could still claim to be a bona fide customer, but once outside he or she could get rid of the goods more easily, so the timing of an arrest was important. Mary Leighton claimed to have seen Margaret Townley take ribbon from her mother’s shop, “let her go out of the Shop a good way, and then sent to fetch her back again, that when she was brought back she searcht her” (t17200712-4).

Shop security was clearly one of the key functions of employees (Tickell 304). In some of the above cases servants, perhaps apprentices or journeymen, were called on by masters and mistress to catch thieves; in others they acted independently. James Bartley, servant to a draper, told how he suspected Mary Atkins, followed her down the street and found some muslin under her cloak (t17210525-38). John Goodchild’s servant carefully orchestrated the arrest of Katherine Crompton; seeing her take a piece of muslin, he “called the Maid down Stairs” before searching her, and made sure that Goodchild himself and one Jane Ballard would be able to confirm his testimony (t17200907-30).[6]

Jane Ballard may have been a customer who just happened to be in the shop at the time of the theft, as perhaps was Joseph Lock, the alert and fast-acting apprehender of John Scoon. Lock, “being in the Prosecutors Shop” heard the display case rattling, stepped to the door, “saw the Prisoner at the Glass Case, and stopt him”; he then, “charg’d a Constable with the Prisoner, and search’d him. and after some time the Prisoner gave’em the Chain from the Wastband of his Breeches” (t17211206-3). In another case a neighbour, Joseph Austin, found Mary North standing behind the door into his house and claimed to have allowed her in to hide from bailiffs; later, “hearing the Prosecutor was robb’d, followed, took and carried her to him and saw the Goods in her lap” (t17200303-10).

In other cases casual passers-by seem to have been keen to have a go (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 226-58). At David Pritchard’s trial, William Dunkley deposed that he had noticed Isaac Johnson standing at the end of a street, and asked him what he was doing; Johnson replied that he had “observed the Prisoner lurking about, and suspected that he had a Design against the Prosecutor’s Shop.” When Pritchard reached into the shop and took the goods, Johnson chased and seized him; Dunkley too gave chase, but a coach got in his way and by the time he caught up, Johnson “was scuffling with the Prisoner on the Ground with the Goods under him” (t17210830-18).

This testimony rings a little odd. Had Johnson been following Pritchard in the hope of a prize? Were Dunkley and Johnson collaborating, or were they competing to get their hands on the thief? Was either or both of them one of the professional thief-takers who proliferated in these years? If either Johnson or Dunkley—or both—were thief-takers, we must add private enterprise to the methods by which my cohort of thieves were caught.

Strangely, dealers in blood-money do not figure among the antagonists of either Moll Flanders, or even Colonel Jack and the footpads and burglars with whom he associates, and who were the favorite targets of thief-takers. Defoe may have been reluctant to highlight mercenary motives for taking an active part in law enforcement.[7] Moll and her kind fear being taken at or near the scene of their crimes not by professionals but by members of the business community on which they prey. Moll’s first “Teacher” is “snap’d by a Hawks-ey’d Journey-man,” prosecuted, and sent to the gallows (203-04). When Moll takes some damask from a shop and passes it to an accomplice, the latter is seized by the mercer’s men, and Moll, half- relieved, half-terrified, sees “the poor Creature drag’d away in Triumph to the Justice, who immediately committed her to Newgate” (221). Her next partner, a “rash” young man, is taken by a furious crowd and ends up on the gallows; she too is run to ground and only narrowly avoids being arrested (216-17). On another occasion Moll is seized by a pair of mercer’s journeymen (241), and on yet another by an “officious Fellow” who has noticed her enter a silver-smith’s shop in the absence of the owner (269).[8]

In all these episodes those who arrest Moll or her comrades are presented as vigilant, quick-acting and aggressive. The two maids who put an end to her thieving career are no exception. Moll has ventured through an open door and “furnish’d myself as I thought verily without being perceiv’d, with two Peices [sic] of flower’d Silk, such as they call Brocaded Silk, very rich” when she is rudely interrupted:

I was attack’d by two Wenches that came open Mouth’d at me just as I was going out at the Door, and one of them pull’ me back into the Room, while the other shut the Door upon me; I would have given them good Words, but there was no room for it; two fiery Dragons cou’d not have been more furious than they were; they tore my Cloths, bully’d and roar’d as if they would have murther’d me … (272)

Moll is thus trapped in the first of Peter King’s judicial spaces, that of the arrest, and it is the worse for her that it is populated by plebeian women who have no time for “good Words,” or good manners. The two “Wenches,” with their open mouths, rough hands and loud voices, “attack” and “pull,” tear, bully and roar in thoroughly unlady-like manner. We shall hear more of their murderous roaring, for the progress of Moll Flanders through the judicial process will be determined largely by what these “fiery dragons” do and say.

Not involved in person in Moll’s story, but very present in her mind, is another, more insidiously menacing type of witness. In three of my Old Bailey trials, the prosecution case relies on the testimony of an associate or accomplice. Henry Emmery was reported for stealing pistols by “the Father of a Woman whom the Prisoner kept,” and “betrayed” also by the woman herself for taking weights from the very pawnbroker to whom he had pawned the pistols (t17200907-16). Robert Lockey asked a fellow journeyman named Vaughan to sell three dozen sword blades he had taken from their master’s shop; Vaughan “confest the Matter” before a justice, after which each accused the other of having “enticed him to do it” (t17210830-3). A simpler story is that of Ruth Jones; taken with a skin of leather under her petticoats, Jones accused Mary Yeomans of having “[given] her the Leather and bid her go away with it” (t17210525-14).

Inducements to finger a partner in crime in early eighteenth-century England were enormous. By turning crown witness an accomplice could avoid prosecution and save his or her own neck, perhaps becoming eligible for a reward (Langbein 158-65). No fellow thief informs on Moll, but not for want of trying: at one point the whole of Newgate is threatening to impeach her (214). Luckily she has never let anyone “know who I was, or where I Lodg’d” (221), but the psychological cost of deliberate anomie, and of the homicidal desires induced by fear, comes out in two of the darkest episodes in the novel. The rash young man gets “his Indictment deferr’d, upon promise to discover his Accomplices” (218), and though he fails to track Moll in time, she goes into hiding and remains under “horrible Apprehensions,” until she receives “the joyful News that he was hang’d” (220). The “Comrade” to whom Moll passes the mercer’s goods is similarly unable to “produce” or “give the least Account” of her accomplice, but the court, considering her “an inferiour Assistant … allow’d her to be Transported.” At once “troubled … exceedingly” for this “poor Woman,” yet anxious lest she manage to buy a full pardon at her expense, Moll is not at peace until her partner has been shipped to Virginia. Indeed Defoe’s protagonist is only “easie, as to the Fear of Witnesses against me” when “all those, that had either been concern’d with me, or that knew me by the Name of Moll Flanders, were either hang’d or Transported” (222-23).

Another type of witness is absent from her story. Many shopkeepers, dealers, and pawnbrokers in eighteenth-century London were happy to buy goods cheaply without asking too many questions. We find few traces of such people in the Proceedings, unless—as in the case of Elizabeth Pool (t17200115-34)—they were indicted for receiving. An exception is “one Beachcrest, a Slopseller at Billingsgate,” who bid Anne Nicholls “bring any thing she could get to him, and he would give her Money for it” (t17211206-2). Law-abiding intermediaries who reported suspicious offers are, for obvious reasons, more visible. Among those in my sample is a Mr Baker, a bookseller who noticed, from the way the titles were pasted into the three books James Codner had sold him, that they must have come from a fellow dealer, and sent to Gustavus Hacker “to know if they had lost such Books” (t17201207-12). A wigmaker who became suspicious when John Cauthrey was willing to take fifteen shillings for a two-guinea wig sent “to enquire after his Character” (t17210525-28). Another wig-thief, Edward Preston, was “taken offering them to Sale” (t17200907-29). When Hannah Conner brought a silver mug to John Braithwait to be weighed, he questioned her persistently until she “at last owned she stole it out of the Prosecutor’s Shop in Canon Street” (t17201207-6). Samuel Dickens had not even noticed that “a Camblet Riding-Hood and 14 Yards of Persian Silk” had gone missing from his shop until a pawnbroker arrived and brought him to Elizabeth Pool, who admitted to having had them from Richard Evans (t17200115-34).

In certain cases, victims went to great trouble to nail a thief, mobilizing numbers of neighbors, intermediaries and artisans. John Everingham, clearly exasperated at having “lost a great quantity of Twist at several times,” got his chance to track Alice Jones down when “one of his Neighbours seeing some of his Goods in Mr. Crouch’s Shop, acquainted him with it.” Everingham found the twist at Crouch’s, followed the trail back through another dealer named Hall, and from Hall to a Mr Rawlinstone, on whose premises he was lucky enough to find “the Prisoner there offering more Goods to sale.” Not content with Jones’s confession before a Justice, plus the testimony of the three intermediaries, Etherington went on to consolidate his case by looking out two artisans who had worked the twist specifically for him (t17200303-4).

No one resembling John Braithwait, Mr Baker or Cauthrey’s wig-maker feature in Moll Flanders. Early on in her criminal career Defoe solves Moll’s marketing difficulties once and for all by providing her with an efficient, generous and devoted fence. Having accumulated a quantity of luxury pickings, she finds out her old friend and “Governess,” the woman who had helped her last lying-in. This resourceful businesswoman has in the meantime conveniently “turn’d Pawn-Broker”—and something more (197-200): receiver, teacher and organizer of a small army of burglars, shoplifters and pickpockets, she closely resembles a character whose shadow has already fallen on our story—that of Jonathan Wild. Luckily for Moll, her governess does not seem to have included informing or thief-taking among her many sources of income; at least in the case of her favorite pupil she will go to great lengths to save her from the gallows. Critics have noticed the maternal role of this and other women in the novel (Chaber 220; Swaminathan 195), but in the world of Moll Flanders any “female support system” cannot but be fragile. When threatened with the gallows the women, like the men, try to send others in their places. Some, as we shall now see, seem strangely determined to watch Moll die for no apparent reason.

2. In the Justice’s Parlour

Those who apprehended thieves in eighteenth-century England did not always march them off to a Justice of the Peace. As with detection and arrest, it was up to private individuals to start the judicial machine rolling. Many chose to let the matter drop, perhaps exacting an apology, informal punishment or compensation. There were strong disincentives to prosecution: costs in time and money, fear of retaliation or unpopularity, and, as in the case of the “Mistress of the House” in Moll’s case, pity. The size of the ‘dark figure’ of unprosecuted crime is by definition a mystery, but in the eighteenth century it was probably “immense” compared to the “tiny but brightly illuminated figure of the indicted” (King 30-32, 132). If Moll now tries to negotiate with her potential prosecutors, it is because she knows that they can, if they wish, let her slip out of the spotlight:

I GAVE the Master very good Words, told him the Door was open, and things were a Temptation to me, that I was poor, and distress’d, and Poverty was what many could not resist, and beg’d him with Tears to have pity on me; the Mistress of the House was mov’d with Compassion, and enclin’d to have let me go, and had almost perswaded her Husband to it also… (272-73)

In begging for mercy, she is running a risk. When Mary Leighton found some of her mother’s ribbon in Margaret Townley’s pocket, Townley “fell down on her Knees and begg’d pardon,” only to have this recounted in court as evidence of guilt (t17200712-4). In Moll’s case the move nearly pays off. The Master is about to capitulate when he is prevented by the fait accompli of his tough and independent-minded maids: “the saucy Wenches were run even before they were sent, and had fetch’d a Constable, and then the Master said he could not go back, I must go before a Justice, and answer’d his Wife that he might come into Trouble himself if he should let me go” (273). What kind of “Trouble” this broker might have got into is not clear, but he shows a consistent tendency to defer to authority. Now, as “[t]he sight of the Constable” sends Moll “into faintings” (274), discretionary power slips through the master’s fingers.

The mistress, on the other hand, proves a stalwart ally. She “argued for me again, and entreated her Husband, seeing that they had lost nothing to let me go,” a pragmatic consideration to which Moll adds an appeal to self-interest: “I offer’d him to pay for the two Peices whatever the value was, tho’ I had not got them, and argued that as he had his Goods, and had really lost nothing, it would be cruel to pursue me to Death, and have my Blood for the bare Attempt of taking them” (273). This offer to pay for goods “not got” constitutes an invitation to “turn a theft into a purchase,” an illegal way out of the judicial corridor, but one probably used frequently (Tickell 307). The journeyman John Cauthrey (t17210525-28) hoped to be able to “make a debt of it” when confronted by his master with having stolen wigs from his shop. In law the fact of having “lost nothing” was not supposed to exempt from punishment: Giles Jacob’s A New Law Dictionary of 1729 (qtd. by Starr 392n.) defined all offences in terms of “Intent to commit some Felony, whether the intent be executed or not.” Among my Old Bailey accused there are, however, none arraigned for intending to steal; Moll astutely reminds mistress, master, constable and then justice, that she had not “carried any thing away.”

She also stresses that she “had broke no Doors,” a circumstance which should have saved her from being charged with house-breaking in the presence of the owners, an offence regarded seriously for involving violation of private property and “putting in fear.” Moll is well-informed on legal technicalities (Swan 150-57)—but also on discrepancies between theory and practise. Jacob declared house-breaking to include lifting up a latch on the way out (qtd. by Starr 382n.); but how many were actually charged on that basis? Moll’s defence seems to have persuaded not only Mistress and Master, but even the Justice himself, now “enclin’d to have releas’d me.” Then, once again, her escape hatch is slammed shut by the maids, one of whom now firmly takes the lead: “the first saucy Jade that stop’d me, affirming that I was going out with the Goods, but that she stop’d me and pull’d me back as I was upon the Threshold, the Justice upon that point committed me, and I was carried to Newgate; that horrid Place!” (273). How Moll’s hearing before this justice compares with those experienced by my contingent of real shoplifters is hard to deduce from the Proceedings, except in one respect. Moll’s persistence in defending herself distinguishes her from ten in my sample who confessed before magistrates.[9] James Codner seems to have hoped to earn “Favour” by so doing (t17201207-12). Hannah Conner and Richard Evans must have regretted having given way; when their confessions were read in court they retracted, but were found guilty nonetheless (t17201207-6). In obtaining confessions justicial hearings fulfilled the official function of the pre-trial procedure as described by Langbein: that of helping make the strongest possible prosecution case and thus reinforce the citizen’s role in law enforcement (40-43). The magistrate was meant by law to “take examination of such Prisoner, and information of those that bring him, of the fact and circumstance … as much thereof as shall be material to prove the felony” (2&3 Phil & Mar., c.10, qtd. in Langbein 41).

