ORCID: 0000-0002-9981-2740

Abstract: Because pirate tales as a genre are intensely intertextual and counterfictional, it is often befuddling when the historical record will not align with historical fiction. While it is assumed pirates may well have used prosthetic hooks, there is little reason to believe J. M. Barrie’s memorable villain wore a hook as an informed piece of historical continuity. What evidence we have as to the use of hook prostheses connects them to the laboring classes, not the Eton-trained menace of Jas. Hook and his iron appendage, and there is virtually no evidence at all of pirates using hook prosthetics. Rather than attempting to locate the pirate’s hook in historical antecedents among real one-handed adventurers—neglecting the importance of how disability was understood both in Barrie’s time and earlier—the piratical hook is better understood as a loose signifier for the pirate’s social perversity.

Keywords: piracy; prosthetic; Captain Hook; Long John Silver; disability

Introduction

IT WAS PROBABLY J. M. Barrie who made hooks a stock item for murderous pirates. While one-armed sailors had long dotted the cultural seascape, before Captain Hook came along, the hook-wielding pirate was really not a trope. In discourse around pirates in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (that is, the Golden Age of piracy, so called), pirates are often terrifying torturers, and are potentially the defilers of other bodies, but they are only rarely depicted as having been maimed themselves. Descriptions of historical pirates with prosthetics are vanishingly rare. In contrast, by the end of the eighteenth century, prosthetic legs and missing arms became an increasingly common sight due to warfare and the dangers of maritime work, both on the street and in print, at least in London and major port cities. In the nineteenth century, the presence and marginalization of disabled people continued to increase—because of industrial accidents and wars, but also due to improved medical treatments that meant more people could survive grievous wounds. This happened concurrently with a palpable increase in the middle-class anxiety to make bodies outwardly conform to a standard, status-signifying appearance. Barrie’s decision to have his villain eschew a more realistic artificial limb in favor of a weaponized hook was therefore a choice with both aesthetic and, for his audience, moral freight.

Hook, in fact, draws attention to his evilness through his willingness to underscore (sometimes actually by making score marks with) his disability. But the very familiarity of Hook’s choice—discordant as it might once have been—has made it indelible in the piratical cultural imaginary. Or to put it another way, different imaginaries are combined in the figure of the pirate: loss of limb (real) along with the politics (intangible) of what a body should look like in public. Modern readers remember Hook; historians tell us there were maritime amputations, and so arises a collective sense that this is what all pirates had: we grow to “remember” pirates as having hooks. It is not only fiction readers who build and flex these associative sinews, but authors and scholars, too. Pirate lore is founded on a relatively small, dubiously accurate, self-referential groups of texts, and so it is particularly crucial to examine the types of evidence—literary, cultural, documentary—that underpin what feels true about pirates.

A strong feeling of familiarity does not mean assumptions about the correspondence between historical fiction and historical materiality—fantasies about them—are meaningless or careless. Memory studies rose to prominence as a field of academic interest in the later nineteenth-century, which is the same period Stevenson and Barrie wrote their piratical masterpieces. Moreover, interest in the formation of cultural memories—their constructedness, rather than historical roots—in particular has become conspicuous in the field.¹ Works such as Daniel Schacter’s influential Seven Sins of Memory warn us that humans can easily be misled into creating false memories by feelings of familiarity—such as the kind that comes from past stories, dimply recollected in more mature days.² What I propose here is, essentially, that there is a powerful Mandela effect around pirate prostheses.³ Scholars argue that there is even a specifically visual version of the Mandela effect in which people are prone to remember the same specific wrong detail about familiar images.⁴ This resonates well with the piratical case study, in which the iconic pirate, who is usually missing at least one and usually more than one major body part, so readily appears in visual media of all kinds.

This essay unpacks the fictional roots of our cultural beliefs about pirates to show how their constructedness comes not only from history, but from creative forms as well. Because of this, we need to understand popular ideas of pirates in terms of disability: its realities but perhaps more importantly its shifting cultural resonances.

***

We begin not with the question of historical cases of pirate disability, although those will come, but with canonical ones. Connected to Barrie’s reshaping of old nautical tropes into newer piratical clichés is the association between Robert Louis Stevenson and pirate disability. One of the memorable verbal tics of Treasure Island’s clever, one-legged pirate Long John Silver is his oath, “shiver my timbers.” Silver’s shivering timbers are sprinkled liberally throughout the text, along with other nautical markers that assure the reader of the briny nature of the piratical dialog: for example, “Cross me, and you’ll go where many a good man’s gone before you, first and last, these thirty year back—some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes” (148). Treasure Island (1881-2) has been a key source for what readers grow up thinking pirates looked and sounded like for more than a century, but Stevenson is rather a nexus than a source in the sui generis sense. He admitted openly to borrowing some of his pirate color from other writers, such as Washington Irving’s Money Diggers stories (1824), which influenced the scene at the Admiral Benbow Inn; he was also certainly influenced by the pseudonymous General History of the Pyrates (1724-8).5

“Shiver my timbers,” though, is not a literary invention, but instead an ambiguous theatrical trope for pirate talk. Its cloudy history ably demonstrates the multifarious sources for popular culture beliefs around piracy. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the phrase “shiver my timbers” (that is, shatter my ship), was a fictional sailors’ oath invented in Frederick Marryat’s 1834 Jacob Faithful, a yarn about a Thames waterman (e.g., “I won’t thrash you, Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do”). But the phrase, which in context serves the same general purpose as, “I swear,” or “damn it,” was extensively used in song, story, and on the musical stage, for decades before Marryat turned his hand from reefing and steering to fiction. It appears, for example, in C. W. Briscoe’s Clerimont (1786), Mary Robinson’s Angelina (1796), in comic operas like Samuel Arnold’s The Shipwreck (1797), and in periodical pieces, such as “A Conversation between an English Sailor and a French Barber” (1796).

The 1800 image, “A Broken Leg, or, The Carpenter the Best Surgeon” [Figure 1] does really connect the phrase, as with Silver, to a mariner’s amputated leg. The sailor, Jack Junk, is intoxicated, and has fallen and broken his wooden leg; his companions waive off a doctor and instead hail a passing carpenter, explaining, “Jack … has shivered his Timbers—and wee [sic] want a Splice here.” The scene is comic, and notable for the cheerful good humor of its characters (even the woman looking on from the window appears to be gesturing knowingly, either in on the joke, or possibly picking her nose). Importantly, if the tableau mocks the disabled man, still there is no hint that he is sinister, a villain, or at all piratical.⁶ Shivering timbers, then, were a matter for the common mariner amputee, and only very belatedly for a more swashbuckling stereotype. Teresa Michals goes further by arguing that in contrast to the famous fictional pirates like Silver and Hook, up through the Napoleonic era, “the actual amputees who commanded tall ships were not villains. They were national heroes” (1). Michals’s study is of officer amputees, though, and the class status of even pirate captains is inevitably compromised, for a pirate officer may achieve wealth, fame, or notoriety, but cannot be treated as an acceptable member of the higher social classes.

Figure 1. [“A Broken Leg, or, The Carpenter the Best Surgeon,” 24 February 1800, Laurie & Whittle: 53 Fleet Street, London. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.]

It may indeed have been the popularity of Stevenson’s tale that transformed “shiver my timbers” from a comic oath and in-joke of a group of sailors we can see in “A Broken Leg, or, The Carpenter the Best Surgeon” to the indelible utterance of a one-legged buccaneer. But here an odd thing happens: the timbers of Silver’s oath became, in the foggy memory of Stevenson’s reader, the timber replacing his lost leg. Silver explicitly used a crutch in the novel, but is often depicted in prints and film with a different wooden prosthetic: an artificial leg. (The drama Black Sails [2014-17] campily gave him a silver leg that could be used as a bludgeon.)

Perhaps Silver is associated with wooden legs, despite his not wearing one, because he often uses language that was metonymically attached to the practice; memory is constructive this way.⁷ Indeed, Silver’s very dexterity, the combination of his charm and criminality, make it difficult to read his disability.⁸ Stevenson, author of so many travelogues and pirate yarns, understood the vicissitudes and joys of travel with an imperfect body. He was for long periods made an invalid by his experience with tuberculosis; he was directed to travel as a medical treatment at a time when climatotherapy often involved such piratical locales as Malta, Algiers, and the Mediterranean (Frawley 72-76).⁹ Therefore, both the historical record and Stevenson’s own experience underpin the plausibility of Silver’s wooden prosthetic, crutch or otherwise. However, legs whose loss is assisted by a wooden crutch or peg have been documented among maritime workers much earlier than the use of hook hands—and this is why this essay primarily follows Captain Hook’s hook instead of Long John Silver’s prosthesis.