These hard-line instructions were, however, contested by commentators as authoritative as Blackstone, and contradicted by recommendations that magistrates act as peace-makers in the community; in practice they were often ignored (King 88-93). Beattie has shown that, in London especially, the nature of the preliminary hearing was changing, allowing more accused felons to be released (Policing and Punishment 106). Rather than send cases on for trial, magistrates could choose one of four options, three of which would have been available in a case like Moll’s.[10] Her J.P. could have treated her offence as a minor one, such as trespass, and used his summary powers relating to vagrancy and the disorderly poor to commit her to a house of correction and whipping (King 132).[11] Alternatively he could have mediated a settlement between victim and accused; Anthony Johnson has refused Moll’s offer of payment, but might have given way if encouraged to be lenient by an authority. The last option, that of discharging the accused for want of evidence, came to be used commonly later in the eighteenth century, especially by energetic investigators like the Fieldings, and under pressure from the attorneys who took an increasing part in pre-trial hearings. In Defoe’s time this was rare, however, and according to Beattie, impossible when a witness swore to a felony charge. By “affirming that I was going out with the goods,” number one “saucy jade” has taken control, leaving the magistrate with little choice but to push Moll “on up the corridor” toward Newgate, the Old Bailey and Tyburn. His clerk would have taken down the testimony of accuser and accused, ‘freezing’ the evidence in the form of written depositions which would be handed in when the assizes were convened at the Old Bailey. For the interval the magistrate would bind over prosecutors and their witnesses on pain of £40 penalties designed to ensure that they did not change their minds about testifying, and commit the accused to gaol to prevent her from absconding (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 269-74, 281).


3. Tampering with the Evidence

This is precisely what happens to Moll. Back in the prison where she was born, accused of a crime remarkably similar to her mother’s “borrowing three pieces of fine Holland, of a certain draper in Cheapside” (8), she comments wryly: “I was now fix’d indeed.” Over the coming weeks the prosecutor will remain free to strengthen his case, perhaps persuading witnesses to testify to fact, or to the ownership of the property stolen. It would have been during this interval, presumably, that John Everingham sought out his twist-makers, while Alice Jones would have remained locked up, reliant on the advice of fellow jailbirds, ‘Newgate Attorneys,’ and visiting friends for help in preparing to face her accusers (t17200303-4).

In theory, those charged with felonies in eighteenth-century England were not meant to prepare for trial at all, since spontaneity was supposed to allow juries a clear perception of guilt or innocence. But the Proceedings give us clues as to how prisoners might get some sort of defence together (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 441-46; King 230). At her trial Margaret Elson (t17201207-9) “called one to prove” her explanation of why she had been in a coach with John Abraham and a stolen 108lb mortar; she must have got word to this person from Newgate. She is the only one to have sought a witness to fact; most had to fall back on testimony to reputation, which was thought important. James Cawthrey had offered the man guarding him five shillings for “a good Character” (t17210525-28).

Cawthrey’s offer was rejected, but eight of my sample found several each to speak for them.[12] Only in the two cases in which insanity was pleaded does the Proceedings tell us what these witnesses actually said in court. Of Mary North one “said he believ’d her Lunatick … Another who deposed that she had 700 l. to her Portion, but marryed an ill Husband who had brought her very low, and believed this to be her first Fact” (t17200303-10). On behalf of James Codner a Mrs. Harris stated that she “had known him from a Child,” and a Mrs. Simpson, who “knew him well,” also “observed him to be out of his Senses for Two Months before this matter happen’d and that he was a sober good Man before.” Insanity pleas tended to be successful with judges and juries, and the word of established neighbours and of employers was especially persuasive (King 304, 309).   Codner’s Master deposed

that he found him disorder’d in his Mind, and that he was forcd for 2 Months before this Fact to employ another in his Room; that he let him come to him however, and imployed him in some little matters now and then; that before his Disorder he found him very Honest having entrusted him frequently. (t17201207-12)

How influential was character testimony in general? The Proceedings reporter tends to note its absence in negative terms. Mary Hughes had “none to her reputation,” and was condemned to death (t17200115-40). On the other hand, both Edward Preston (t1720907-29) and Alice Jones (17200303-4), neither of whom called any witnesses, received the lighter sentence of transportation. To some, character witnesses seem to have done no good at all. Katherine Crompton “called several to her Reputation: but the Evidence being very full, the Jury found her Guilty. Death.” Hannah Conner’s trial, reported in almost identical terms, ended with a death sentence, though she was subsequently respited for pregnancy. Margaret Elson and Elizabeth Simpson are the only accused in my sample to have been fully acquitted on the basis of defense testimony. In other cases a good character may have helped mitigate verdicts, or influence judges favorably. The receiver Elizabeth Pool was found guilty for a lesser offence and transported, while the man with whom she was tried, Richard Evans, had his death sentence respited on condition of undergoing experimental inoculation for smallpox. Codner, so strongly supported by neighbours and Master, got away with being burnt in the hand. The “26 Ells of Dowlas Cloth. value 33 s.” taken by Mary North was down-valued by the jury to 4s.10d, which saved her from a death sentence, while David Pritchard’s 28 yards of crape were valued at only 10d, letting him off with a whipping.

Moll might have hoped for a similar sentence, but for the fact that she has “no Friends” (281), certainly none likely to make a good impression in court. Her Governess is an underworld habitué who has quite other ideas about the “proper methods” of getting people off the judicial hook:

first she found out the two fiery Jades that had surpriz’d me; she tamper’d with them, persuad’d them, offer’d them Money, and in a Word, try’d all imaginable ways to prevent a Prosecution; she offer’d one of the Wenches 100 l. to go away from her Mistress, and not to appear against me; but she was so resolute, that tho’ she was but a Servant-Maid at 3 l a Year Wages or thereabouts, she refus’d it, and would have refus’d it, as my Governess said she believ’d, if she had offer’d her 500 l. Then she attack’d the tother Maid, she was not so hard-Hearted as the other; and sometimes seem’d inclin’d to be merciful; but the first Wench kept her up, and chang’d her Mind, and would not so much as let my Governess talk with her, but threaten’d to have her up for Tampering with the Evidence. (276-77)

One of the “illegal tunnels” out of Peter King’s judicial corridor, tampering with the evidence, which in theory included any kind of endeavour to dissuade a witness, was punishable by imprisonment and a large fine (Jacob, qtd. by Starr 390n), so it is not surprising that the Governess desists when threatened with being ‘had up.’ Less comprehensible is the iron resolution of a maid-servant who refuses the equivalent of thirty-three years’ wages rather than let an unsuccessful thief go free. Defoe never has Moll even hint at why this woman is so adamant. There is no mention of rewards, but nor is it suggested that she is driven by a sense of public service or reforming zeal. She could hardly have been impelled by a desire to please her employers, who are at best lukewarm about this prosecution.

Even now, the mistress continues to argue in Moll’s favour, and though her husband rejects the Governess’s blandishments, it is for a puzzling mix of reasons:

the Man alledg’d he was bound by the Justice that committed me, to Prosecute, and that he should forfeit his Recognizance.

My Governess offer’d to find Friends that should get his Recognizances off of the File, as they call it, and that he should not suffer; but it was not possible to Convince him, that could be done, or that he could be safe any way in the World, but by appearing against me. (277)

Seemingly unconcerned about the ethics of getting recognizances “off of the File,” this prosecutor worries only that the Governess’s “Friends” (presumably malleable clerks to the court) will not succeed, and that he will be left out of pocket. It is true that the sum he would have pledged at Moll’s pre-trial hearing could have been huge (£120, £40 each for himself and the two maids), though King finds that courts were lenient about enforcing such payments; one in ten of his sample prosecutors dropped out before the trial (43-44). In my Old Bailey sample only Daniel Veal (for his second indictment, t17211206-76) was acquitted because “no Evidence” appeared against him—but then the Old Bailey seems to have been trying to stamp down on “no shows” at this time. On December 6, 1721, while Defoe would still have been at work on Moll Flanders, the bench ordered that “All Persons that have not attended the Court in the Trials of those Prisoner [sic] whom they were bound to Prosecute, are to have their Recognizances Estreate” (s17211206-1).

With the failure of her Governess’s efforts to buy off the prosecution, Moll begins to lose hope: “so I was to have three Witnesses of Fact against me, the Master and his two Maids, that is to say I was as certain to be cast for my Life as I was certain that I was alive” (277). Against “three Witnesses of Fact,” she assumes that she has no chance: “I had a Crime charg’d on me, the Punishment of which was Death by our Law; the Proof was so Evident, that there was no room for me so much as to plead not Guilty; I had the Name of a Old Offender, so that I had nothing to expect but Death in a few Weeks time …” (278-79). Early readers acquainted with the procedures by which “our Law” was applied would have known that Moll’s fate is not yet sealed. She does not yet know what offence she will be charged with in court—it could yet be the non-capital crime of petty larceny[13]—nor is it clear that the “Name of an old Offender” has in fact caught up with her, or indeed under what name she is being prosecuted (Gladfelder 129). Moll has now has taken yet another step along Peter King’s grim corridor, but she has by no means passed all the possible exits to safety.


4. A Plain Case?

First among these, that “Proof” Moll labels “Evident” has yet to be vetted by a grand jury. Throughout the eighteenth century grand juries continued to play an important role in filtering out weak and malicious prosecutions (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 318-19). This body of twenty or so men of property, most of them experienced jurymen and many themselves magistrates, must now hear the sworn testimony of Johnson and his maids, and either find the bill of indictment “vera,” sending Moll to trial, or “ignoramus,” in which latter case she will be discharged.

Grand jury verdicts were not foregone conclusions: a surprising number of bills were thrown out (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 403). Their deliberations remain “shrouded in mystery,” but they would have been influenced by factors such as how seriously they considered the offence, perceptions of the state of crime and of economic conditions, and any prior knowledge of the offender (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 327; King 221). No defence testimony will be heard however, so Defoe’s early readers would have understood why Moll’s indefatigable Governess now goes to work behind the scenes: “a true Friend, she left me no Stone unturn’d to prevent the Grand Jury finding [the Bill and finding] out one or two of the Jury Men, talk’d with them, and endeavour’d to possess them with favourable Dispositions, on Account that nothing was taken away, and no House broken, etc.” (282).[14] Again the usual arguments seem about to succeed, but again crumble in the face of direct testimony: “all would not do, they were over-ruled by the rest, the two Wenches swore home to the Fact, and the Jury found the Bill against me for Robbery and Housebreaking, that is, for Felony and Burglary” (282). For the third time the maids succeed in slamming shut a door to safety. One of Moll’s keepers reports the Newgate consensus as to her prospects: “They say, added he, your Case is very plain, and that the Witnesses swear so home against you, there will be no standing it … indeed, Mrs. Flanders, unless you have very good Friends, you are no Woman for this World.”

Yet is this case so “very plain”? Howard Koonce has accused Moll of getting in a muddle, but she is not the only one who seems confused here. The bill of indictment seems to equate the usually violent crime of “robbery” with the generic “felony,” and “house-breaking” (a day-time crime) with the more serious night crime of “burglary.” As to house-breaking, Moll has always insisted that she had entered through an open door, and was leaving the same way, so that we do not expect such a charge, even as so broadly defined by Giles Jacob’s Dictionary. Blackstone was to complain about lack of clarity in the concept of burglary (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 162): should we attribute the unclear wording of this indictment to a general legal haziness, or is Defoe telling us that Johnson deliberately opted for the tougher charges—and if so why? Surely not under the influence of his maid, however fiery? Could it be the Grand Jury which has introduced the muddle? Has Defoe deliberately entangled the matter, and does he expect his readers to notice?

The Proceedings are of no help to us here, for they do not specify under which statute a prisoner is being charged. But Moll’s prosecutor, or someone, does seem to have over-reached himself here—or so Moll sees it, we may deduce from the manner in which, after many weeks in prison, she faces her accusers in the most public of judicial spaces.


5. Moll Speaks

First her arraignment, the day before the trial. Only now, and in accordance with the practice of not allowing the accused time to prepare a story for the jury, is Moll told the precise charge against her: “I was indicted for Felony and Burglary; that is, for feloniously stealing two Pieces of Brocaded Silk, value 46 l., the goods of Anthony Johnson, and for breaking open his Doors” (284). To this she has no hesitation about pleading “not Guilty, and well I might … I knew very well they could not pretend to prove I had broken up the Doors, or so much as lifted up a Latch” (284).

Moll’s self-confidence sets the tone for her comportment in court next day. The format for her trial is quite unlike that of the modern adversarial stand-off between professional barristers, in which accused and judge speak hardly at all, in which evidence is highly-regulated, and defendant presumed innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. In the ‘accused speaks’ trial described by Langbein (48-61), the prisoner was meant to address the jury directly and spontaneously, conveying as much by his or her aspect and manner as by his or her words. Expected to challenge the prosecutor’s version of what happened and, if innocent, be able to explain to the satisfaction of the jury how he or she came to be involved, defendants could call witnesses, but they testified unsworn, and counsel was not permitted: legal learning and studied eloquence would supposedly obscure a jury’s unmediated perception of the naked truth.

So much for the theory. In practice, Beattie suggests, most of the accused were men and women

not used to speaking in public who suddenly found themselves thrust into the limelight before an audience in an unfamiliar setting—and who were for the most part dirty, underfed, and surely often ill—did not usually cross-examine vigorously or challenge the evidence presented against them. (Crime and the Courts 50-51)

The impression we gain from Proceedings reports of 1720-21 shoplifting trials is fairly consistent with Beattie’s little sketch. Alice Jones, Henry Emmery, and Edward Preston are all said to have had “nothing to say” for themselves (t17200303-4; t17200907-16; t17200907-29). Katherine Crompton merely “denied the Fact” (t17200907-30); Mary Hughes “had nothing to say in her Defence but a bare denial of the Fact” (t17200115-40); and Richard Evans denied everything, including his confession: “he did not know what he said before the Justice” (t17200115-34).

The Proceedings reporter evidently construed having “nothing to say” as evidence of guilt, and perhaps juries did also. No wonder most prisoners did try to say something. Edward Corder, rather feebly, “laid in his Defence, that he was Drunk, and knew not what he did” (t17211206-6). Others offered an alternative version of events, but it is they who would have borne the burden of proof, and few of their stories were believed. John Abraham pleaded that he had had his huge mortar “of a Gentleman out of the Country, who desired him to sell it for him; but could not prove it” (17201207). Hannah Conner had confessed to stealing a silver mug, but “on her Tryal denied that she stole it, saying as at first, that a Man desired her to weigh it for him, (but could not prove it)” (t17201207-6). John Scoon “in his Defence laid he won the Chain at Southwark Fair, but could bring no proof of it” (t17211206-3). Mary Atkins, perhaps more plausibly, claimed that James Bartley, the servant who had followed and searched her, “had been in her Company several times, asked her to come to him and he would give her something, pay his Master for it; that accordingly she went, and he gave her the Goods she was now charged with”; but then, having “called none to prove it,” she was found guilty (t17210525-38). The only accused who seems to have convinced the jury (and reporter) is Elizabeth Simpson who, besides calling several to give her a “very good character,” gave a detailed account of her shopping expedition with Ruth Jones; unlike Jones, who had little to say for herself, Simpson was acquitted (t17200115-3).

How does Moll’s behaviour at the bar compare with that of her flesh-and-blood counterparts? Like them, she has no counsel; unlike many, she has no character witness either. As for speaking for herself, her account of life in Newgate, rapidly reducing her and all its inmates to a stone-like state, “Stupid and Senseless, then Brutish and thoughtless” (278), would lead us to expect a no-better-than-average performance—if it were not for her proven ability to rise to the toughest of challenges. When “brought to my Tryal” on the Friday, she is fresh and vigorous: “I had exhausted my Spirits with Crying for two or three Days before, that I slept better the Thursday Night than I expected, and had more Courage for my Tryal, than indeed I thought possible for me to have” (284). Moll faces her moment in court as a test of personal courage, strength and above all of her ability to give “good words.” She is so eager to address the jury that the judges have to explain: “the Witnesses must be heard first, and then I should have time to be heard.”

The witnesses are, of course, the “hard-Mouth’d Jades.” Moll reports their words carefully:

tho’ the thing was Truth in the main, yet they aggravated it to the utmost extremity, and swore I had the Goods wholly in my possession, that I had hid them among my Cloaths, that I was going off with them, that I had one Foot over the Threshold when they discovered themselves, and then I put tother over, so that I was quite out of the House in the Street with the Goods before they took hold of me, and then they seiz’d me, and brought me back again, and they took the Goods upon me … (285-86)

Speaking impromptu, as she must, Moll says nothing to refute the ‘aggravating’ circumstance of the goods being “hid … among my Cloaths,” but pins much on the liminal position of her foot (or feet?) at the moment she is grabbed: “I believe, and insisted upon it, that they stop’d me before I had set my Foot clear of the Threshold of the House” (285). Her main defence, however, consists of the two negative arguments she has been offering throughout, plus an ingenious new explanation of what she had been doing in Anthony Johnson’s house:

I pleaded that I had stole nothing, they had lost nothing, the Door was open, and I went in seeing the Goods lye there, and with Design to buy, if seeing no Body in the House, I had taken any of them up in my Hand, it cou’d not be concluded that I intended to steal them, for that I never carried them farther than the Door to look on them with the better Light. (285)

This story sounds plausible enough, as Moll had never been clear about the nature of the space she had entered;[15] but “[t]he Court would not allow that by any means, and made a kind of Jest of my intending to buy the Goods, that being no Shop for the Selling of any thing.” The Judge’s joke opens the way for the maids to add their own “impudent Mocks” on the need for more light: they “spent their Wit upon it very much; told the Court I had look’d at them sufficiently, and approv’d them very well, for I had pack’d them up under my Cloathes, and was a going with them” (284-85).

No holds are barred in this battle of wits: mockery plays its part alongside straight affirmation of fact, fine distinctions and logical analysis. Less neatly and sequentially-ordered than it would be a modern trial, testimony is given, challenged and counter-challenged in a contest for the jury’s favor in which the judges act as not very impartial umpires (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 342). A true oral ‘altercation’ between contestants, Defoe’s fictional trial exemplifies Langbein’s model of common law procedure as it was before the lawyers took charge. The witnesses’ words come through clearly, with Moll resembling Langbein’s articulate challenger more closely than Beattie’s feeble defendants. Their performances realize in fiction a key moment in the ideal process of English criminal justice in the early eighteenth century.[16]

In the last phase of her trial Moll is once more called on to speak in public for herself. She has been “found Guilty of Felony, but acquitted of the Burglary” (285), the acquittal being, as Moll comments bitterly, “but small Comfort to me, the first bringing me to a Sentence of Death, and the last would have done no more” (285). By the standards of her time the verdict is a harsh one. In general Old Bailey juries acquitted around 40% of all those charged, whereas less than 19% of my sample was found not guilty. Moll’s jury has also failed to apply any of the mitigating options commonly used to avoid death sentences for non-violent crimes. It has not downgraded the capital felony charge to non-capital larceny (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 428), nor has it apparently brought the value of the goods stolen below the five shillings for which a death sentence was mandatory, as they did in the trials of a full seventeen of Moll’s real counterparts. Eschewing these outcomes, Defoe sends Moll to join the small group of the six actual shop-lifters who, out of the thirty tried and found guilty at the Old Bailey in 1720-21, were condemned to death.[17]

The fictional sentencing scene is one of high drama. This is how Moll faces her judges for the last time:

The next Day, I was carried down to receive the dreadful Sentence, and when they came to ask me what I had to say why Sentence should not pass, I stood mute a while, but some Body that stood behind me prompted me aloud to speak to the Judges, for that they cou’d represent things favourably for me: This encourag’d me to speak, and I told them I had nothing to say to stop the Sentence; but that I had much to say, to bespeak the Mercy of the Court, that I hop’d they would allow something in such a Case, for the Circumstances of it, that I had broken no Doors, had carried nothing off, that no Body had lost any thing; that the Person whose Goods they were was pleas’d to say, he desir’d Mercy might be shown, which indeed he very honestly did, that at the worst it was the first Offence, and that I had never been before any Court of Justice before: And, in a Word, I spoke with more Courage than I thought I cou’d have done, and in such a moving Tone, and tho’ with Tears, yet not so many Tears as to obstruct my Speech, that I cou’d see it mov’d others to Tears that heard me. (285-86)

Defoe manages Moll’s transition from silence to eloquence carefully. Her offence is not clergyable, and she is too old to follow her mother’s example and claim pregnancy (8), so she has indeed “nothing to say to stop the Sentence.” But as to “bespeaking mercy” she is eloquent, once prompted to speak by that mysterious “some Body” standing behind her.[18]  This person is clearly well-versed in court practice: her judges could indeed “represent things favourably” by including Moll’s name in the list of those deemed to deserve ‘administrative’ pardon which, at the end of every session, they sent the secretaries of state (Beattie, Policing and Punishment 288). Rehearsing the mitigating “Circumstances,” she adds new emotional force to her appeal. Thick with verbs of asking, speaking, representing, telling, saying and hearing, particulars of tone and gesture, her report foregrounds the orality and theatricality of her speech. It is a masterly performance, one that moves some to tears, but apparently not the decision-makers:

THE Judges sat Grave and Mute, gave me an easy Hearing, and time to say all that I would, but saying neither Yes, or No to it, Pronounc’d the Sentence of Death upon me; a Sentence that was to me like Death itself, which after it was read confounded me; I had no more Spirit left in me, I had no Tongue to speak, or Eyes to look up either to God or Man. (286)

The ‘accused speaks’ trial thus concludes with the judges “pronouncing” their “Sentence,” the condemned woman unable now to use her tongue, or even make the traditional gesture imploring divine mercy. The contrast between this fictional account and the bare lists of names offered by the Proceedings is marked. At end of the four-day session held in early September 1720, for example, readers were told merely that:

           The Tryals being over, the Court proceeded to give Judgment as followeth;

Receiv’d Sentence of Death, 10.

James Wilson , John Homer , Edward Wright , James Holliday, James Norris , Henry Emmery , Robert Jackson , Katharine Crompton, John Tomlimson, and Anthony Goddard. (s17200907-1)

We hear nothing here of judge’s warnings or vindications of the law, or of prisoners’ pleas for mercy, and are given no sense of solemn ritual. As with defence statements, this silence does not prove that nothing was said, though later in the century there were complaints about the “desultory” manner in which sentencing was conducted (qtd. in King 336). As to these prisoners, surely a few of the ten condemned that day would have had something to say in the hope of gaining at least a respite. Three of the six shoplifters sentenced to die were certainly reprieved, and it would have been at this stage that they could have put their cases to the bench. Two of the women (Conner and Jones) must have ‘pleaded their bellies,’ for they were respited for pregnancy, and presumably there was an exchange in which Evans agreed to undergo medical experiment and had his death sentence remitted. We do not know what happened to Mary Hughes (t17200115-3), Henry Emmery (17200907-16) or Katharine Crompton (t17200907-30), but there is no trace of them in the extant Ordinary’s Accounts for the months following their trials, so they may have got off. Of the thirty in my sample who were accused and found guilty of shoplifting none was certainly hanged, and twenty-seven were definitely not.

By far the majority of the latter, twenty-two, were sentenced directly to transportation.  Moll too will escape the fatal tree and be sent to Virginia, though only in extremis. She is evidently not on the judges’ list recommending ‘administrative’ pardons, for her name is on the dead warrant sent down to Newgate twelve days after her trial (289). In the meantime, however, she has been brought to true repentance by the good minister sent by her Governess. It is he who obtains a last minute reprieve (290), giving Moll time to make “but not without great difficulty … an humble Petition for Transportation” (293).[19] Her petition is granted, though we are not told on what grounds, but her trial judges would have been consulted, and one wonders whether Moll’s eloquence in court had not contributed to some extent. Perhaps the “easy hearing” she receives from her Old Bailey judges stands metonymically for the “easy reading” we, throughout the novel, accord her many “good Words.”


6. Credible, surprising, edifying?

Where does this leave Defoe’s narrative of the prosecution of Moll Flanders? How does it compare to the story we have extrapolated from reports of trials of real thieves going through London’s central criminal court in the early 1720s? And how might we interpret Defoe’s adhesion to or divergence from the expectations readers of those reports would bring to Moll’s story?

On the whole, Defoe’s account of the prosecution of Moll Flanders would not have grossly violated early eighteenth-century assumptions about who might do what, when, where and how at the scene of a theft and subsequently. She is caught by people on the spot, prosecuted by her victim and goes through the pre-trial procedure as laid down by law. A bill of indictment against her is found true by a grand jury, and before a petty jury she directly confronts the witnesses against her according to the old ‘accused speaks’ trial format. If in the end she is convicted but avoids execution, her salvation is accomplished according to standard pardoning procedure, enabling her to join the large numbers of transported property offenders.   By telling us what nearly happens to her, or happens to her associates, Defoe extends his coverage of the probable; he has Moll avoid the usual methods of fencing stolen goods, hinting at the dangers that lay that way, and he makes her live in dire fear of being tracked down by accomplices, thus pointing to ways of catching thieves that were commonly used and reported in his time.

Yet as we have seen, Moll’s story includes silences and emphases which detract from rather than reinforce credibility. Years ago J. Paul Hunter remarked that even in the midst of verisimilitude we long for the marvelous, the strange and surprising (30-34), and Wolfram Schmidgen recently argued that we should turn to Defoe less for realism than for the various and surprising (96). Hunter also insisted that we take the didactic intentions of eighteenth- century novels seriously, recognizing that they respond to the needs and desires of their readers (ch.11). When Moll’s editor insists that we “make the good Uses” of her life (2), and learn something “from every part,” he means us to read for practical instruction in crime management as well as for moral and religious guidance (4). Can either or both of these counsels help us to “know how to Read” Moll’s progress along his or her route from arrest to committal, from committal to trial, and from trial to punishment or pardon?

We have noticed, for instance, that Defoe excludes from his cast the professional thief-takers who sent many robbers and burglars to their deaths, and who did not turn up their noses at the chance of profiting from the occasional shoplifter. I suspect that he did not eschew these figures out of fear that the reader might find them dull and predictable, but because he preferred not—at least not here—to bring to his public’s attention the role played by blood money in the administration of English justice. The uncertain wording of Moll’s indictment raises the prospect of a turn in her favor and hence an element of suspense, but also warns potential prosecutors to take care in framing their charges. If the verdict against her is more severe than those usually handed out to women shoplifters, this too adds tension and suspense, but also reinforces the warning to thieves which was certainly an item on Defoe’s agenda. It is also a necessary prelude to a death-sentencing scene for which there is no equivalent in the Proceedings, one which adds dramatic interest, but also magnifies the solemnity of criminal court practice.

Perhaps most surprising of all Defoe’s emphases, however, is the clarity and force with which he amplifies the voices of plebeian women as they negotiate with constables, magistrate, and grand jurymen, and fight out their battle for the hearts and minds of the Old Bailey bench and jury. Anyone who followed the trials of petty thieves in the Proceedings would surely have been struck by the energy, intelligence and pathos with which an uneducated, elderly shop-lifter argues her own defense in every “room” along the corridor of prosecution, and especially in that theatrical Sessions House. He or she might also have been struck by the Governess’s tenacious negotiating with prosecution witnesses and grand jurymen. Perhaps even more striking would have been the ways in which two maid-servants dominate the process of prosecution, not merely grabbing Moll at the scene of the crime but fetching the constable of their own initiative, keeping the Justice of the Peace to the rule book, defying their mistress and forcing a reluctant master first to indict for burglary a woman taken in a “bare Attempt,” and then, in defiance of all claims to compassion, never mind gender solidarity, and with no prospect of material benefit, persist with the case right through to the shadow of the gallows. We know from social history—such as Lawrence Stone’s study of divorce cases Broken Lives, and Carolyn Steedman’s Labour’s Lost (30)—that early modern law allowed (and sometimes forced) many ordinary and illiterate people to speak of their experiences in a wide range of contexts. Paula Humfrey, who has studied defamation suits and settlement hearings in which domestic servants deposed has called them ‘highly visible participants of public life’ (29). Perhaps these wenches’ bellowings would have surprised Defoe’s readers less than they do us now. But it is probably still fair to say that his telling of the prosecution and trial of Moll Flanders foregrounds the active and articulate roles played by women near the bottom of society in the practical administration of justice in early eighteenth-century England.