This essay uses as its main case study the hook-using pirate, a figure often treated as historically plausible but for whom, it turns out, the evidence is scanty at best. But it is interested in wider questions as well: Why, when it comes to Golden Age [ca. 1650-1730] pirates, do we feel that things happened without good evidence that they did? How do we transpose ideas from popular media back into educational work and scholarly inquiry? It is no wonder, given the cultural ubiquity of pirate stories, that Anglophone readers grow up believing some things about pirates that are, to put it gently, not well supported by evidence. The histories we have relied on for hundreds of years, chief among them Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates, intermix fact, fiction, and speculation, but stories told and retold from that core set take on a force of their own; their truisms start to exist in the popular imaginary. For example, the basis for claiming that the pirate Mary Read hid her identity as a woman and called herself “Mark” while on board John Rackham’s ship, or that Edward Thatch (Blackbeard) set his beard alight while boarding other ships, is about as compelling as the basis for George Washington cutting down that cherry tree.¹⁰ (In other words: this never happened.)

Documented examples of known pirates who used hooks are hard to come by. It is at least clear that loss of limb was a hazard of regular maritime work, to say nothing of maritime warfare. Not only regular seafarers, but pirates and buccaneers, from Henry Morgan to Bartholomew Roberts, accepted this risk, and even provided for a form of insurance payments for maiming in their articles.¹¹ In the 1935 film Captain Blood, this well-known trope is played for humor, when the pirate Honesty Nuttall shoots his little toe off in a futile attempt to increase his share of booty. Moreover, depictions of one-legged sailors are so common in the eighteenth century that it would seem only logical to assume that there could indeed have been peg-legged pirates stumping the deck here and there; images of one-eyed men are slightly less common but still readily available. The case for progenitors of Captain Hook, though, is dicier. In fact, a “real” Captain Hook is unlikely, or at a minimum, unproven. I suspect that, more often than is readily acknowledged, readers of history who are interested in piracy begin with a picture of Captain Hook as the primary impulse for imagining hook-using pirates, and work backwards from there, rather than the other way around. These two arguments together point to a peculiar property of pirate yarns to become unmoored in both genre and temporality. We tell tales about pirates because we want them to be true.

Here is the Captain Hook contradiction: while it is often assumed as a cultural truism that pirates did use prosthetic hooks, J. M. Barrie’s memorable villain did not wear a hook as a nod to historical continuity. Hook’s hook is improbable either as a late Victorian or a Golden Age accessory; it must be a fictional invention, and not one meant to invoke some kind of gritty realism. As Ryan Sweet points out, prior to Captain Hook, even literary depictions of pirates using hook prosthetics were uncommon (Sweet, “Pirates and Prosthetics” 87-88).¹² The evidence we have as to the use of hook prostheses connects them more to the laboring classes than the aristocratic, Restoration fashion-wearing terror of Jas. Hook and the iron appendage that replaced his organic thieving fingers. [Figure 2] A number of critics have already traced the fictional antecedents that influenced Barrie; Jill P. May helpfully makes clear the attachment of Hook and his band not only to Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, and Stevenson, but also to Gilbert and Sullivan and the musical tradition of comic singing pirates they crowned in 1879 with The Pirates of Penzance (70).¹³ Yet none of these ancestral buccaneers satisfactorily explains Hook’s appearance. My suggestion is that Hook’s hook might be best understood as a loose signifier for Hook’s perversity. Speaking more broadly, it would do us no great harm to be suspicious of whether the foundational pirate fiction writers like Fenimore Cooper, Marryat, Stevenson (all of whom had at least some claim to expertise on the maritime world in general), or Barrie (who has become as influential as the rest) had any particularly deep knowledge about pirate history.

Figure 2. [Detail from a sheet of nine illustrations by Frank Gillett (1874-1927) from the 1905 production of Peter Pan. Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 1400.]

I. Histories of the mariner’s missing hand

“Canonical” historical fiction about pirates does not align with the historical record. This may seem obvious, but the collective attachment to pirate lore overwhelms evidence time and again. (E.g., people persist in hoping to find buried treasure on Gardiner’s Island and Oak Island.¹⁴) It is difficult to find evidence that the hook prosthetic was in wide use among amputees at all, piratical or otherwise, prior to the nineteenth and perhaps the twentieth century. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does make it far from likely that Barrie’s detail about the hook was intended as historical verisimilitude, and it was not a direct literary allusion, either. What was true? This section will provide an introductory primer on the discourse around sailors’ manual amputations and how society did and did not make room for them. Missing limbs were real enough, and considerable thought was devoted as to what to do about them—but early on, the hook prosthesis is mostly absent from that discourse, which focuses on compensation and employment prospects, as well as occasional attempts at creating lifelike prostheses.

The immediate consideration was what was to become of the impaired man and his dependents. A naval sailor who was severely injured by his service could apply for a pension or, after 1705, for a spot in the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich.¹⁵ Civilian companies were often willing to take some steps to care for employees injured on the job, even as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and there were various charitable institutions who undertook to help provide for the impaired as well; those harmed in the course of employment could make a case for belonging to the category of the so-called deserving poor. At the same time, a history of employment and a continued willingness to work were strong prerequisites for receiving such aid, as Haydon and Smith have noted (54-55; 59). They provide the striking example of Thomas Joyce, a clerk in the employ of the British East India Company, who lost a hand when it was “cut off by an Arabian at the siege of Ormuz,” but learned to write with his left hand and petitioned, apparently with some success despite the company’s initial skepticism, for re-employment (60). The main question at the time, then, was less the appearance of any prosthetic, but whether the person could perform specific tasks.

Medical writing about hand prostheses existed but was not of widespread lay interest in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Surgical manuals make clear why amputation might well be necessary as a treatment, and how best to sever bone from bone as needed. On the other hand, these were not particularly hopeful, forward-looking tomes, and they do not address aftercare beyond the initial wound and surgery. The influential Surgeon’s Mate (1617) described the implements of amputation as “very needful instruments to be at hand upon all occasions in the Surgeons Chest,” making clear how vulnerable the mariner’s body was, particularly if he—like a pirate—were at all likely to be shot at (2). Attempting to cure a gunshot wound was likely to lead to permanent aftereffects due to scarring, infection, and, often, amputation, with pain, inflammation, fever, gangrene, and mortification (what the buccaneers called “stiff limbs,” and compensated as they would an amputation); death, too, was far from improbable. Woodall’s Viaticum, Being the Path-Way to the Surgions Chest explained:

No wound of Gun-shott can be said to be a simple wound … [f]or the composition of Gun-shott-wounds are ever reall, and very substantiall, witnesse the poore patient, where Fibres, Nerues, Membrances, Veines, Arteries, et quid non, suffer together, so that such wounds in their recency resemble Vlcers rather then wounds … all the whole member suffereth together, and the parts adjacent in the highest degree. (5)

The reason for amputation might involve other possibilities—a badly broken bone due to accident or battle; uncontrollable infection in a limb; cancer. But violence was depicted as a leading cause.

Traumatically, it was sometimes alleged that the real reason for amputation was over-eager and under-skilled surgeons who amputated rather than attempting more complicated and labor-intensive forms of care; this was, of course, especially likely in a battle environment, or on a ship that might not even possess a qualified surgeon.¹⁶ The Pirate Captain William Phillips was wounded in the leg during battle. A General History of the Pyrates includes a harrowing description of the subsequent treatment: “There was no surgeon aboard, and therefore it was advis’d … that Phillips’s Leg should be cut off, but who should perform the Operation was the Dispute.” They pick the carpenter to do it, “Upon which, he fetch’d up the biggest Saw, and taking the Limb under his Arm, fell to Work, and separated it from the Body of the Patient, in as little Time as he could have cut a Deal Board in two; after this he heated his Ax red hot in the Fire, and cauteriz’d the Wound,” but did so clumsily, badly burning the man’s leg. Improbably, Phillips recovered—and later executed the carpenter-surgeon for an escape attempt.¹⁷ (Phillips’s colorful career ended in 1724, when yet another discontented carpenter led a successful mutiny against him.)

As with the historical Phillips, the fictional Long John Silver did not lose authority with his limb. He was arguably demoted from quartermaster to sea cook because of his disability, but this demotion lasted only until the pirates mutinied against Captain Smollett, whereupon he assumed command. And of course Lord Nelson, who was blinded in one eye and whose right arm was amputated above the elbow because of a musket wound, is the quintessential example of a man who lost an arm but not his status.¹⁸ While the loss of limb could theoretically befall a member of any level of society, though, it was certainly more likely to afflict men in the military and members of the laboring classes, who were more exposed to accidents and less likely to be able to dictate the terms of their treatment. Notably, enslaved Africans were particularly likely to be treated with amputation when other therapies might have been offered to white people in similar circumstances (Boster 45-48, 68-69).

Pirates, sensibly, if we are to take surgeons like Woodall at their word, expected to risk major injuries. Sailors often had to travel without good physicians or surgeons, and pirates were not any more likely than their cousins who sailed legally to have competent medical practitioners with them; they therefore had ample reason to plan for serious injury and the possibility of amputation—and they did, although their insurance payouts varied widely. According to A General History of the Pyrates, which as noted is often fanciful in the details but usually attached to some version of reality in the broad strokes, multiple crews had these kinds of provisions. Captain Bartholomew Roberts’ crew was promised that if “any Man should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionably” (212).¹⁹ Captain Lowther offers a comparatively lower sum, for a pirate that “shall have the Misfortune to lose a Limb, in Time of Engagement, shall have the Sum of one hundred and fifty Pounds Sterling,” but, interestingly, such a man is also promised he may “remain with the Company as long as he shall think fit”—amputation need not amount to loss of employment; Lowther’s group appears to take a more generous stance than the East India Company had, when it needed much convincing to give work to the amputee Thomas Joyce (Defoe, General History 308). But whether the pirate’s continued employment implies prosthesis or any other manner of workplace accommodations is left unclear; no hooks of either silver or iron are invoked.

What is invoked, sometimes, is the value of a hand or other limb in terms of another human’s whole body. Pirates often attacked ships engaged in the transatlantic race chattel slave trade; while the effect of their engagement was occasionally to free enslaved African prisoners, they were not by any means a politically abolitionist group. Pirates calculated the worth of human prisoners, Black and white, based on their capacity to work at sea or their ability to be exchanged for money. Because pirates, like other mariners, were willing to consider captive humans a form of currency, they also entered into a calculus of human value. In this racialized metonymy, exchanges are predicated on both labor needs and identity, loss of limb equated mathematically to loss of freedom. In a well-known example of such exchanges, Henry Morgan’s group regarded the African and Indigenous captives of the Spaniards they were targeting as a fundamental part of their wealth and currency exchange system, so that the mutilation of a European’s body could be translated via a simple formula into so many non-European bondspeople. The Buccaneers of America chillingly records that among Morgan’s articles in the Panama campaign were promises that

for the loss of both Legs, they assigned 1500 pieces of Eight, or 15 Slaves, the Choice being left to the election of the Party. For the loss of both Hands, 1800 pieces of Eight, or 18 Slaves. For one Leg, whether the right or the left, 600 pieces of Eight, or 6 Slaves. For a Hand, as much as for a Leg. And for the loss of any Eye, 100 pieces of Eight, or one Slave. (Exquemelin 9)

Also noteworthy here is the severity of the injuries contemplated, and the apparent valuation whereby hands are worth more than legs, but individual eyes substantially less than either (the possibility of complete blindness is not explicitly addressed). But this shows, of course, only that the limbs might be lost and recompensed, not how the pirate might treat, or feel about, the impairment afterwards.

It is clear, though, that mariners expected to risk being maimed in their line of work, which if anything would make Captain Hook less remarkable, not more; and yet he remains a cultural standout. Further, Hook’s apparent prosperity also contrasts with the historical record of the sailors in what would have been his historical moment, had he really sailed, as Barrie wrote he did, with Blackbeard. Barrie joked that Hook was “the only man of whom Barbecue [Long John Silver] was afraid,” directly connecting him with a legacy of disabled literary pirates (Peter and Wendy 56). The pirates’ planning for disability pay described above outstrips what was available in the merchant service, in an example of what historians Rediker and Linebaugh have characterized as the radical egalitarianism that was characteristic of Golden Age piracy and set it apart from other maritime cultures.²⁰

It also set them apart from land-based cultures, which offered no formal safety net for the poor or disabled. In a notable example, the collection of moral essays extraordinaire known as the Spectator in 1712 published an uncomfortable essay urging Mr. Spectator to “censure” the “scandalous appearance of poor” people in London by homing in on injured mariners as an example of the deserving poor who were failed by their society (166).²¹ This indifference was not universal, though, and some attempted to suggest policy solutions, including insurance conglomerates, or “friendly societies.” In 1745, John Griffin petitioned Parliament on behalf of sailors who were “Maimed, Aged, and Disabled” in the merchant service, arguing that since disabled naval seamen—the example he gives is “a poor Man, who loses his Limbe”—were entitled to pensions, merchant mariners ought to be as well (4).

Griffin wants something that will work as a complement to Greenwich Hospital, which was then a retirement home for mariners supported in part by automatic pay deductions. His petition notes that “by an Act made in the Eighth Year of the Reign of his late Majesty King George the First, For the more effectual suppressing of Piracy, every Seaman on board any Merchant Ship, who is maimed in Fight against any Pirate, is likewise to be admitted into the said Hospital”—but that the hospital lacks the resources actually to permit this (10). His argument, which is plagiarized in part from Daniel Defoe’s An Essay Upon Projects (1697), depends upon the threat of piracy throughout its reasoning; here (as in Defoe’s version), pirates are depicted less as losing hands than as taking them. A guaranteed pension in the case of disability at sea would save “many a good Ship, with many a rich Cargo,” he says. Here is why:

A Merchant Ship coming Home from Abroad, perhaps very rich, meets with a Privateer (not so strong but that she might fight him, and perhaps get off) the Captain calls up his Crew, tells them. Gentlemen, you see how ‘tis; I don’t question but we may clear ourselves of this Caper, if you will stand by me. One of the Crew, as willing to fight as the rest, and as far from being a Coward as the Captain, but endowed with a little more Wit than his Fellows, replies, Noble Captain, we are willing to fight, and don’t question but to beat him off; but here is the Case, If we are taken, we shall be set on Shore, then sent Home, lose perhaps our Cloaths, and a little Pay; but if we fight, and beat the Privateer, perhaps half a score of us may be wounded, and lose our Limbs, and then we and our Families are undone. If you will sign an Obligation to us, that we may not fight for the Ship and go a begging ourselves, we will bring off the Ship, or sink by her Side, otherwise I am not willing to fight for my Part. The Captain cannot do this; so they strike, and the Ship and Cargo is lost; which has often been the Case. (4-5)

It was often complained that merchant sailors hesitated to put up enthusiastic resistance in the face of pirate attacks, for why would a man risk life and limb for a company that was not likely to reward the sacrifice? Griffin’s use of this complaint stands out for just how strongly it emphasizes the risk to limbs over life in particular. Loss of limb meant “undoing.”

Defoe’s Essay upon Projects similarly complained that naval sailors received “Smart Money” (i.e., money for hurting) for disabling wounds while those in the merchant service did not. From 1721-4, threatened by a resurgence of piracy off the West African Coast, the Royal African Company (RAC) actually promised incentive pay—“Three Chests of silver”—to merchant crews who bravely resisted piracy (Minutes; Instructions).²² In addition, the RAC promised, “To every seaman that shall loose his Life in defence of the ship as aforesd thirty pounds, to be payd to his Widdow, Children, Father, Mother or Execrs &c” and “To every seaman that shall lose a Leg or an arm, For either Twenty pounds; for both thirty pounds, and for both legs, or both Arms, thirty pounds” (Royal African Company). One arm or one leg is therefore worth half as much as the entire man. But for the RAC, the incentive pay seems primary—mirroring the pirate or privateer’s pay for prey, they offer pay to avoid becoming prey—and the “smart money” seems secondary to their strategy. Griffin’s petition is strange not only for the way it focuses on lost limbs, but also for its timing. When Defoe wrote in 1697, or when the RAC developed its policies, piracy was a far more present and legitimate threat to trade than when Griffin recycled his rhetoric in 1745. Both authors use a connection between piracy and severed limbs to make a broader economic argument, but Griffin’s anachronistic use testifies to the extent to which pirate violence had already entered the realm of the powerfully figurative. Griffin, perhaps wanting to avoid any imputation of greed or privateerism, centers the fear of disabling injury. There also may be a calculation at work on the power of the idea of the injuring pirate, however figurative here, to fire the imagination.