If so, questions arise not only about Defoe’s rhetorical purposes, but also about the part he may have played in changing the way law enforcement was narrated. Did Moll Flanders—and Colonel Jack too—influence the representation of actual judicial process? In the early 1720s the Old Bailey Proceedings were still meagre publications of four to nine pages from which the actual words of witnesses were almost wholly absent; Moll Flanders is a reporter ahead of her time, anticipating the verbatim transcriptions and dramatic presentation of evidence that begin to be included from the end of the decade in which she appeared on the London scene. Did Defoe’s full, first-person account of an ordinary thief fighting for her life help bring about that development, and stimulate the growth of critical interest in testimony, its value and its reliability? My enquiry started from the hypothesis that the Proceedings journalist could have been of help to a master of fictions—but that master of fictions may also have been of help to the Old Bailey reporter, and to the long line of his successors in the narrating of true crime, its prosecution and punishment.

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice


NOTES

[1]   I am most grateful to Robert Shoemaker and Shelley Tickell for reading so carefully an earlier version of this essay, and to the Digital Defoe referees for precise and useful suggestions. I would also like to thank Danièle Berton and the research group who organized the colloquium “Témoigner: De la Renaissance aux Lumières” at the Université Blaise Pascal in November 2011; this essay grew out of a paper presented on that occasion and a French version of it is forthcoming in the proceedings (Editions Honoré Champion Paris). In its turn the essay will be the nucleus of a book-length study dealing also with Colonel Jack and non-fiction, provisionally entitled Catching Thieves: Defoe and Law Enforcement in Eighteenth-Century England. Paola Pugliatti and Giacomo Mannironi continue to give their invaluable advice and encouragement to this project.

Shoplifting because this is one of Moll’s two specialities. All data on trials are taken from   Hitchcock et al., The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 16741913. My sample of trials consists of those produced by a search on “offense = shoplifting” and limited by date to 17201721—with one exception: I have eliminated t17210113-9, in which Thomas Knight was found guilty of stealing £6666 5s worth of jewellery from the shop of the well-known ‘toyman,’ William Deard (Battestin 55), because Knight used an auger to get into the shop and was surely on trial for burglary. As we shall see, Moll too will be accused of burglary, but she clearly thought she was “stealing privately,” i.e. without breaking in and without being seen. I am grateful to Shelley Tickell for drawing my attention to the crime categorization problems arising from the Proceedings’ failure to state under which statutes prosecutions were brought.

[2]   For a comparison between the Account and the Proceedings, see Faller, Turn’d to Account, and Clegg, “Moll Flanders, Ordinary’s Accounts and the Old Bailey Proceedings,” 108109. Andrea Mckenzie shows that violent crimes were hugely over-represented in the select trials; on the volume most pertinent to Moll Flanders, the 1718-21 Compleat Collection of the Most Remarkable Tryals, see 5254.

[3]   Tickell suggests that some of the new features of shops were in fact designed to prevent shop-lifting (304).

[4]   In chronological order of appearance in court: Elizabeth Simpson (t17200115-3); Thomas Johnson (t17200115-29);   John Tracey (t17200907-02); Margaret Elson (t17201207-9); Ann Wood (t17210113-23); William Moor (t17210525-53); Edward Thomas (t17211206-38); John Nash (t17211206-73).

[5]   Thomas Kingham (t17200303-12); Zephaniah Martin (t17200427-56); Thomas Riggol (t1721071206-73); Ann Nicholls (t17211206-2); John Alcock (t17211206-27).

[6]   Thanks again to Shelley Tickell for pointing out that, since Crompton was seen taking the muslin, she may not have been charged under the 1699 Shoplifting Act, which covered stealing privately, but (since shops were so often parts of houses), under the 1713 law which made stealing goods of over 40 shillings from a house a capital offence, and this could explain her death sentence. The same might apply to Mary Hughes (who was also condemned to death); yet Susannah Lloyd, Margaret Townley and Thomas Rice too were seen taking the goods and were sentenced instead to transportation. It is evident, in any case, that all of them meant to take the goods by stealth so I have treated all five as shoplifting trials.

[7]   All the more strange if, as I am convinced, the True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725) is by Defoe (Clegg, “Inventing Organised Crime”).

[8]   For detailed comment on these scenes see Faller, Crime and Defoe 15253; Clegg, “Popular Law Enforcement,” 53031.

[9] Thus Richard Evans and Elizabeth Pool (t17200115-34); Susannah Lloyd (t17200303-38); Henry Emmery (t17200907-16); Hannah Conner (t17201207-6); James Codner (t17201207-12); Ann Nicholls (t17211206-2); Robert Lockey (t17210830-3); Edward Thomas (t17211206-38).

[10] The fourth was enlistment in the armed forces.

[11] I am grateful to one of my referees for bringing my attention to chapbook abridgements in which the title pages assert that Moll was “15 Times whipt at the Cart’s Arse”; this was a standard punishment for disorderly women, but Shoemaker has found magistrates committing thieves to houses of correction as well (Prosecution and Punishment 172).

[12] Simpson (t17200115-3); Evans and Pool (t17200115-34); North (t17200303-10); Crompton (t17200907-30); Conner (t17201207-6); Codner (t17201207-12); Pritchard (t17210830-25); Rice (t17211011-5).

[13] If one were to take seriously the claim that Moll’s story was “[w]ritten in the Year 1693,” she would be ahead of history in assuming a clear-cut distinction between capital and non-capital offences; throughout the seventeenth century anyone (even a woman, after 1623), could claim benefit of clergy for many crimes (Beattie, Crime and the Courts 142-43).

[14] Unlike her attempts to tamper with the witnesses, these “endeavourings” do not take the form of bribes, but the phrase may have rung alarm bells with Defoe’s early readers. As G.A. Starr notes (390n), jury corruption was highly topical. In 1721 a bill had been introduced for preventing it, and in March 1722 Defoe was writing optimistically of a “Law lately pass’d” to that effect; Starr finds no such new law reaching the statute book at this time however.

[15] In her first telling of the theft Moll states that “it was not a Mercer’s Shop, nor a Warehouse of a Mercer, but look’d like a private Dwelling-House” (272). Because shops occupying parts of dwelling-places would have been familiar to Defoe’s early readers, her uncertainty is less ridiculous than the judge’s sneer implies.

[16] I am grateful to Robert Shoemaker for reminding me that, because of the scant attention paid by Old Bailey reporters to the defense, Defoe’s account may have been more true to what actually took place in court than the Proceedings.

[17] Mary Jones (t17200115-3); Evans (t17200115-34); Hughes (t17200115-40); Emmery (t17200907-16); Crompton (t17200907-30); Conner (t17201207-6).

[18] Whoever this person is, in trying to help Moll he (or possibly she) is typical of eighteenth-century trial audiences, which in property cases “tended overwhelmingly to favour mercy” (King 256). On the other hand, he may have been one of those ‘Newgate attorneys’ who frequented the courts and prisons in order to pick up clients and keep abreast of current trends (Beattie, Policing and Punishment 396-99).

[19] In Policing and Punishment, Beattie (288-89) distinguishes between special pardons for named individuals, expensive documents inscribed on parchment, and “general” or “circuit” pardons for groups of “poor convicts” held in a particular gaol or gaol of an assize circuit. It would have been onto one of the latter type that Moll’s younger colleague had earlier got her name after “starving a long while in Prison” (Defoe 204 and Starr n3). It often took a long time for such documents to pass under the Privy Seal, so if Moll’s pardon too is of this type, she is lucky in having to wait only two weeks, and in having managed to conceal the wealth she will take to Virginia: those “able to bear the charge of a particular pardon” were supposed to be excluded from circuit pardons. There would indeed have been “great difficulty” in drawing up the petition; of the arguments most frequently successful–old age, youth, infirmity, distressed circumstances, and proof of having “lived in a neighbourly, honest, and orderly manner” (King ch 9)–only the first is available to Moll. The one most likely to have been used by the minister, “signs of reformability” was, according to King, not often successful and was rarely employed (289).


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Shoemaker, Robert. The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Hambleton and London, 2004. Print.

———. “The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London.” The Journal of British Studies 47.03 (2008): 559–80. Print.

———. “Print and the Female Voice: Representations of Women’s Crime in London, 1690–1735.” Gender & History 22.1 (2010): 75–91. Print.

———. Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660-1725. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Starr, G. A. Introduction and Explanatory Notes. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of The Famous Moll Flanders, &c. London: Oxford UP, 1971. vii–xxix, 345–98. Print.

Steedman, Carolyn. Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

Stone, Lawrence. Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Swaminathan, Srividhya. “Defoe’s Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies And Female Networks in Moll Flanders.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15.2 (2003): 185–206. Print.

Swan, Beth. Fictions of Law: An Investigation of the Law in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: P. Lang, 1997. Print.

Tickell, Shelley. “The Prevention of Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century London.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 2.3 (2010): 300–13. Print.

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A Metropolis in Motion: Defoe and Urban Identity in A Journal of the Plague Year

Elizabeth Porter

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY London was a city of sensations: it could be visually appealing and appalling, depending on one’s location and perspective. It was loud, crowded, messy, and often malodorous, inspiring satirical verses from Swift and Gay.[1] At the same time, the metropolis was the epicenter of fashion, commerce, and culture, drawing the wealthy in like a magnet and making the fortunes of merchants and shopkeepers. With a population influx of individuals from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, the city grew in unprecedented numbers, creating new sites and attractions for residents and tourists alike. Roy Porter calls the London of this age a “social laboratory in the making of modernity” and pithily claims that “people make cities, and cities make citizens” (5, 7). Scholars such as Miles Ogborn and Roy Porter have discussed the relationship between urban space and identity in eighteenth-century London. Ogborn points to the geographical heritage of “selves and subjectivities,” arguing that one’s geography is just as formative as one’s history (42). With the London metropolis expanding geographically, commercially, and demographically throughout the long eighteenth century, the city inspired and cultivated sensory responses. In part to represent and reimagine these new spaces, literary genres emerged that adapted earlier forms, suggesting, as Cynthia Wall and John Bender have argued, that urban development and the production of literary forms were mutually constitutive.[2] Urban development and movement inspired narrative, producing many genres unique to the eighteenth century, such as journals, tour narratives, and novels, which animated “patterns of… prose” (Wall, “London and Narration” 117).

One reason for the popularity of these forms might be that city inhabitants and tourists needed to (re)familiarize themselves with a disorienting space. To some extent, all London residents and visitors had to learn or relearn London geography and social mores in the eighteenth century. Experts on the history of London discuss the trajectory of the city’s growth in various ways, but the standard narrative is usually as follows: The Restoration drew the gentry to the metropolis, creating a renewed interest in and demand for theatre, art, and material goods. Merchants and shopkeepers benefited from this demand for goods and London became a premiere commercial and shopping center. The wealthy settled in Westminster, expanding the boundaries of London further west until it “no longer made sense to think of London proper and London peripheral” (Porter 67), and the area became more commonly referred to as the West End. Streets were paved and widened, making room for coaches to travel more easily and efficiently. The Great Fire of 1666 partially contributed to this expansion, as it destroyed four-fifths of the original City.[3] With wealthy households settling in London, the demand for permanent, live-in servants had never been higher, leading to a population influx from the laboring-classes. The expansion of the West End, with its ever-increasing number of squares and parks, and the virtual transformation of the East End after the Great Fire of 1666, reshaped London’s topography and required a remapping and a rethinking of these urban spaces. Literary productions, from verse and essays to drama and novels, depicted an active metropolis in which new locations provided new opportunities and challenges for its citizens.[4]

Images of motion abound in London travel accounts, as evident from the works of Daniel Defoe and many of his contemporaries. Motion, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, includes the movement of the body, the movement of the senses in processing information, and progression over time.[5] The term motion, then, accounts for the active and perceived movement of space, mind, and body, illustrating the fluidity of the urban space and of the individual within that space.[6] While the metropolis in motion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year will be the focus of this essay, it is useful first to contextualize this work by briefly reviewing some of the thoughts on London shared by Defoe’s contemporaries. While not always invoking the keyword explicitly, the following examples illustrate the motion of a bustling city and showcase the way people’s minds and bodies move in response to such stimulation.