Also worth considering is that Griffin says “limb” rather than specifying a particular injury, but leg amputations were considerably more common that arm amputations, and the loss of a leg is the more common symbol for nautical misfortune (Ott 14). While Griffin’s plan was to raise the funds for a hospital via subscription, Defoe suggested a payout scheme tagged very specifically to the limb that was lost (and, notably, significantly lower than what our piratical examples above were suggesting): £25 for an eye (£100 for both); £50 for a leg (£80 for both); £80 for the loss of the right hand but only £50 for the loss of the left, and so on (Essay Upon Projects 130). A widow would receive £50—the whole man evidently equivalent, for her purposes, to his right hand.

While lost hands could bear major symbolic significance, they simply do not dominate in the eighteenth-century iconography of disability. In both visual and textual imagery, wooden legs were far more common, often (but not always) functioning as stand-ins for poverty. They were associated with beggars, as in the Spectator—perhaps former war heroes, naval or army, who had sacrificed or been made to sacrifice on behalf of the homeland. They were also a subject for mirth and cruel humor. Simon Dickie writes that, “the man with a wooden leg becomes almost a master trope for testing the limitations of sympathy,” and after all, “many deformities were predictable consequence of labor” (93).²³ Responding to scholarship like Dickie’s, Gabbard and Mintz wonder why the “great age of sensibility” is better known for its derision or hostility than compassion for people with physical impairments and disabilities; their answer, in part, is because sensibility functioned on amelioratist logic, demonstrating the moral virtue of a select few of the able-bodied by allowing them to demonstrate their pity and sympathy (10-13). Sensibility itself was understood as a highly physical matter, arising from the body’s material nerves and their vibrations as much as from the metaphorical heart. Missing limbs, so often the revenants of war wounds or workplace injuries, could potentially testify to a person’s virtue or innate dignity, but this was far from a universal interpretation, and the ableist correlation between moral and physical deformity was an ever-available trope. For all these reasons, the oddly limbed pirate would seem to make perfect sense—and yet there is little evidence of such figures in imaginative works prior to the nineteenth century, and none at all of hook-wearing ones.

II. Disability and the prosthetic hand

This section considers the history of hand prosthetics in more detail, and attempts to offer some context for understanding the hook-using pirate figure in terms of disability. The course of the eighteenth century saw the gradual emergence of disability as a generalized category, as opposed to singular instances of injury or inability, as well as an emerging consensus that disability often could and should be treated medically.²⁴ My emphasis here is on prosthetic hands, which have a long history, but one that refuses to come into focus as sharply as the more ubiquitous artificial leg. Before the industrial accidents of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became a common source of manual loss, warfare and dangerous nautical labor were the primary reasons a person, most often a man, might lose a hand or arm; at least a sporadic interest in functional replacements for these losses seems to have developed early as well.²⁵ John Gagné, for one, has shown that plans for prosthetic hands (and arms) stretch back at least to the 1400s, and moreover were, if hardly omnipresent, at least “eminently feasible” as treatment for amputation (134). Per Gagné, prostheses were usually made by artisans and tradespeople—blacksmiths, carpenters, leatherworkers—which may have made them more accessible down the social ranks than is commonly thought. And indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, as Sue Zemka has shown, artificial limbs were often still “designed and made by artisans, men who … took a craftsman’s approach to the problem.”

Despite the fact that hooks would have been simple and easy to construct from shipboard materials, not to mention just generally more usable than hand-like prostheses, there was considerable interest in the early modern period and eighteenth century in making artificial limbs lifelike and movable, a challenge considerably more daunting in the case of the iron hand than the wooden foot. David Turner cites a 1749 London advertisement in The Scots Magazine for a French surgeon who both amputates all manner of body parts, and sells “wholesale of retale [sic] all sorts of legs, arms, eyes, noses, or teeth, made in the genteelest manner” after the fashion of “persons of rank in France” (qtd. in “Disability and Prosthetics” 301). Ambroise Paré’s (1510-90) account of ingenious clockwork hands made by a locksmith that could bend their fingers is perhaps the best-known example from the early modern period, but it is not isolated. Incidentally, and evocative of Captain Hook, Paré did not write about hooks for hands, but he did write an account of hunting for crocodiles in the River Nile by using strong metal hooks baited with meat (680).²⁶ On the other hand, clockwork hands and lifelike legs with flexible knees or ankles do not appear to have been widely adopted in the early modern period, or at least are not represented that way. Common people, based on what we see in periodicals and engravings, were more likely to use a wooden peg leg. And while images and descriptions of wooden legs abound, there is little proof that the average sailor used any prosthetic hand at all. Surviving hand prostheses, artisanal creations of metal and leather, tend to be hand-shaped, and often to have movable fingers, even when the purpose of such hands was not primarily aesthetic, but instead to restore function to the warrior or tradesman who needed still to work.²⁷ This is a detail that the often fanciful David Jenkins’ Our Flag Means Death (HBO 2022) gets right: the pirate-adjacent character Spanish Jackie (Leslie Jones) sports a jointed, realistic wooden hand that she can use to smoke.

Many who could manage it seem largely to have avoided the inconvenience, and likely the discomfort, of hand prostheses entirely, or at least this is how things are portrayed. The leftwards messenger in the 1790 etching “An Admiral’s Porter” wears an eyepatch and has his missing hand discretely tucked into his chest with the help of a sling, while his companion uses a crutch rather than a peg; the lack of artificial limbs may show their penury, but also it corresponds to their obvious mobility and ability to perform useful work. [Figure 3] Higher up the status ladder, there is no record of the historical Admiral Horatio Nelson using a prosthetic, although Moby Dick’s fictional Captain Boomer, who may well have helped inspire Barrie, has an odd, self-fashioned, mallet-betopped extremity.²⁸ When Jane Eyre’s (1848) Rochester has his left hand amputated, we are told only that, “the left arm, the mutilated one, he kept hidden in his bosom”—there is no suggestion that he uses an assistive technology (… expect perhaps his marriage). While some women did need and use prosthetic limbs, depictions of amputees tend to focus on men, wrapping up the idea of patriotic sacrifice with the masculine body.²⁹ In an unusual example of female amputation, Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s historical romance Hope Leslie (1827), the Pequod woman Magawisca tragically loses her arm fairly early in the narrative; thereafter she usually wears a discrete cloak, but is never depicted using a prosthesis.

Figure 3. [Two disabled veteran sailors, employed by an admiral as messengers, delivering a letter to the servant at the front door of a town-house. Coloured etching after G.M. Woodward, 1790. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).]

One status-conscious amputee of the early nineteenth century, Captain George Derenzy, offered a helpful tip strongly suggesting that prostheses were not at all the rule: “To those who have lost the whole arm it will be found very useful to have a loop of black ribbon fastened into the inside of the coat sleeve near the shoulder on the defective side, and of sufficient length to allow of its being fastened to a button of the waistcoat; by which means the coat will be prevented from falling off at the shoulder.”³⁰ Derenzy’s work notably prioritizes almost every technology he can imagine except the hand or arm prosthesis. His fascinating Enchiridion: Or a Hand for the One-Handed (1822) describes the Captain’s own designs, not for a hook hand or other prosthesis, but instead for a series of devices to make everyday activities easier to do with a single remaining hand, such as nail-filing and eating one’s breakfast egg.³¹ The devices are, significantly, designed to look tidy and to be easy to carry and use, and to promote the user’s comfort, self-care, and independence. My favorite among the list is a rather superior looking spork: a curved utensil that combines the tines of a fork with the blade of a cheese knife for ease of cutting and eating one’s meals. It comes with a stylish carrying case of red Moroccan leather, which is spring-loaded so that it may be opened easily with one hand.³² (The item is an elegant predecessor of the “Nelson fork,” a knife-fork combination popularized after the army presented one to Admiral Nelson.) Derenzy’s assistive technologies, then, were meant to maintain a level of social status by enabling physical function consistent with that status.³³ While a hook might enable a soldier to steady a rifle, or a heavy armored glove prosthetic to grasp a horse’s reins, for some men the important issue was to be able to sit with dignity at table, or to hold a pen.