Tom Brown’s 1700 account of London records the sensory overload in this bustling and loud city, describing it as a “prodigious and noisy city, where repose and silence dare shew their heads in the darkest night” (29). Making use of the familiar metaphor of the body’s circulatory system to explain the motions of London, he continues: “the streets are so many veins, wherein the people circulate” and these people are “always in motion and activity” (31). The movements of people within the city become inseparable from the motion of the city as a whole, suggesting that bodies become part of the urban structure. Preeminent observer of metropolitan life Richard Steele in Spectator No. 455 (1712) writes about a day of various motions through London where he “roves” by boat and coach, “strolls” from one fruit shop to another in Covent Garden, and “moves” toward the City and “centre of the world of trade” (42-43). His geographic location and method of transportation influence the ways in which he moves and perceives movement around him. Based on his lexicon of motion-related terms, we can discern that the Covent Garden markets allow for the slower-paced movements usually involved in shopping, whereas the City pulls one in with almost centripetal force toward the “world of trade.” Enabled in part by infrastructural progress in London, such as the paving and widening of streets to accommodate coaches and allow for safer pedestrian activity, John Gay produces a comic poem on walking, titled Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). In Gay’s mock-pastoral poem, the speaker negotiates the constructs of the early eighteenth-century city, focusing on the “maze” of alleys, the “winding court,” and the “busy street,” and offering tips for avoiding the “saunt’ring pace” of prostitutes in Drury Lane’s “mazy courts and dark abodes” (48-50). The above examples present phenomenological renderings of a city in motion, thereby making their texts not only representations but also products of the city’s development and accommodations.[7]

It is my goal in the pages that follow to shed new light on the ways in which A Journal of the Plague Year contributes to depictions of a fluid, dynamic London by attending to the ways in which Defoe explores and assesses the motions of various “types” of Londoners—the gentry, merchants, laborers, the poor and homeless, servants, and women—in urban space. By attributing specific movements with certain socioeconomic or subject positions, Defoe’s narrative seeks to identify and organize people in an increasingly populated metropolis. Cynthia Wall has argued, quite convincingly, that Defoe’s newly created “grammar of space suggests a grammar of motion” in A Journal of the Plague Year and other urban novels, as well as in A Tour Through the Island of Great Britain. These texts represent urban spaces in motion in ways that did not exist in pre-Fire texts, such as John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London (Literary and Cultural Spaces 111, 95-111).[8] Indebted to Wall’s perspective, I will investigate how Defoe analyzes the motions of various “types” of Londoners as they interact with urban space. Through the course of this essay, it should become evident that Defoe attempts a kind of taxonomy of the Londoner.

Defoe sets A Journal of the Plague Year in the “aggravated epistemological environment of the plague” (Thompson 154-55), in which there is fear and curiosity to know where and why people are becoming infected. This narrative choice provides Defoe with the opportunity to create a schema of London life and a taxonomy of London personalities, largely from the perspective of an upwardly mobile merchant named H.F. The epidemic of the plague reveals that all people are implicated in the disease, just as all are affected by urban development. As George A. Drake puts it, A Journal of the Plague Year “sees others in terms of collectivities,” investigating what “shap[es] their collective spaces” (126). Maximillian Novak has praised this novel for the sympathies H.F. shows to the poor and suffering, claiming that the protagonist’s “all-pervading sympathy” establishes a “pattern for fictional narrators” (“Defoe and the Disordered City” 249-50). As these and other scholars have noted, A Journal of the Plague Year is invested in exploring the experience of Londoners from a variety of class and subject positions, and I argue that we can learn even more about their identities by attending to representations of motions through city spaces. There is a relationship between motion and socioeconomic positions in A Journal of the Plague Year: the rich flee, the poor wander, and H.F., a representative of the merchant class, walks and observes. The plague casts these motions into relief and helps to consolidate emerging ideas of the Londoner in the newly modern metropolis.[9]

Historians of London such as Peter Whitfield and Roy Porter illuminate the degree to which urban space was divided according to socioeconomic status, illustrating the relationship between one’s class position and his or her London location. For the gentry, “[l]arge parts of London were remodeled by a social elite on new and elegant lines which reflected the aesthetic tastes of the time” (Whitfield 65). Defoe’s particular descriptions and precise account of H.F.’s, the narrator’s, residence and travels within London are meant to provide markers of class status and spatial change. As Roy Porter tells us, “the quarters of the new metropolis were less inner and outer than east, central, and west, north and south, distinguished by different manufacturing, commercial, residential, and political complexions” (67). We are offered the exact location of H.F.’s home, which is “without Aldgate about mid-way between Aldgate Church and White-Chappel Bars, on the left hand or north side of the street” (Journal 9). This area is outside the boundaries of the City walls, in the East End, where citizens typically reside. H.F., we learn, is a saddler with a successful business and relationships with transatlantic merchants. Possessing a “family of Servants,” and a “house, shop, and ware-houses fill’d with goods” (Journal 10), H.F. fears losing everything if he abandons London, in spite of the health risks. His status as a merchant and his identity as a citizen rely on his residence in London.

H.F. is our guide through this “aggravated epistemological environment of London,” to use Helen Thompson’s term once again (154). His position as a merchant and citizen seems to make him a likely hero and a trustworthy narrator. Defoe and his contemporaries saw the merchant as an “important culture hero,” imbued with the possibilities for advancement in status and the accumulation of wealth, especially in the decades following the Glorious Revolution (Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 104). As a result of such perspectives, it is not surprising that H.F. serves as the figure of epistemological authority in the novel. Nevertheless, H.F.’s access to plague-ridden areas and his decisive, unafraid movements in a time of chaos and fear position him as a singular character. He expresses a sense of autonomy as he reports on his observations and assessments, all while maintaining a certain distance from the people he encounters and the places he visits. Even when the plague rages through London, he declares that he went “freely” about the streets, even shirking the advice of others to avoid visiting the Aldgate parish pit, a mass grave containing plague-ridden corpses (Journal 58). The theorist Michel de Certeau refers to city-walking as a “spatial practice” that allows for forms of “enunciation” akin to a speech act (96-99). A person can evade restrictions and claim autonomy in urban spaces by determining one’s own distinct paths as he or she traverses the streetscape. In walking the streets, H.F. seems to remain separate from the spectacles he witnesses, observing “dismal scenes,” from “persons falling dead in the street” to “terrible shrieks and skreechings of women” and a “variety of postures” signaling misery, fear, and affliction (Journal 78). H.F’s repeated “curiosity” leads him to pace the streets and view his surroundings. In other words, the motions of his mind (i.e., curiosity) force his body into motion. Staying on the periphery of most scenes, not touching anything or coming into direct contact with other bodies, he positions himself as an observer rather than as a participant in daily life during the plague.

Whereas H.F. feels connected to the environment that houses his business and enables his way of life, the gentry, he asserts, are easily able to flee the metropolis they have helped to create. The gentry, H.F. reveals, are perhaps the most visible population in London, even though they seem the least connected to it, relocating with speed when the plague comes to London. Observing their vehicles and many of their servants leaving, H.F. notes, “the throng was so great, and the coaches, horses, wagons, and carts were so many, driving and dragging the people away” (Journal 176). The motion of exodus is palpable, and it makes it seem as if “all the City was running away” (Journal 176). With all of their vehicles, staff, and material splendor, the gentry are associated with the wealth and commercial success of the metropolis. Although some merchants leave too, including H.F.’s brother, H.F. identifies the rich as people who have no valuable ties to the city, such as businesses or permanent family residents. The gentry are a transient population, fueling the economy through consumption during the court “season” but remaining separate from the everyday work and living environment of London citizens. “Unencumbered with trades and business,” H.F. suggests that the gentry have other options for residence, and are therefore less connected to and dependent on the metropolis (Journal 19).

In fact, H.F. goes to some lengths to show that the arrival of the gentry is a recent phenomenon, and perhaps a dangerous one, as the influx has led to an overcrowded city. “The conflux of the people” to “a youthful and gay court” has fueled a massive trade industry and inspired a population influx from the laboring classes, leading to crowded East End parishes (Journal 20). Around the Restoration, wealthy landowners expanded their estates westward to create planned streets and squares in the style that is now associated with the Georgian period. As early as the 1640s, the Earl of Bedford erected houses on his square in Covent Garden, which were then leased to members of the gentry, leading other property owners around the West End to follow suit (Whitfield 14). This new practice signaled, as Peter Whitfield writes, “a new form of social differentiation in London’s geography—the creation of districts that were exclusive and superior, and with them the sense that to live there flattered people’s image of themselves” (57). The gentry helped to stimulate the market by generating a demand for goods and services, yet as Defoe suggests through H.F., they could flee and relocate with ease: “The richer sort of people, especially the Nobility and Gentry, from the West-part of the City throng’d out of Town, with their Families and Servants in an unusual manner” (Journal 9). The word “throng’d” is repeated again in reference to the abrupt and highly visible exodus of the wealthy. Although the gentry may have contributed to the making of a more modern London, they are not tied to it. The motion of fleeing and escaping signals this detachment.

Since most of the gentry left London at the plague’s outbreak, H.F.’s discussion of servants mainly concerns those employed by upwardly mobile citizens of London. After all, as Novak informs us, those who could afford to pay five to seven pounds per year had at least a few servants (Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 625). During this time, servants were under special scrutiny, as they were particularly feared as carriers of infections, due to their direct contact with potentially “distempered people” in marketplaces and other public sites of exchange (Journal 157). H.F. names locations such as “bakehouses, brewhouses, and shops,” where servants would be sent for “necessaries,” and could encounter those with the “fatal breath,” or plague (72). H.F. attributes the spread of the plague to the city-wide need for people to make purchases in marketplaces. Defoe’s comments on servants reflect the growing historical trend to employ household servants, especially in an increasingly commercial society in which merchants were earning more money and purchasing luxury items. Bridget Hill’s work on domestic servants reveals that members of this often “invisible” population in history and literature were “ubiquitous” in eighteenth-century England, delivering messages, cleaning, and attending their employers on business and social calls (1). More servants resided with employers, as opposed to performing itinerant labor, yet the system was not solidified enough to offer stability. Often servants were dismissed for arbitrary reasons and then were at risk for homelessness or prostitution. Even if they retained their positions, servants received a limited education and were constrained in their movements, unable to choose where to spend their time or what to do (Hill 102-36). They possessed a certain degree of mobility, traversing public spaces and participating in economic exchange as the proxies of their masters. Positions within a household were not sharply differentiated, so many would serve multiple functions, shopping in the marketplaces, cooking in the kitchens, and cleaning the house (Hill 15-22). Still, their motions were circumscribed by their employers, and their positions were not guaranteed.

Defoe’s treatment of servants in his works is ambiguous and ambivalent at best. He argues that servants can function as an extension of the family and as a source of moral good in the home in works like The Family Instructor (1718) and Religious Courtship (1722).[10] Nevertheless, he is often critical of servants, worrying about their corrupting influence and promoting government regulation in treatises such as Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business (1725) and The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724). In the latter works, Defoe expresses anxiety for the power that servants, particularly young women, exert in their employers’ households. Female servants often adopted aspects of the dress and manners of their mistresses, creating a more fluid social hierarchy that blurred roles and boundaries. A servant’s increased potential to spread the plague within her employer’s household signals metaphorically the possibly damaging influence on families. By suggesting that servants were at fault for spreading the plague, the Journal reflects, and perhaps stokes, anxieties about the power servants might wield over families and their corrupting influence. The fact remains that servants were the marginalized population who were often left vulnerable to infection based on the conditions of their living. Defoe acknowledges this fact in moments throughout A Journal of the Plague Year when he laments the fate of the “poor” servant, who was often abandoned by families and forced to wander the streets, trying to survive (29). Thus, servants can be seen as trapped in the metropolis, forced to earn their living in any way they can. They seem to be continuously moving around the city, often ignored as people but in demand as proxies.

The poor, whether they are “wandering beggars” or former tradesmen suffering from the economic effects of the plague, receive attention and sensitive treatment in this novel. H.F. praises the “charitable, well-minded Christians” who support the poor, and by extension, the City, during this harrowing time (Journal 91). Novak has lauded A Journal of the Plague Year for its sensitive attention to the plight of the poor, praising the “compassionate treatment of individuals” (“Defoe and the Disordered City” 242). During the plague’s height, the law established that “no wandering beggar be suffered in the streets of this City, in any fashion or manner” (Journal 45). H.F. explains how futile it was to enforce any such rules of confinement or control, either in interior spaces or out in the streets. Inhabiting the streets to beg, work odd jobs, or simply survive, the poor “swarm in every place about the city,” inseparable from urban space even if not contributing to its development through work or financial capital (Journal 45). The poor are part of the urban landscape and become associated with London streets and passageways.

According to Tim Hitchcock, the poor would usually congregate in open markets or busy thoroughfares in order to beg, collect uneaten or wasted food, find short-term work, and remain anonymous in a crowd. The city, more than other spaces, provided opportunities for the poor; “beggarly professions” were important to the London economy (Hitchcock xv-xvi, 74). During the time of the plague, anonymity and contingent labor were no longer options, and the poor suffered greatly, not only from disease but from neglect and want. Defoe mentions the charities that helped to support them, but the main focus is, as Novak remarks, sympathy for their travails. At the same time, there is also fear of resembling a “wandering” beggar if one becomes infected and loses his or her sanity and of coming into contact with a “poor wanderer” (Journal 98).

Novak traces the shifting meanings of the word “poor” in A Journal of the Plague Year, noting that Defoe alternates between the noun and adjectival forms of the word (Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 606). Whether describing an economically bereft person, or expressing sympathy for a suffering one, Defoe’s repeated use of the word “poor” illustrates an all-encompassing compassion for Londoners affected by the plague, regardless of their social positions. In a similar fashion, I contend that forms of the word “wanderer” shift in meaning and end up conflating the poor and the infected. H.F.’s analysis of the infected movements relies on the verb “wander” (Journal 53, 57). Just as the poor cannot be contained or prevented from wandering the streets, the infected cannot be trapped in their homes, especially once they lose the ability to regulate their minds or bodily motions. Expressing both sympathy and fear, H.F. describes the epistemological problems involved in city-walking, especially during the time of plague. He thinks he spots “poor Wanderers” in the distance, but the “general method” is to walk away before he can confirm whether in fact they are ill (Journal 98). This conflation of the poor and the infected through the term “wanderer” signals the anxiety of resembling lower-class figures. In a city that threatens to blur boundaries, and during an epidemic that puts everyone at risk, the malleability of class distinctions becomes a fear for people like H.F. Observing the ways in which social classes move helps H.F. maintain these distinctions, but, as in the case of the “poor wanderer,” it also risks blurring them, revealing that these positions are always fluid and somewhat arbitrary.

Still, H.F. works to distinguish the vulnerable and abject “wanderers” from the “walkers” or producers of knowledge like H.F., who travel and negotiate space while remaining distanced enough to observe rather than be absorbed by the chaos. It is this lack of reason that horrifies H.F. when he witnesses citizens like himself infected with plague. They take on the characteristics of wandering beggars, as in one instance when a man roams the streets of Harrow Alley “in the Butcher-row in Whitechapel,” “dancing and singing, and making a thousand antick gestures” (Journal 165). H.F. watches this display from his home window, conceiving of himself as a “man in his full power of reflection” in comparison with this “afflicted” madman (Journal 165). Seeing a neighbor and fellow citizen behave this way likely makes H.F. feel that he too is susceptible to the ravings and abject state of the begging poor. In the vignettes scattered throughout A Journal of the Plague Year, infected people take on the abject qualities of the mad and the poor, becoming impulsive, raving wanderers as opposed to reasoning, regulated walkers. On the metaphorical register, the plague’s effect on people illustrates the fluidity of subject and class positions in a commercial London that threatens to deprive people of economic success and challenge their social standing. As Novak and others have mentioned, A Journal of the Plague Year is often read in part as a response to the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and the risks—the possibilities and perils—of a commercial London lead to anxiety and fear, (Novak, “Defoe and the Disordered City” 244−45).

As I have been arguing, H.F’s observations suggest a desire to classify people according to their motions. H.F. walks from place to place noticing the scenes of chaos and the behaviors of those around him, reporting briefly on what he perceives. Thus, it appears somewhat odd when H.F.’s quick descriptions and movements though London yield to the lengthy, slowly unfolding tale of John, Tom, and Richard, three laboring men from Wapping, a small hamlet on the Thames. A baker, a sail-maker, and a joiner, these three men are suddenly displaced when their respective landlords relocate after the plague finally hits the region. Pausing his own motions to explore theirs, H.F. depicts their worries of appearing like wandering vagrants. Remaining active in mind and body, the three men direct their motions, moving deliberately and strategically. Itinerant, they pool their money and carry a tent with them as they fight for survival. By suggesting that people—especially hard-working and resourceful ones—can shape the ways they are perceived by regulating their motions, Defoe’s novel presents a case in which individuals have some control over their identity positions. To H.F., the story of three “midling people” who negotiate their environment and interactions, so that they are perceived and received as active, hard-working men, rather than wandering vagrants, “has a moral in every part of it” (Journal 144, 118).

During their travels, John, Tom, and Richard encounter other displaced Londoners, and some members of the group they meet happen to be women who are similarly resourceful and courageous in their quest for survival. In much of the novel, however, H.F. depicts women moving in unregulated, frenzied ways. For example, he describes seeing women throughout the East End who were “reduc’d to the utmost distress,” as evident from their cries, shrieks, and fainting (Journal 112, 78), and offers the story of a wealthy woman becoming “distracted” and “void of all sense” or “government” of her mind and body when her daughter dies of the plague (Journal 56). Historically, in accounts of traumatic events, women’s bodies and screams often register the pain and suffering of a generation, a race, a nation. Instead of hearing their stories directly, the nonverbal signs of distress are meant to carry symbolic weight and generate a heartfelt response in the reader or audience.[11] I argue that Defoe uses the distress of women as a way to describe the emotional burden the plague wreaked on the metropolis. Not exactly walking or wandering, such women move and emote in ways that seem to embody the collective suffering in London. Defoe, it seems, relies on the bodily motions and sonorous cries of women to render the pain of the city.

Ultimately, I argue that the plague in Defoe’s novel casts into relief the experiences of people in various social positions within a developing urban space. Defoe would continue to be preoccupied by the people and places in London for the remainder of his career. A Journal of the Plague Year, in which he distinguishes between the walled “City” and the more expansive “city,” that included Westminster and areas outside the wall, initiates a discussion of urban development that he would continue in A Tour Through the Island of Great Britain (Journal 19). A Tour through the Island of Great Britain focuses on the simultaneously monstrous and exciting expansion of London, showing how the growing metropolis presents opportunities and challenges for those trying to navigate and conceptualize this ever-increasing urban space. In other London narratives, such as Moll Flanders and Roxana, Defoe goes further in tracing the minds and movements of the marginalized—women, prostitutes, criminals, and the poor. Capitalizing on the sensation of writing about London in the early eighteenth century, Defoe observes and assesses motions in the metropolis to create taxonomies of subject positions, which are often defined in socioeconomic terms. Thus, A Journal of the Plague Year is part of a larger pattern for Defoe in which he focuses on the category of motion or movement to analyze the ways in which people from various backgrounds adapt to, navigate, and identify themselves in that most complex of city spaces: London.

Fordham University


NOTES

[1]   Jonathan Swift used a classical style of verse in “A Description of The Morning” (1709) and “A Description of a City Shower” (1710) to mock the dirty environment and trivial affairs of early eighteenth-century London. John Gay’s Trivia; or the Art of Walking (1716) satirizes the dirty walkways of London and the prevalence of prostitutes in his lengthy poem on London pedestrianism.

[2]   In “Novel Streets: The Rebuilding of London and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” Cynthia Wall interprets Defoe’s “urban novels” as a “generic response to the unknown,” arguing that their “nonlinearity” responds to the “newly perceived fluidity of the changed and changing city” of post-fire London (174). In comments on the novel as genre, John Bender argues that it “formally embodies the fabric of urban culture” (58).

[3]   Cynthia Wall provides this statistic in her article cited in the previous endnote and in her book The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. She, like other London scholars, uses a capital C to distinguish the original City of London within the walls from the more expansive metropolis (“Novel Streets” 164; Literary and Cultural Spaces ix).

[4]   For detailed explanations and analyses of rebuilding spaces and redrawing maps after the Great Fire, see Cynthia Wall’s The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration England, 3114; see Peter Whitfield’s London: A Life in Maps for explications of London life based on visual representations and maps, 5381; for an analysis of servant life in eighteenth-century England, see Bridget Hill’s Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century, 1207; and for general studies of London development see Roy Porter’s London: A Social History, 66159, and Jerry White’s A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century.

[5]   OED definitions for ‘motion’ take into account physical movement as well as mental movement. One definition that persisted into the mid-eighteenth century involved emotion (12a).

[6]   ‘Motion’ and ‘emotion’ were often used interchangeably up until the mid-eighteenth century, suggesting a link between the motions of mind and body.

[7]   According to Lawrence Manley, literary representations of London are always phenomenological, “defined as much by varieties of mental experience and changing social practices as by physical location” (1).

[8]   Although Wall’s focus is on Defoe she nevertheless applies this term “grammar of space” to the works of John Gay, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, among others (130-133).

[9]   Helen Thompson claims that “the plague compels a formal articulation of character,” thus linking the theme of the plague with the genre of the novel. In her analysis, she connects the novel genre with epistemological discourse (154).

[10] Religious Courtship (1722) is structured as a series of dialogues between an aunt and her three nieces that involves the practice and philosophy of hiring servants. They all believe in hiring religious servants who will promote religious harmony in the home. The second volume of The Family Instructor (1718) focuses on the relationship between masters and servants, ultimately articulating the transformative effects they can have on one another.

[11] Drawing on theories of trauma and gender, Marianne Hirsch writes in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012) that in representations of traumatic events women tend to function as “translators and as mediators carrying the story and its affective fabric, but not generating it themselves” (12).

 

WORKS CITED

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth- England. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.

Brown, Tom. “Amusements Serious and Comical.” 1700. The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-life, 17001914. Ed. Rick Allen. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. An Essay on Projects. 1697. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Web. 20 Aug. 2015.

—. Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business. 1725. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Web. 2 June 2015.

—. The Family Instructor. 1718. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Web. 15 Aug. 2015.

—. The Great Law of Subordination Considered. 1724. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Web. 2 June 2015.

—. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

—. Moll Flanders. 1722. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

—. Religious Courtship. 1722. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) Web. 3 Aug. 2015.

—. Roxana. 1724. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

—. A Whole Tour Through the Island of Great Britain. 17241726. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print.

Drake, George A. “The Dialectics of Inside and Outside: Dominated and Appropriated Space in Defoe’s Historical Fictions.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14.2 (2002): 125-45. Print.

Gay, John. “Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London.” 1716. The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-life, 17001914. Ed. Rick Allen. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Hill, Bridget. Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print.

Hitchcock, Tim. Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Hambleton & London, 2004. Print.

Manley, Lawrence. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Ed. Lawrence Manley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

“Motion, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, March 2015. Web. 2 June 2015.

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

—. “Defoe and the Disordered City.” PMLA 92.2 (1977): 241-52. Print.

Ogborn, Miles. Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 16801780. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. Print.

Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. Print.

Steele, Richard. “The Hours of London.” The Spectator. 1712. The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-life, 17001914. Ed. Rick Allen. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

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 54.2 (2013): 153-67. Print.

Wall, Cynthia. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration England. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

—. “London and Narration in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Ed. Lawrence Manley. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

—. “Novel Streets: The Rebuilding of London and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” Studies in the Novel 30.2 (1998): 16477. Print.

White, Jerry. A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013. Print.

Whitfield, Peter. London: A Life in Maps. London: The British Library, 2006. Print.

 

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Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels, by Karen Lipsedge

Reviewed by Amy Wolf

Karen Lipsedge’s book examines the relationship between real domestic spaces and their fictional counterparts in novels by Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan. “By recreating the structure, design, function and social significance of specific rooms and garden buildings, and the ways of life they facilitated,” Lipsedge hopes to shed light on the ways such rooms functioned in novels, recapturing the ways eighteenth-century readers would have understood literary heroines’ characters, relationships to privacy, and senses of freedom or confinement through the descriptions of their rooms (3–4). She sees her approach as bringing together studies of domestic architecture and literary studies, focusing not just on literature’s symbolic treatment of spaces, but also on the relationship of rooms in novels to real eighteenth-century rooms and cultural understandings of those rooms’ meaning and function.

Lipsedge’s introduction provides an overview of eighteenth-century architecture and the polite elite’s embrace of the Palladian ideal to order their domestic spaces—both indoors and outdoors. Building on other scholars’ work, she shows the ways “the Palladian house was perceived to be the ideal visual symbol of the owner’s politeness” and its “hierarchal organization of the interior, in which the function of each room was signalled by its location [and] was believed to reflect the order and harmony of the inhabitants” (8). But it is not only order and harmony or ideas about the homeowner’s identity that are revealed through architecture. Lipsedge is also interested in how over the course of the eighteenth century a growing concern with privacy and individuality gets expressed through architecture. Specifically, she concentrates on two kinds of rooms in her introduction—dressing-rooms and closets—in order to show this change, tracking the “decreasing social significance of the private closet and the concurrent increase in value of the dressing-room, in the second half of the century” (11). Closets were places of individual study and reflection, especially for prayer. Alternatively, dressing-rooms, originally both for men and women, became more and more associated with women over the course of the century and reflected changing conceptions, not just of privacy, but also of virtue. Tracking the decrease in closets and increase in dressing-rooms—as both rooms also shifted in meaning—helps us to understand quite a bit about eighteenth-century lives. More importantly for Lipsedge’s purposes, it also helps us to understand the nuances of these spaces in novels not as fixed but as culturally dependent and continually questioned, by both those who wrote and those who read novels.

Lipsedge’s first chapter is mostly an overview of real houses, exploring how eighteenth-century architects and inhabitants of those spaces thought of their homes and rooms. She uses letters, architecture histories, and illustrations to reveal what houses looked like and how they were laid out. Interestingly, as the century progresses, rooms became more and more about sociability at the same time that the occupants were becoming more concerned with privacy. From the mid-century on, there was “a change in the balance between social and private rooms, for while social rooms began to dominate the domestic interior, the composition, size and significance of private rooms began to decrease” (36). Social rooms took over the ground floor and private rooms moved upstairs, all as part of the Palladian ideal moving away from the idea of apartments into a different use of space. Rooms became more and more specialized and sometimes even gendered, as when dining rooms developed as spaces solely for eating and (with)drawing-rooms became a female sanctuary where women could “withdraw” from the men after dinner. Lipsedge makes interesting use of architect Isaac Ware’s 1756 Complete Body of Architecture to trace specific examples of the locations, functions, and meanings of important domestic spaces.

Lipsedge’s next three chapters turn to the novels themselves and are named after different kinds of rooms: social rooms, private rooms, and garden rooms. “Social Rooms” concentrates on parlours and drawing-rooms. Her close reading of the three parlours in Clarissa is thoughtful and nuanced, emphasizing the ways in which the Harlowes assert their authority over Clarissa by manipulating and controlling her parlour, staging Solmes courtsthip scene there, for example, and attempting to limit how she uses a space once in her control and once a site for her personal intellectual pursuits and privacy. At its best, Lipsedge’s work brings to life for the modern reader the function and meaning of spaces that an eighteenth-century reader would have intuitively grasped. For example, she notes that the Harlowe’s three parlours—one family parlour, one for Bella, and one for Clarissa—was unusual and this fact “articulate[s] the recurrent themes of the novel: divided families and the violation of space” (59). Rooms in the Harlowe household are “commodities and assets for which the family bargain,” just as they will attempt to do with Clarissa herself (59). Lipsedge also traces the function of social rooms in Pamela, Evelina, and, briefly, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. The “Private Rooms” chapter contends that the shift from Richardson’s emphasis on private rooms to Burney’s emphasis on social rooms reflects “changes in interior design and the cultural perception and use of domestic space in the eighteenth century” (98). Closets and dressing-rooms were seen as “liberating spaces in which the individual could escape, if only metaphorically, from the physical boundaries of the surrounding walls” (91). Lipsedge traces the evolution of the dressing-room from its satirical origins early in the century to its association with virtue and privacy later by looking closely at two works of art, Hogarth’s Marriage-à-la-Mode in 1745 and a portrait of Queen Charlotte by Johann Zoffany in 1765. Hogarth’s dressing-room is certainly a satirical site of illicit female sexuality and consumerism whereas Queen Charlotte is portrayed in her dressing room with her two sons in a scene of “maternity, harmony, order and femininity” (114). She notes that the Queen is positioned next to her mirror but looking at her sons, not focusing on vanity. Queen Charlotte’s dressing-room is a place of family intimacy and privacy. Lipsedge nicely integrates this visual history into a reading of several novels, moving from Pamela in her lady’s dressing-room in danger of seduction to Harriet (in Sir Charles Grandison) in her dressing room’s “private female space in which the heart, rather than the body, is unveiled and displayed” (120).