Captain Hook, markedly, would not be among that group; his prosthetic inventions were a double-cigar holder and a murderously sharpened hook. The case of a man named James Cragie, which was detailed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1793, stands, like Derenzy’s aspirational devices, in strong contrast to the extremely violent uses to which Hook puts his own inventions. The “Character of Gavin Wilson,” essentially an advertisement, describes its subject as an “ingenious artist,” that is, a journeyman bootmaker of Edinburgh who had a sideline in cleverly constructed prosthetic limbs. It includes a letter, reprinted from the Caledonian Mercury, in praise of Wilson’s wares, purportedly from James Cragie, “a person who was unfortunate enough to be deprived of both his hands [they were taken off by an 18-pound cannon ball near Ticonderoga] while serving in the Royal Navy,” but who is now able to write and perform offices of self-care thanks to his leather hands (308-309). Cragie had been pensioned, but said that he still felt he had been “rendered useless to my king, my country, and myself,” until fitted with his leather prostheses (309). The wrists and fingers of his new hands could be bent, thanks to hollow “balls and sockets made of hammered plate brass,” and a screw plate in the palm allowed them to hold knives and forks. Two of the details here stand out: the description of Cragie’s inability to write, restored with hand-like prostheses, is couched in the language of patriotism and national identity: to feel himself British, he must work. But the need to employ a complex, jointed artificial hand, to which utensils are affixed, rather than a simple measure like attaching a hook or other tool directly to his wrist, is not questioned: it is better to have either no hand, or a lifelike hand, than an in-between utilitarian solution.

In a literary example of this principle, Charles Dickens’ Dombey & Son (1846-8) offers us Captain Cuttle, a rumored privateersman with a hook for a right hand. [Figure 4] Cuttle, who “unscrewed his hook at dinner-time, and screwed a knife into its wooden socket instead,” is a kind-hearted and loyal soul, but also decidedly uncouth, often gesticulating and even kissing his hook as though it were a right hand of flesh in a manner the narrator finds mildly off-putting. The utilitarian hook registers as bad, or at a minimum strikingly unpolished, manners.

Figure 4. [Frontispiece to Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens, with illustrations by H. K. Browne (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848). Beinecke Library.]

The non-medical interest in bodily disability was strong and often contradictory, torn between interest and pity. In their foundational study of disability in the long eighteenth century, Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum argue that “in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a ‘defect’ was both a cultural trope and a material condition that indelibly affected people’s lives” (1-2). Prosthetic devices centered around walking are arguably more ambiguous, or perhaps multipurpose, than arm prostheses. The cane or walking stick (or for a lady perhaps a parasol), for example, could indicate fashion or wealth, or be used as a means of self-defense, as well as serving as a mobility aid (Bourrier 49). Even as the technological possibilities for light and useful prosthetic legs increased over time, the cheap and reliable peg leg remained commonly visible (Bourrier 51). Moveable metal prostheses in the eighteenth century and earlier could be noisy. According to Stephen Mihm, “amputees often carried an oil can with them”—another reason to prefer a peg or crutch (284). Walking aids are generally not treated as incongruous or arresting, not compared to the jarring sight of a hook for a hand in literary and visual representations.

The language in Cragie’s testimonial, then, points to a developing difference between the early modern and eighteenth-century understanding of impairment, and that of the nineteenth century. Over time, the appearance of the prosthetic came to matter more and more; its function was to restore image and symmetry as well as movement. In the eighteenth century, argues David Turner, the medical community saw an amputee as possessed of a “deformed” body, and “a deformed body was necessarily an unhealthy one” (Turner, “Disability and Prosthetics,” 303). Because of a pervasive eighteenth-century culture of exercise, anyone whose impairments made exercise difficult “were thus seen as naturally unhealthy,” and so restoring movement and encouraging muscle use were key medical tenets, which explains both the utilitarian concern with prostheses that we have seen, and perhaps also the relative lack of interest in hand prostheses versus legs—and the preference for realistic, less functional hand prosthetics versus functional hooks in the cases where an artificial hand was preferred to a sleeve discretely tucked into a pocket or bosom (Turner, “Mobility Impairment” 43).³⁴ During the period most associated with piracy (the so-called Golden Age), there seems to be almost no discourse around hook-handed men or mariners, and so we must look further forward for the origins of that image. In the nineteenth century, visible disability was more explicitly depicted as incompatible with bourgeoise propriety and higher social status. The action that Hook takes, to make his disability both his calling card and a useful weapon, is almost comically defiant to this mode of propriety.

III. Captain Hook

It seems eminently likely that rather than Hook’s hook being inspired by the historical pirates of the Caribbean, the common belief in hook-handed pirates was inspired by Hook. While no pirate historian to date has published evidence of the widespread use of a hook prosthetics among pirates, the possibility is at least plausible. While amputated arms were less common than legs, these were far from unheard of in sea life. For example, the pirate and Madagascar enslaver Captain Condent/Condon, was missing one hand (or arm, depending on the source), but there are no known references to his having used a hook prosthetic.³⁵ The question is less the missing limb, then, but whether pirates used particular prosthetic limbs to replace them. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was true that the artificial arm ending in a hook was a cheap and practical possibility for a soldier whose arm had been lost to war (Kirkup, 160-161). But whether hooks—as opposed to either more handlike prosthetics, or simply a stump tucked into a shirt or sleeve—were very common earlier on is unclear at best. As there are no widely known depictions of Golden Age pirates using hooks in either history or fiction, it seems unlikely that the origin of the common belief in such figures comes to us from the archives, instead of from Barrie.

First appearing in J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan, Hook was famously a late addition during the composition of the drama, which had not originally featured a clearly demarcated villain at all. Barrie’s novelization of Peter Pan, the 1911 Peter and Wendy, describes him pointedly as regal, cowardly, and beclawed:

A man of indomitable courage, it was said of him that the only thing he shied at was the sight of his own blood, which was thick and of an unusual colour. In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of Charles II, having heard it said in some earlier period of his career that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts; and in his mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw. (67)³⁶

In other words, Hook’s hook is a major and material part of his character, flagged from the start as iconic, and in provocative contrast with his vaguely regal bearing. Barrie’s ableist conflation between Hook’s evil and his disability was a common shorthand within the context of the Victorian stage, although the banality of this prejudiced trope makes it no more acceptable than his unbearably racist depictions of Native characters elsewhere in the play, though these, too, were common in contemporary representations. Even so, Hook has not primarily been read through the lens of disability studies; instead, we have an enduring tug-of-war between symbolic and historicist interpretations.³⁷ Many readings of Hook and the hook have been proposed—perhaps most often variations on the Oedipal theme, wherein the hook is a prominent but ultimately failed phallus—but there is also considerable investment in trying to identify potential literary-historical antecedents for the character (besides Charles II, whom Barrie himself invokes). None of the proposed pirate ancestors, though, offers obvious or indelible proof of a pirate with a hook prosthetic.

Historical figures who have been proposed as Hook’s inspirations include James Cook, the “pirate” called “Barbarossa,” Christopher Newport, and even the terrestrial soldier Henri de Tonti.³⁸ The first two we may dispense with quickly. Captain Cook, a famous explorer, was in full possession of both of his hands up until the day he was dismembered in 1779, although undeniably he was a famous mariner, and the names do rhyme. Oruç Reïs was a famous corsair of the western Mediterranean whom the Europeans called Barbarossa; a story told of him was that in 1512 he lost an arm to the Spanish, and thereafter wore a silver cap or prosthetic—but no mention is ever made of him using a hook.