Chapter Four, “Garden Rooms,” follows the pattern of earlier chapters in giving a history of “real” garden buildings to shed light on their function in novels. Garden buildings were often whimsical and idiosyncratic, not as formal as house architecture, but functioned much as interior parlours did. Much of this chapter looks at famous garden seduction scenes, a common trope at least since the amatory novels of the late seventeenth century. In the four novels Lipsedge examines, the “ambiguities of isolation” make summer houses seemingly safe retreats, but it is dangerous for the heroines to treat them as they would parlours—their seclusion makes them unsafe (148). Lipsedge uses J. D. Macey’s argument that the garden buildings are “transitional spaces” in these novels and applies it in slightly different ways (132). Many scholars look at the ways male intruders trap the heroines in garden buildings, but Lipsedge sees them as sites for potential autonomy. For example, in her reading of the changing function of the arbour at Mrs. Beaumont’s house in Evelina, Lipsedge notes that at first Sir Clement Willoughby tries to seduce Evelina there, but eventually it becomes a spot for Evelina and Lord Orville to meet: “The arbour now functions as a symbol of pastoral innocence and of burgeoning platonic love, rather than as an emblem of threatening passion” (165).

The book’s conclusion is mostly a repetitive summary of earlier material, but it does begin to speculate on male characters’ relationship to domestic space. Overall, Lipsedge is successful in her main goal, bringing to life the function and meaning of eighteenth-century rooms in several novels and their “intersect[ion] with contemporary ideas about the function and use of domestic space, the concept of privacy, and the connection between living space and the individual” (1–2).

Amy Wolf
Canisius College


WORKS CITED

Macey, Jr., J. D. “‘Where the World May Ne’er Invade’? Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Princess de Clèves, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Cecilia.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.1 (1999): 75–100. Print.

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Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660-1780, by Howard D. Weinbrot

Reviewed by David Walker

Howard D. Weinbrot’s Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture has a very impressive chronological and intellectual range and sweep. Adapting Darwinian evolutionary theory to the cultural history of the long eighteenth century is a significant and formidable undertaking. It is Professor Weinbrot’s contention that “gradual improvements from generation to generation are passed on to successive generations.” These are then “solidified and in turn improved … and incorporated into national and international social, political, literary, and other cultural gene pools” (8). Portraits of Defoe and Sacheverell appear on the dust jacket along with a list of eighteenth-century notables such as Gilbert Burnet, Tobias Smollett, John Wesley, and George Gordon, who themselves loom large in Weinbrot’s text. This appears a generous cross-section of individuals displaying diverse religious and political affiliation in the long(ish) eighteenth century. In his concentration on their works and their activities Weinbrot demonstrates the extent to which cultural, religious, and political life in eighteenth-century Britain was in a constant state of flux.

Sacheverell’s name is forever associated with the most celebrated trial of the early eighteenth century. He was charged with sedition for vilifying the powerful Whig minister Sidney Godolphin and denigrating the Glorious Revolution. His impeachment and trial generated a considerable “storm of pamphlets” (Holmes 32). A narrowly high-Tory Anglican who hated moderate Tories, Latitudinarians, and Dissenters alike, Sacheverell’s guilt at trial led to riots on the streets of London. George Gordon, at the other end of Weinbrot’s gallery of portraits, shares with Sacheverell the distinction of lending his name to significant violent acts of riot in defense of religious intolerance, this time against Catholics. Violence against Dissenters in 1710, and against Catholics in 1780, seem to suggest that little in the way of enlightened evolution took place in eighteenth-century England.

The history of early modern English Protestantism is a history of conflict, famously embodied in regicide, revolution, and republicanism in the mid-seventeenth century. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, revolution was carried on by other means across the remainder of the seventeenth century when republicanism ceased to be a practical alternative to monarchy and instead was translated into a language of opposition. Defoe himself of course was a notable Dissenter and supporter of the Glorious Revolution: his character was formed in the persecutory decades before and after the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Toleration Act, when a war of religion raged through the literary mediums of pamphlet polemic in many different forms. Weinbrot is alert to the tangled threads of orthodoxy and Dissent in all of its murky difference, and he opens chapter 2 of Literature, Religion, and Culture with the recognition that “[e]ven one’s own coreligionists could be apostates, antichrists, or false brethren” (55).

Weinbrot’s reading of work by Defoe and Sacheverell takes place in the context of other pamphlets, treatises, and tracts that consider the relationship between church and state and the danger presented to the Church of England by Dissent. It was a world in which little quarter was given and less asked. Despite the powers of the state that were almost permanently arrayed against them in the decades after 1660, in the ongoing struggle between the established church and nonconformists, “Lower churchmen and Dissenters gave as good as they got” (30). In chapter two, Weinbrot zeroes in on the reign of William III, placing Defoe’s Shortest-Way and Sacheverell’s The Political Union (1702) at the center of the discussion. Weinbrot’s analysis throughout this chapter is deft and vigorous. He nicely sets up the terms of the debate between High Anglican Tories, Low Church Whigs, and Dissenters, and the manner in which it was fought out in the pamphlet literature of the 1690s and the opening years of the eighteenth century.

In an age of satire, The Shortest-Way famously proved too cunning for its earliest readers to be properly understood. In terms of initial reception the work seems to have satisfied no-one. To Dissenters it appeared to treat flippantly serious questions of toleration and invited in their view the wrong kind of attention to their cause; to Anglican Tories in Sacheverell’s ultra-conservative mode, the text was received as a mockery of their values. On the whole, outrage by all interested parties was the norm (80-84). The death of William III on March 8, 1702 re-opened debates about the efficacy of the Toleration Act passed in 1689 and led to the intensification of what was already a heated discussion regarding the legalization of Protestant Dissent. Between the passing of the Act and 1702 “worries over popular religious behaviour” and “intellectual challenges to orthodoxy” were “presented with particular force,” says Julian Hoppit. This led in turn to debates about the Protestant religion in England that were “hardly less intense than those which had raged so fiercely in the mid sixteenth century and during the Interregnum” (Hoppit 208). Quoting Jonathan Swift’s Some Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs (1714) —“that the church’s ‘secret Adversaries were Whigs, Low Church, Republicans, Moderation-Men, and the like’” —Weinbrot makes it plain that Sacheverell was not the only intolerant High Churchman willing to nail his colors to the mast. Anything less than “absolute belief” in the supremacy of the Episcopal Church of England, many agreed, was madness (55; 89–90, notes 1–2).

Here we see a familiar association made by supporters of Episcopal Church government: Dissent is equated with republicanism, with the implied charges of regicide and revolution—of a world turned upside down. Such rhetoric was the staple of anti-toleration debates throughout the period of Weinbrot’s coverage. Accusations of this kind were revived, reiterated, and enhanced at moments when political crisis was generated by issues of religion. The most spectacular example of this in the later seventeenth century is the massively disruptive political upheaval of the Exclusion Crisis, and of course the Glorious Revolution itself. Gilbert Burnet writes eloquently on it in History of his Own Time. For the Exclusion Crisis he blames the press which “became very licentious against the court and the clergy”. Accordingly the bishops of the time, in fear of a rebellion, “set themselves to write against the late times and to draw a parallel between the present times and them” (Burnett 210–11). Pro-episcopal writers were quick to blame the current liberal fashion for philosophical skepticism, of which the leading practitioners were Hobbes and Spinoza (Ibid). From this point onwards there were existed irreconcilable positions regarding enthusiasm and reason: for Dissenters an exclusive reliance on inspiration by the Holy Spirit was essential. “From the High Church point of view,” says Weinbrot, “the Dissenters had usurped the divine voice.” They took active steps to reclaim it “with their own language of annihilation” (60). It is a short step from this position to one that sees Dissenters tarred by Sacheverell and others with the brush of satanic influence and a fall into chaos. Charles Leslie, for instance, sees chaos as “a synonym for enthusiast-Whig-Dissenter minds” (56). This brief look at the opening section is a prelude to a chapter rich in its analysis of early eighteenth-century writers that were familiar with—and in some cases were contributing to the history of religious violence from the Counter Reformation of Mary I to the late seventeenth century. For some Tory writers in the period there was no separation of church and state needed: “Denial of divine right was a denial of God” (56). Works by Sacheverell (Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality) and Leslie (Principles of the Dissenters) called for Old Testament retribution upon Dissenters. Quoting liberally from both of these texts Weinbrot points out that both writers called out for action including “Condign Vengeance” and the infliction of “wrath” upon “Insatiable, Mercenary, Blood-Hounds.” Recourse to the “Hebrew Law of Retaliation,” the argument went, is the only appropriate solution to the current malaise. Sacheverell and Leslie believed wholeheartedly, Weinbrot writes, that “the state’s martial arm” was [also] its religious arm’ (61). In The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church and State (1709), Sacheverell sets out his stall. Quoting liberally from this text and others Weinbrot draws upon some very interesting material suggesting that fear of persecution and extirpation was something that was feared by Church of England loyalists every bit as much as Dissenters. Commentators such as Charles Leslie “were sadly confident that the Whigs and Dissenters planned utterly to destroy the true church” (59). His New Association makes this all too clear with its repeated references to the “Destroying of Episcopacy Root and Branch” (qtd. in Weinbrot 60).

It is the satirical rendering of these views that form the target of Defoe’s Shortest-Way. In her encyclopedic taxonomy of satire from 1658-1770, Ashley Marshall describes The Shortest-Way as a “less straightforward type of religiopolitical satire,” intended by Defoe “not to ridicule the High Church position but to school his fellow dissenters about the dangers concealed in that position,” while Paula Backscheider believes that The Shortest-Way “was a dramatic impersonation, a defense of liberty [that] included all of the ideas Defoe found most offensive” (Marshall 151; Backscheider 94, 95). The clearest danger, and one that Defoe is alert to from the outset of the Shortest-Way, is the relatively recent parliamentary act guaranteeing religious toleration, albeit to a limited number of Dissenters. The outcome of this act, writes Defoe, is that “these last fourteen years” have enabled a “viperous brood” to flourish, who have “butchered one King, deposed another King, and made a mock King of a third.” William III is no more than the Dissenters’ puppet, a “King of Clouts” (Defoe 132–33). Defoe picks up too on the position outlined by Sacheverell and Leslie: suppression of Dissent is to be lauded and not decried. Intolerance, says Defoe, is preferred to coddling. He cites the clearing of Huguenots from France by Louis XIV in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 as a good example. Insofar as the Dissenters are concerned, “Heaven has made way for their destruction,” by eliminating their “Monmouths, and Shaftesburys and Argylls,” and “if we do not close with the divine occasion” and extirpate them, he goes on, then we have no-one to “blame [but] ourselves” (Defoe 137, 138). As the section in chapter two heads towards its conclusion Weinbrot charts a convincing path through the jungle of visceral religious polemic. In the end, there seems little to distinguish between the two sides. In his view Defoe “could so well mimic Sacheverell’s version of ethnic cleansing: [because] he was keen on practising it himself towards Catholics” (78).

Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture is a formidable work of scholarship written by one of the period’s sharpest critics. Its erudition is pronounced, its analysis acute, and there is little doubt in my view of its quality as a work of literary and cultural history. Each chapter is a case study; most have as their centerpiece a reading of something by a well-known writer: Defoe, as we have seen in chapter two; Equiano (chapter four); Dickens (chapter eight). If I were to quibble I would ask for more close reading of the period’s literature, more poetry, and more fiction. More, as another reviewer has remarked, on the debate concerned with toleration (Conway).

David Walker
Northumbria University

WORKS CITED

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

Burnet, Gilbert. History of his own Time. 1724–34. 6 vols. Ed. M. J. Routh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883. Print.

Conway, Alison. Rev. of Literature, Religion and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780, by Howard D. Weinbrot. Review of English Studies 65:271 (2014): 745–47. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. 1702. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings. Ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. London: Penguin, 1997. Print.

Holmes, Geoffrey. British Politics in the Age of Anne. 2nd ed. London: Hambledon Press, 1987. Print.

Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Marshall, Ashley. The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.

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Christianity Not as Old as the Creation: The Last of Defoe’s Performances. Ed. G. A. Starr

Reviewed by Maximillian E. Novak

G.A. Starr has produced an excellent edition of a work that he demonstrates, without the shadow of a doubt, to be by Defoe. It is a reply to Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, which appeared in April 1730. Defoe’s response was published in May 1730 by Thomas Warner, who, as Starr points out, was one of Defoe’s regular publishers at the time. Defoe’s text runs to only sixty-one pages, but with notes, Professor Starr’s introduction runs almost as long, and he provides over twenty pages of detailed notes to the text itself. Although I will discuss the nature of this work and Professor Starr’s contribution later in this review, I feel that I have to remark on some oddities in the publication. Defoe’s name does not appear on the spine of the work, and its inclusion in the subtitle, “The Last of Defoe’s Performances,” seems somewhat tendentious. The work is certainly by Defoe, but it is not at all certain that it was his last piece of writing. Of course, it was not included in P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens’s Critical Bibliography (1998). Since Professor Starr expresses his gratitude to those authors, did it have to assume a doubtful status, more doubtful than, say, The Commentator (1720), another of Defoe’s works without external evidence? Is this why, even after Professor Starr establishes Defoe’s authorship with brilliant analysis of parallel passages from works we know to be by Defoe, he continues to refer to “the author” of this work rather than to Daniel Defoe?

As Professor Starr remarks, Defoe refers to Tindal’s work just a few times. Tindal glorifies human reason and argues that whatever fails to pass the test of reason—including the Bible—has to be dismissed as unworthy of humankind who needs to be considered “moral Agents.” Defoe’s opposition to such arguments—his defense of Revelation—was longstanding. In fact, he presented similar arguments against William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) in works such as Mere Nature Delineated (1726), The Political History of the Devil (1726), and A New Family Instructor (1727). As Professor Starr points out, Christianity Not Old as Creation has its few slightly amusing passages involving Defoe’s mockery of Adam’s behavior after the Fall, but the essential argument about human folly is handled far more wittily in Mere Nature Delineated and that involving sin and punishment in The Political History of the Devil. Professor Starr presents a thorough picture of the battle between the deists and those, such as Defoe, who believed in Revelation, and he remarks on Defoe’s adherence to a Calvinistic view of sin, faith, and repentance, with the notable absence of any mention of pre-destination. He also comments learnedly on Defoe’s equivalent of Pascal’s Wager, seeing Defoe’s attitude as connected to Defoe’s interest in insurance. In appealing to the youth of his times, Defoe argues the immense risk in disbelief, compared to the relatively small commitment to faith. Defoe, indeed, had argued much the same in his “Vision of the Angelic World” attached to Serious Reflections… of Robinson Crusoe (1720).