Newport is a more tempting potential referent. The Elizabethan privateer and Virginian colonist apparently lost an arm in battle: as captain of the Little John in 1590, his “right arm [was] strooken off” near Cuba while he was (unsuccessfully) trying to take a pair of Spanish galleons from Mexico (White 321). Newport is sometimes depicted as having replaced his arm with a hook—so much so that when a statue was unveiled of him at Christopher Newport University depicting the captain with both arms, it provoked a minor scandal (Dougherty). Moreover, the one thing we can be sure about with respect to Newport is that he continued actively privateering for most of twenty years; he was another of our rare one-armed active captains. More tantalizing still, in 1605, Newport gifted a live pair of crocodiles from Hispaniola to King James (Ransome). Hook, Captain, and crocodile are all here united tidily in a single historical figure, even if he did serve the wrong Stuart for Barrie’s Charles II-favoring creation. However, there seems to be no contemporary source verifying that choice of prosthesis for Newport; indeed, our only contemporary witness to his loss of limb, John White, doesn’t mention how much of the arm he lost or whether he used any prosthetic technology at all. I have not been able to find any source suggesting Newport wore a silver hook that predates Barrie’s play. Likely, then, the assumption that Newport wore a hook follows from Captain Hook, rather than Hook’s hook from him.

The belief in Newport’s hook may also be linked to another possible Hook inspiration, Henri de Tonti. Tonti was a French military officer native to Sicily, and, like Newport, a North American colonialist. In 1674, fighting in the Messina Revolt, he lost his right hand to an explosion. Thereafter he seems to have worn a metal prosthesis covered by a glove. His portrait by Nicolaes Maes is a rare example of a seventeenth-century man shown wearing a prosthetic limb—in a hand shape, or perhaps it is hook-like; it is unclear. [Figure 5³⁹ It was more common for portraits to idealize their subjects than to immortalize scars or impairments; Maes seems to split the difference. There was, provokingly, some avid interest in de Tonti around the time of Peter Pan’s composition. A 1903 romance by William R. A. Wilson, A Rose of Normandy prominently featured an iron-handed Tonti hectoring Native North Americans, but he is actually the dreamy heroic lead, rather than a villain. Edward Sims van Zile’s With Sword and Crucifix includes a proud and satirical de Tonti, much more Byronic in character, but his iron hand is not referenced the way it is in the other fiction. In other words, de Tonti is one among several adventurers whose parallels to Hook include one-handedness—one who was even prominent in contemporary popular fiction—but who was not, in the end, clearly associated with the use of a hook prosthetic.

Figure 5. [Nicolaes Maes, Henri de Tonti, History Museum of Mobile. Image file on Wikimedia Commons.]

What reasons besides history may Barrie have had for assigning his villain a severed hand and iron claw? (What, in other words, made the story’s hook such a hook?) The material prosthesis works as a metaphor, well enough that it need not even require the hook to have been real at all, although I believe readers tend to want it to have been. If historically severed legs were more common than dismembered hands, still there are metaphorical reasons Barrie might have preferred the latter, and not only because when it came to missing legs, Stevenson had beaten him to the punch. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the hand has a particular freight in nautical parlance, as the hand is so strongly synecdochal for the man that we have accepted the expression “all hands on deck” as a matter of course since at least the early eighteenth century. In 1719, Robinson Crusoe, musing upon his lack of labor partners to fit out a vessel, remarked pointedly, “If I had had hands to have refitted her, and to have launched her into the water, the boat would have done well enough,” later wondering whether he could make a canoe, “even without tools, or, as I might say, without hands” (149).⁴⁰ Hand, man, and tool are inseparable within the linguistic hydrarchy; it is no great stretch to literalize this just a little bit further in the figure of Hook.

Hook’s particular realm of villainy—piracy—makes this metaphorical melding especially likely. From around 1820 or so, and at least for the next several decades, “thieving hooks” was a synonym for fingers (“hooks,” as short for “thieving hooks,” could also mean fingers), and “thieving hook,” in the singular, for hand. For example, a lurid 1838 magazine pirate yarn offers this phrasing to the lucky reader: “he claps his thieving hook upon my shoulder in going aloft, and shoves me under” (“Pirate Craft” 888). “Hook” could be a euphemism for a pickpocket as well, presumably synecdochcally for the use of those same thieving fingers. Moreover—and I suggest this context as complementary, not as an alternative to the metaphor just discussed—the theatrical and later the film medium in which Captain Hook was developed as a character is significant. Not coincidentally, nineteenth-century melodrama was markedly friendly to pirate tales (Burwick and Powell 33-57). Melodrama deployed a stylistic system in which its characters’ “moral states [could] be seen in their bodies and heard in the tenor of their words,” using physical expression to provoke physical emotion: emotion and morality both by the body and of the body (Holmes 16-17). Melodrama was thus unsurprisingly prone to use “physical monstrosity,” a la Richard III, as a cue for delineating the villain; early film picked up that tradition as well (Mitchell and Snyder 97).⁴¹ Furthermore, from a costuming point of view, a missing hand or hook prosthetic is far easier and probably more comfortable to depict than a missing leg.⁴² The particularly Victorian flavor of conflating physical disability with moral monstrosity can be seen in the total physical contrast between Hook—older, suffering, marked—with Pan, a symbol of youth and vitality who eerily flashes his perfect white baby teeth when he smiles.

Besides, to locate monstrosity or alienation in the hand was arguably a strongly Victorian choice. In her study of severed and disembodied hands, Katherine Rowe argues that in the Western tradition, “the hand is the preeminent bodily metaphor for human action,” Aristotle’s instrument of instruments–that is, “manual activity” is symbolically linked to human agency (x, xii).⁴³ See, for example, the importance of manual gesture to acting, particularly on the pantomime and melodramatic stages. Rowe also argues that the Gothic writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pays unusual attention to disembodied hands, including Hand of Glory stories (about the special powers of the hands of executed criminals), which became popular a century and more earlier (112, 120).⁴⁴ There is, following Rowe, a strong line between the severed hand and the uncanny, one that resonated strongly in the cultural moment of Peter Pan’s composition. And so, there are a great many reasons, cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic, that might have suggested to Barrie his villain’s memorable prosthetic.

I do not engage in this manual digression to discount the material possibility out of hand (if you will). It is very likely that Barrie had encountered men using hooks in his own lifetime, and, as we do today, simply extrapolated backwards: such things are, and so such things may have been. The earliest surviving metal hand prostheses seem to date from around 1450; their number has only increased since that point, although these very old prostheses are not hooks, but instead hand-shaped.⁴⁵ (Perhaps hooks were less used, or perhaps they were less likely to be preserved; perhaps both; we don’t know.) By the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly after the American Civil War (as well as the Crimean War, for British populations), the use and variety of prostheses available to the public had expanded considerably compared to the previous centuries (Turner, “Disability and Prosthetics” 301). This is because they were needed. While musket balls always had the potential to cause catastrophic injury to human limbs, the firearms used in the Civil War, deploying hollow “Minié balls,” were particularly likely to destroy bones upon impact, and created messy, dangerous wounds; overburdened field doctors practiced amputation widely. Thanks in part to the nascent but increasing use of antisepsis, their patients were more prone to survive than previously (Mihm 282-3). Moreover, Michals argues that in the eighteenth century, naval amputees may have been more likely to live through and recover from the operation than similarly afflicted civilians (Michals, “Lame Captains” 16-17). All of this together added up to an explosion in the number and variety of prosthetic limbs manufactured and worn by both Americans and Europeans; hooks were just one among several options, but were among the cheapest and most utilitarian.

But this fact points us to something curiously out of place about Hook’s iron claw, if we wish to consider it a nod to Barrie’s own moment rather than to the Golden Age of Piracy. By the last third of the nineteenth century, prosthetic limbs, once heavy concoctions of wood, metal, and bone, but now composed of lighter materials and able to make use of innovations such as vulcanized rubber, could look and move more like organic body parts than in earlier times. In a brutal irony, the rubber extraction forced upon Congolese people that enabled advances in European’s artificial limbs was infamously associated with the severed hands of people murdered in the pursuit of rubber quotas.⁴⁶ It is provocative, then, that Barrie reached for a simple hook prosthetic in imagining his iconic pirate. Conceivably, the difference between the hook and the more genteel prosthetic hands that would have been available to Barrie’s contemporaries (or, in contrast, the precious and beguiling silver arm said to have been used by the corsair of legend, Barbarossa) has less to do with history than an issue with decorum.