One point on which I have a mild disagreement involves how Defoe responded to science. In a work such as The Storm (1704), he certainly appealed to God’s power and our ignorance of how wind comes about, but he was always ready to adjust his beliefs when confronted with genuine scientific knowledge. Surely had he a modern knowledge of meteorology, he would have included that in his account of events such as the storm of 1703 which he viewed as a sign of God’s presence in the world. The same would apply to his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in which he actually raises the possibility that the plague might have been caused by the equivalent of germs. Having more certainty on such matters would hardly have changed his overall view of the hand of God in such events, but the author of An Essay upon Projects (1697) and A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, in Useful Arts (1725–26) would not have rejected what he would have considered genuine discoveries.

If, then, there is little new in Christianity Not as Old as the Creation, we still have the pleasure of seeing a Defoe in his seventieth year capable of mustering his arguments with great skill. Does it throw much light on Defoe’s novels? Professor Starr offers the interesting suggestion that the persistent appeal to fear and anxiety in this work is reflected in a similar way in the novels. But some of his connections to the novels are at best doubtful. Fictional characters are not the same as polemicists. They have to be judged according to their situations and individual traits.

In the final paragraph of his introduction, Professor Starr suggests that the rigid test of authorship present in his discussion of this work should be followed by anyone attempting to offer a correction or addition to the Bibliography of Furbank and Owens. That seems slightly self-serving. Furbank and Owens offered corrections to J. R. Moore’s Checklist (1960, 1971). So far as I know, they never attempted to treat any of the many attributions offered after Moore’s final edition. And while Professor Starr is excellent in tracing parallel passages and quoted materials, he is less effective in offering stylistic elements typical of Defoe. Certainly he might have alluded to the short paragraphs, vocabulary, and paragraph beginnings. And despite the air of finality that Furbank and Owens attempted to impart to their Bibliography does not Professor Starr’s discovery suggest that there are more writings of Defoe yet to be found?

Maximillian E. Novak
University of California, Los Angeles


WORKS CITED

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

Moore, John Robert. A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe. 1960. 2nd ed. Hamden: Archon Books, 1971. Print.

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Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole, by Emrys D. Jones

Reviewed by Marc Mierowsky

As a metaphor for relationships of political obligation, friendship is at once more contingent and more applicable to the interactions of eighteenth-century politics than the filial bond commonly used to define the relationship between monarch and subject. In Emrys Jones’s Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature, it is these two qualities that allow friendship to play an important role in bridging the public and private spheres. A semantically and conceptually labile term, friendship, in the eighteenth century, could encompass the exchanges of debt and credit that became an insistently problematic feature of both public and private life following the burst of the South Sea Bubble. The humanistic ideal of friendship set in the minds of writers across political factions a standard, albeit an ambivalent one, with which to judge the rise of Walpole’s party from opposition to oligarchy. Walpole’s implication in the financial crisis was never neatly resolved. And so Court Whigs, not least their leader, were subject to a matrix of judgement wherein the reciprocal loyalties of interpersonal exchange were as much a marker of corruption as they were an asset for what we now call public image.

Jones’s monograph is deeply attuned to the complexities and ambiguities of polemical culture and to how writers in this period rendered the concept of friendship indeterminate. The anxieties that arose when writers questioned the significance of “disinterested” private friendships to politics are shown by Jones to be the product of a difficult negotiation between public and private modes of judgement. The effects of public politics on friendship were rendered ambiguous by an uneasy correlation between private virtue and the “abstract standards” of allegiance required by those in public life (8). The effects of friendship on public politics were, in turn, complicated by the fact that these supposedly “abstract standards”—“reason, principle, sincerity” (8)—were themselves underwritten by the imperatives of private friendship.

This line of argument requires a case by case analysis, upon which Jones stakes his two principal contributions. He broadens the already capacious lexis of friendship established by Naomi Tadmor, uncovering the grounds for contention beneath each of Tadmor’s terms and euphemisms (2); and he expands upon the Habermasian public sphere by identifying a new origin of subjectivity: associations between individuals outside the family unit that sit in uneasy relationship to the wider structures of rational-critical discourse—friendships (6).

In pursuit of these tasks, Friendship and Allegiance is divided into two parts. The first, “Friendship in Crisis” (21–108), attends to the historically specific operations of intimate relations in the wake of the South Sea Crisis and Excise Crisis, convincingly linked by Jones (22). The second, “Friendship by Trope” (109–72), focuses on how the difficulties associated with finding a secure idea of intimacy, exacerbated by these crises, surface in the “dehumanising tropes” of beast fables and criminal narratives (166). Re-reading the figures of beast and criminal, commonplaces of eighteenth-century literature, Jones uncovers how these figurations were, in fact, attempts to reconcile the political and the personal. Indeed, it is the inevitably irresolute end of such a task which preoccupies the first part of his book.

Jones’s close reading of political communication, propaganda, and literature ensures a convincing transition between the two sections. The sources he marshals reflect the wide purchase friendship gained on political and literary culture during Walpole’s dominance; and his easy movement between the various discursive genres demonstrates the aptness of his methods of elucidating it.

The first chapter focuses on two actors—Walpole and Pope—in order to situate Scriblerian accounts of friendship in the climate of public hysteria brought on by financial collapse. Walpole’s retreat from blame finds a parallel in Pope’s distancing himself from the polluted exchanges of the public arena. Yet both are inescapably implicated. And Pope, who was discomfited by the extent to which “the public drive for speculation” (35) affected him, assumes a focal point within the network of communication between Swift and Gay; their corpus of letters speaks not only to the financial networks of the coterie, but also to the destabilizing effects of these networks on friendship—as an ideal and in practice.

Perhaps of greatest interest to Defoe specialists will be chapter two, “Daniel Defoe and South Sea Friendship.” With Defoe, whose ambitions (despite his acumen) made him receptive to the values of the market, Jones is able to show that the influence of public speculation on sociability was of bipartisan concern. The hypocritical disdain for the market displayed by the Scriblerians was but one product of a public engaged in mass speculation; the crisis of conscience and opportunism within Whiggism was another. To this end, Jones homes in on the friendships between Walters and Singleton in Captain Singleton (1720) and between H.F. and Dr. Heath in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The first he treats masterfully, carefully reading the implications for individual identity, conscience and confessional affiliation drawn out by the vicissitudes of this friendship in the novel. The Journal, however, seems like an afterthought. Heath is an unusual example and does not quite bear out the suggestive links Jones makes between mass hysteria and infection, both of which intimate the dangers of widespread public exchange. One need look no further than the tales of entrepreneurial sociability of Robert the Waterman and the Three Men of Wapping (Defoe 103–11, 117–45) for more nuanced examples of the careful negotiations involved in the sociable exchanges of business, the demands of virtuous friendship, and the health of the body politic.

Jones’s third chapter deals with Lord Hervey and the often unsuccessful attempts of Court Whigs to integrate ideas of virtuous friendship into a “pro-ministerial discourse” (53). The fourth chapter looks back to Pope, considering his Epistle to Bathurst (1733) as an interrogation of Walpole’s behavior in the wake of the South Sea Crisis. (69). The poet who emerges from Jones’s extended and detailed analysis is unmistakeably aware that those opposed to Walpole, himself included, faced just as difficult a task in assimilating private conceptions of virtue to the public identity of the Opposition.

In the final chapter of the first section, Jones turns to the figure of the Patriot Prince (Frederick Prince of Wales), continuing to trace the fraught involvement of a relationship that is at once domestic and the basic constituent of a public sphere. In this chapter, the discourse which works to ameliorate friendship is the mythos of the Patriot Opposition, which Jones furnishes with interesting new readings of little-discussed plays, including Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739), David Mallet’s Mustapha (1739), and James Thomson’s Alfred (1740). The friendships of the Patriot Prince are the subject of scrutiny and yet, as he is rendered, the Prince embodies the private virtues of male companionship. The prospect of Frederick assuming the throne thus throws private virtue and public life into stark relief.

In the second part of the book, Jones brings the complexity and overdetermined nature of friendship established in the first section to bear on fabulistic tropes (mostly Aesopian) and narratives of crime. In doing so, he finds interesting new angles for mostly Scriblerian texts: Pope’s epigrams, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Polly (1729), and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), among others. While Jones’s reading of each work yields new insight, the sum total seems to be that these works struggle to make public what were once, and still, to an extent remained, private concerns. In these texts, intersubjective associations and the virtues they profess or violate are accommodated to the substantive deliberations of the rational public sphere. The potential for public figures to retreat to the privacy of friendship, now an avenue fraught with paradox, is touched on in the book’s all too brief epilogue.

For a work so engaged with the divisions of public and private, and the slippages between them, it must be seen as an oversight that Friendship and Allegiance makes no mention of Michael McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity. Jones’s stated preference for contemporary polemic (3) over humanistic inheritance in understanding eighteenth-century friendship means that while references to Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Senecan conceptions anchor his monograph, large gaps are left between the philosophy of friendship and how it is put into practice. But this is perhaps to judge the work against criteria which are not its own.

All in all, Jones resists teleology, probably wisely, and yet still fashions a coherent account of the complexities of friendship, as concept and trope, that will have widespread interest. With Jones’s principal analytic claim that friendship is more complex than previously assumed, the rigor of his analysis is, in places, too easily substantiated by the ambiguities of the texts themselves. Readers of Friendship and Allegiance will find, with Jones, that friendship hopelessly complicates all the hermeneutic possibilities it advances.

Marc Mierowsky
Queens’ College, University of Cambridge


WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Ed. Cynthia Wall. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 1962. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity P, 1989. Print.

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

Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

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Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James, by Teresa Michals

Reviewed by T. J. Lustig

This lucid, subtle, and stylishly written scholarly monograph belongs to a line of works which includes Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel (1987), and, more recently, Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography (2014). It is informed by recent work in reception studies and book history—work which has complicated our understanding of the history of the European novel, returning us to archival sources, reminding us of the materiality of culture, and challenging teleological conceptions of change.

Since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1960) we have been familiar with the idea that childhood is an “invented,” or historically specific, concept. Studies of children’s literature have burgeoned, but until now less has been said about the other side of the coin: the “invention” of “adulthood” and of a specifically “adult” literature. A literature aimed at younger audiences began to appear in the seventeenth century and had become increasingly prominent by the middle of the eighteenth century. But it was not, in Michals’s view, until the latter part of the nineteenth century that strong claims were made for the existence of a distinctively adult audience for the novel and, more importantly, for the superior value of this literature. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was written for a “mixed” rather than an “age-leveled” audience and it was only in 1761, when it became the first work of fiction to be read by Rousseau’s Émile, that Defoe’s work began to be seen as the foundational children’s classic. Richardson’s Pamela (1740) presents the converse case: it was initially (albeit somewhat ambiguously) directed at a youthful readership and it was only in the nineteenth century that Richardson’s story, in which a twenty-six year old man repeatedly attempts to rape a fifteen year old girl, no longer seemed suitable reading for children.

Michals’s book traces the emergence of a “developmental model” in which the child was seen, not simply as “a person of any numerical age whatsoever in a dependent social status” (66), but as an individual who lacked the criteria which defined adulthood—criteria variously set out in terms of social autonomy, sexual maturity, and economic and/or Lockean rationality. In the work of such writers as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott maturity was a matter of manners and property. Gradually, however, the notion of a “psychologically complex” adult—and, therefore, of an adult reader—began to emerge (95). It was not there in the work of Dickens, one of the last novelists in English to address his work to a mixed-age audience. David Copperfield the boy does not develop into David Copperfield the man like the heroes of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830) or Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–1843). In Michals’s view, David Copperfield is always David Copperfield: his experiences do not change him in any essential respect. It is, as Michals argues, equally difficult to fit the Pip of Great Expectations (1860–1861) into a stadialist model of development: he simply loses the insights of his childhood and finally regains them. And this is not just the case for Dickens’s male protagonists: Michals argues that Dickens’s “Little Mothers” are also exceptions to the stadialist model, precisely because they are “mothers” whatever age they happen to be.

The ways in which novelists were received by future generations were affected by their awareness (or lack of awareness) of differences between the child and the adult, their sense of what activities and experiences defined the life course. Scott’s work later came to be seen as suitable reading for children exclusively—particularly boys. In 1919 Virginia Woolf suggested that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (192). For Michals this judgment offers a telling example of the “cult of adulthood” associated with literary modernism. Notions of complexity and seriousness became key values because they were “adult.” Meanwhile fiction for a mixed-age audience or writing specifically addressed to younger readers was seen as artistically inferior. A narrative of human development became a narrative of literary history: in its earlier stages the novel had been a child; now had it come of age.

The final chapter of Michals’s study argues that modernists like Woolf were anticipated by Henry James, who rejected the idea that the novel should minister to a younger audience and set out to create an adult novel which was non-didactic, intelligent, and, most importantly, had sexual relationships as its main field of interest. Such works as What Maisie Knew (1897), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), “In the Cage” (1898), and The Awkward Age (1898–1899) have children or young adults at their centre, but Michals argues that James’s vision was self-consciously an adult one. He was concerned in these works to think about what adults are—or rather to think about what adults do (in other words to have sexual relationships and to think about these relationships, often in ways which Fielding or Richardson might have found curiously indirect). The focus on James is most welcome, though Michals might perhaps have broadened the perspective to include George Moore, Thomas Hardy, and the “New Woman” novelists of the 1890s, not all of whom would have been happy to identify adulthood with masculinity.

Michals observes in conclusion that nineteenth-century conceptions of adulthood remain “consonant with important assumptions that economics, politics, law, education, medicine, and psychology make about the self” (208). This closing point is quietly made, but for that reason it is all the more thought-provoking. One of the achievements of this book is to make the world of the modern adult as strange as an earlier world in which those whom we would think of as children stood on burning decks, married, were hanged, elected Members of Parliament, and sent to work in factories—all with no sense that anything untoward had taken place.

T. J. Lustig
Keele University

WORKS CITED

Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. 1960. Trans. Robert Baldick. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print.

Schmidt, Michael. The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Print.

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