The fin de siècle was, overall, more obsessed with seeking a link between the body’s outward appearance and inward morals than many previous cultural moments had been, and was less forgiving of amputees in the middle classes and above who did not try to hide their impairments politely from the public gaze (Mihm 288-289). As Ryan Sweet argues, there was a powerful “social preference for physical wholeness: a predilection culminating from several factors, including the rise of bodily statistics, the vogue for physiognomy, and changing models of work,” so that the loss of a limb, or an eye, or even hair or teeth were stigmatized similarly (Prosthetic Body Parts 4). To choose function over form in that prosthetic is to misalign an important aspect of Hook’s appearance with his aristocratic aura, at least by nineteenth-century standards, and quite probably by earlier ones as well. Hook is a careful dresser with aristocratic taste, but he is unquestionably open about who he is, and the hook, however deplorably, marks him as a villain even more emphatically for Barrie’s first audiences than for ours.

This brings us back to the question: following the “thieving hook” resonance, was Hook’s hook only ever a stage metaphor? Had he no human forbearers at all?

Not among real pirates, no. Hook can at least in part be understood as a literary composite, owing something to Robert Louis Stevenson’s one-legged but nimble and magnetic Long John Silver, even as he stands simultaneously as the temperamental opposite to Dickens’ kindly Captain Cuttle. Another possibility, discussed above, might be that he was inspired by the foil to Melville’s peglegged Ahab, Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby. Both Rowe and Peter Boxall posit that there is a marked increase during the nineteenth century in fictions of the “dead hand”—hands that are really or metaphorically disembodied, cut off from the material wholeness of the body. Boomer’s example is, then, an apropos part of this pattern. His arm had been amputated after being wounded in an encounter with the White Whale, and, when Ahab encounters him, he boasts, “a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet”—an interesting implement designed by himself, and whose purpose is unclear.⁴⁷ (While the ship’s surgeon claims he uses it to bash in his colleagues’ heads, this is clearly said in jest.) But if the prosthetics in Moby Dick are “the coming together of the living hand with the dead, of the living limb with the whalebone aesthetic,” as Boxall would have it, then Hook’s prosthetic is, like the ship flying a jolly roger, the coming together of the living and death itself (Boxall 18). Small wonder, then, that we often look to dead men in search of whatever germinated him.

The recurrent postwar increases in the use of real hook prostheses after the U.S. Civil War, and again post WW I, must have helped to amplify the sea change in hook iconography marked by Captain Hook, but this is not a complete explanation of Hook’s influence. Hooks were not popular in visual media and visual culture until after Captain Hook, and the hook he brandishes is a solution to a missing hand, but also a solution that conveys that he is a villain, and moreover a villain in the realm of children’s literature; the imaginative leap from disabled mariner to Disney fodder is massive.

It is possible that Hook’s hook—and the hook-wearing pirate in general—has a basis in historical reality, but that possibility is not well supported by the historical record. Turning to the historicist possibility prior to the culturally informed theoretical ones is an easy answer that downplays the role of fiction and stage—the literary—in creating common knowledge. It also downplays the ableism of writing that thrills in the association between prosthesis and evil. The modern image of the pirate would seem to lend itself naturally to a disability studies lens—often more prosthetic than organic, the pirate in popular culture is frequently missing at least one hand, one eye, and often at least one leg as well. Straining credulity (see LEGO’s Metal Beard the Pirate, who is merely a head atop a fantastical prosthetic creation, for an extreme example), the prosthetic possibilities have become half the imaginative fun, an end in and of themselves. But a disabilities approach to understanding pirates and their limbs is not common; instead, a loose historicism offers to explain the pirate prosthesis as realistic, and too often, it stops there. Hook’s hook suggests one angle for understanding the relationship between piracy and disability, piracy and prosthesis. It is also a powerful example of how what feels familiar can be mistaken for what feels true.

Notes

¹ See for example Erll and Nünning; Assmann and Shortt; and Ben-Amos and Weissberg.

² “A strong sense of general familiarity, together with an absence of specific recollections, adds up to a lethal recipe for misattribution” (Schacter, Seven Sins 97). See also Schacter, “Adaptive Constructive Processes.”

³ The Mandela effect is the phenomenon whereby people share specific false memories about major cultural phenomena: e.g., that Nelson Mandela died in prison. The phenomenon was named by Fiona Broome, a paranormal researcher, in “Nelson Mandela Died in Prison? The Mandela Effect” in a blog post in 2010, and is sometimes taken as proof of alternate universes, rather as déjà vu is taken by some as evidence for past lives. On the other hand, psychologists are far more likely to suggest the Mandela effect is evidence of the constructive nature of memory.

⁴ As Prasad and Bainbridge explain, “a proportion of what dictates memory performance is intrinsic to the stimulus and independent of individual experience” (1972).

⁵ The General History of the Pyrates was attributed to Defoe in John Robert Moore’s Defoe in the Pillory and Other Studies (1939); that attribution is rejected by Furbank and Owens’s The Canonization of Daniel Defoe (1988) and Defoe De-Attributions (1994), as well as by the present author. Although some substitute authorial candidates have been suggested—in particular, Nathaniel Mist—no definitive identity for the text’s author has yet been established.

⁶ For further discussion of jokes about “healing” wooden legs, which was apparently a long-running phenomenon, see Van Horn 381.

⁷ On this point see Sweet 88-89.

⁸ Talia Schaffer has argued that a Victorian heroine might understand a lover’s disability as a way to form a judgment of his social character before agreeing to partner with and help care for him (160-61). Are we, though, to imagine such a virtuous relationship between Long John Silver and his unnamed Black wife and confidant?

⁹ Stevenson was also, interestingly, sent to try the effects of cold mountain air as well as warm sea breezes.

¹⁰ The origin of the claim that Read passed as a man on board ship, which is contradicted by court testimony in her trial, can be found in The General History of the Pyrates, and is credulously repeated by dozens of subsequent accounts. The “Mark Read” pseudonym originates in John Carlova’s 1964 novel, Mistress of the Seas. On the curious permeation of known fictions into modern historical scholarship on Mary Read and Anne Bonny, see Rennie 265-9. The Cherry Tree Myth was the invention of one of Washington’s first biographers, Mason Locke Weems.

¹¹ On pirate welfare, see also Rediker, Villains of All Nations 73-74; Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic 69-70; and Leeson, Invisible Hook 71-74.

¹² Sweet’s chapter is particularly useful as one of the only extended readings to treat pirate prostheses as narrative prostheses.

¹³ On Barrie’s literary influences, see also Friedman, Second Star; Stirling; and Green.

¹⁴ Both locations are erroneously attached to stories about Captain Kidd’s treasure, as are numerous other islands and enclaves.

¹⁵Unfortunately, pensions were underfunded and not always easy to secure. Chronic wounds or ulcers that would not heal, for example, were not usually enough to secure a man a pension; amputation, providing its cause was documented, might be (Nielsenm196).

¹⁶ Turner, “Disability and Prosthetics” 305.

¹⁷ Defoe, A General History 344-5.

¹⁸ Teresa Michals shows that in effect, Nelson (and officers who follow his example) is the exception that proves the rule: while “amputation was widely represented in the eighteenth century, Nelson’s portraits are unusual” because they unabashedly pair amputation with admirable military masculinity. “Invisible Amputation” 17; see also Lame Captains 128.

¹⁹ Note that “dollar” here is a reference to the Spanish dollar, aka a “piece of eight,” minted at about one ounce of silver per coin. This made them theoretically equal to a British pound sterling, except that the exchange rate in Britain artificially favored their own currency, which partly explains the difference between Morgan’s and Lowther’s rates.

²⁰ Linebaugh and Rediker argue that the maritime world is organized “from below” by sailors in “motley crews”—and that pirates go a great deal farther in terms of organized resistance than other mariners (Many-Headed Hydra 156-67).

²¹ The gist of the essay (number 430) is a request that Mr. Spectator instruct the public on how to tell true beggars from undeserving ones, largely by distinguishing those who are physically impaired from those who sham impairment to generate sympathy. The fear of being taken in by the beggar who falsified their impairments was a perpetual bugbear of the middling classes well through the nineteenth century as well.

²² My profound gratitude to David Wilson for directing me to the RAC Minutes cited here and below, and for sharing his transcriptions. For context on the RAC’s position, see Wilson, Suppressing Piracy 161-2.

²³ Ross Carroll makes the point that at least some social philosophers—Shaftesbury and James Beattie are named—regarded laughing at physical disability as appalling (28, 143).

²⁴ C.f. Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England 3-5.

²⁵ There were two main causes for the normalization of seeing male amputees in the latter portion of the nineteenth century: industrialization, which caused industrial work accidents, and war, particularly the U.S. Civil War, meant that more male laborers than ever were losing limbs (Bourrier 44).

²⁶ Benerson Little has proposed a similar crocodile-hunting scene from Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America as a likely inspiration for Barrie’s Captain Hook, but the combination of crocodile with extensive descriptions of artificial limbs in Paré’s oeuvre is suggestive, even if only a coincidence.

²⁷ Indeed, following Turner and Withey, it was not until well into the eighteenth century that using medical technologies only to improve the body’s aesthetics came to be seen more commonly as a virtue rather than treated with suspicion (“Technologies of the Body” 780).

²⁸ Nelson is sometimes depicted with a hook—James Gilray’s 1798 “Extirpation of the Plagues of Eqypt” is a well-known example—but such examples are better understood as caricature than realism. See Michals, “Invisible Amputation” 24-25.

²⁹ Turner argues that prosthetics are a deeply gendered issue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (at least potentially positive for men; never so for women); Gagné that they were a strongly masculine matter in the early modern period.

³⁰ Derenzy, Enchiridion 53.

³¹ For an extended discussion of the Enchiridion and its authors status and masculinity, see Daen 93-113.

³² This was one of the dearest implements in Derenzy’s catalog, retailing for 1 pound 1 shilling. The case was 4 shillings extra.

³³ On Derenzy and class/gender, see also Daen 105-106.

³⁴ As Teresa Michals notes, the hand tucked into a waistcoat (think of Napoleon) was a common pose for genteel masculine portraiture regardless of handedness, and so can function as a way to elide the visibility of amputation even when it’s being shown (“Invisible Amputation” 31).

³⁵ His first name is often given as Christopher, but there are many variants, including Edward. Baylus Brooks puzzles over how the first name “Christopher” became attached to this man at all, since it occurs in none of his eighteenth-century sources (192-94). Possibly there was some twentieth-century confusion between the one-armed Christopher Newport and the one-handed Congdon.

³⁶ I have incorporated the prose description of Hook, as it may be more familiar to the reader, but the original stage direction uses very similar language: “Cruelest jewel in that dark setting is HOOK himself, cadaverous and blackavised, his hair dressed in long curls which look like black candles about to melt, his eyes blue as the forget-me-not and of a profound insensibility, save when he claws, at which time a red spot appears in them. He has an iron hook instead of a right hand, and it is with this he claws. […] A man of indomitable courage, the only thing at which he flinches is the sight of his own blood, which is thick and of an unusual colour. At his public school they said of him that he ‘bled yellow.’ In dress he apes the dandiacal associated with Charles II., having heard it said in an earlier period of his career that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts. A holder of his own contrivance is in his mouth enabling him to smoke two cigars at once. Those, however, who have seen him in the flesh, which is an inadequate term for his earthly tenement, agree that the grimmest part of him is his iron claw” (Barrie, Plays 40).

³⁷ Ryan Sweet is an exception here; see also note 10. Hook is often cited, glancingly, as a well-known example of disability in film or in children’s literature, but interpretive readings of Peter Pan concerned with Hook have not traditionally unpacked him as an example of negative portrayal of disability. See, for example, Margolis and Shapiro 18-22; Dowker; or Rubin and Watson 60-67.

³⁸ See, for example, Lester D. Friedman, “Hooked on Pan” 193-4; and Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera, “True Identity” 70-74.

³⁹ This image was in private collection until the 1930s; Barrie probably could not have seen it.

⁴⁰ On Crusoe, see also Boxall 86-99.

⁴¹ Mitchell and Snyder specifically name Captain Hook as an example of the character type they call a “disabled avenger” (99).

⁴² The theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-48), entitled Dombey and Son, or, Good Mrs. Brown, the Child Stealer, depicted Captain Cuttle with a hook prosthesis, at least according to the illustrations in Penny Pictorial Play no. 4.

⁴³ See also the Introduction to Peter Capuano and Sue Zemka’s Victorian Hands.

⁴⁴ On “the hand of death, see also Stainthorp 11-13.

⁴⁵ “From the century or so between 1450 and 1600 about thirty iron hands/arms survive, almost equally balanced between right and left” (Gagné 142). These were not, according to Gagné, relegated to the chivalric class, but were available to craftspeople and artisans, too (the labor pool who would have had the skills to make them) (143).

⁴⁶ On hands, race, and rubber extraction, see Briefel 129-150.

⁴⁷ David Park Williams, although he is more attached to a comparison between Hook and Ahab, still puzzlingly suggests that “from mallet to claw hammer to iron claw is no great stretch of the imagination” (486).

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Abstract: This paper is a reply to an article written by Irving N. Rothman, Rakesh Verma, Thomas M. Woodell, and Blake Whitaker—“Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis” (2017). That study claimed to support the consensus of traditional attribution studies that Madagascar; or, Robert Drury’s Journal (1729) is a collaborative work to which Defoe contributed. This paper points out the many flaws of the Rothman group’s attribution study—flaws not only in the non-traditional authorship attribution experimental plan but also in the eighteenth-century literary and editorial production aspects of their paper. Rothman et al.’s work was based on Stieg Hargevik’s non-traditional authorship study of Memoirs of an English Officer which in turn was based on Alver Ellegård’s non-traditional authorship work on the Junius Letters. This paper also explicates the errors carried over by the Rothman group from the Hargevik and Ellegård studies. The conclusion of this paper is that the Rothman group’s results are not valid.

Keywords: Defoe, Authorship Attribution, Statistics, Stylistics, Accountability

And even if some studies have proved faulty, the vigorous discussion of their shortcomings is a resource for those who follow. (Craig 287)

IN APRIL 2017, I was asked by The Scriblerian to review an article titled, “Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis” written by Irving N. Rothman, Rakesh Verma, Thomas M. Woodell, and Blake Whitaker and published in the Festschrift for Jim Springer Bork, An Expanding Universe. The article is in the area of my ongoing studies—non-traditional authorship attribution (non-traditional meaning making use of statistics, and stylistics).¹ The review was published in 2018 (“Review”). I concluded the review by recommending that a proper “ripost” to the Rothman et al. study be undertaken.² The more time that went by without a ripost, the more I felt that I myself should take on this necessary but personally unpleasant task, since their article has the potential to misguide scholars and researchers not knowledgeable in the nuances or even the basics of non-traditional authorship studies. This task was made more complicated by the death in 2019 of the principal investigator, Irving N. Rothman. Rothman was a pre-eminent scholar and writer—especially knowledgeable and widely published in the area of eighteenth-century literature and all things Daniel Defoe. I had started to correspond with Rothman about their paper but had to shift the correspondence to Rakesh Verma who graciously, promptly, and completely answered my questions. I would ask the reader to bear in mind while reading the following article that Irving Rothman is not able to defend his experimental plan. ³

I. Overview

When I have had to criticize particular methods or scholars it has not been without respect for the courage with which they have addressed themselves to significant problems in a collective enterprise in which failure has often been as instructive as success. (Love 13)

The task will be approached with such modesty as we can muster, for nothing is more instructive in surveying the errors of others than the salubrious suspicion that we ourselves are likewise fallible. (Ashley 8)

As the title of the Rothman et al. article indicates, they attempted to establish what contributions Defoe may have made to Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal (1729). The first third of the article presented a thoroughly researched and well written overview of the traditional authorship attribution studies that look at Defoe’s involvement with the production of the Journal. The Rothman group reported that the consensus of these studies is that the Journal is a collaboration. They also reported that their stylistic study comes to the same conclusion—the Journal is a collaboration, with sections attributable to Defoe. Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the literature as to what type of collaboration it is, who the collaborators were, or what parts are collaborative.⁴ This first third of their paper provides much needed background for what followed in their article—a non-traditional authorship attribution study of the Journal using Stieg Hargevik’s experimental design and techniques based on his 1972 dissertation. Rothman’s multi-disciplinary group at the University of Houston consisted of an eighteenth-century literary scholar and Defoe specialist, Rothman; a computer scientist, Verma; a linguist, Woodell; and a graduate student in the English Department, Whitaker. The Rothman group’s article and the Hargevik book are difficult reads, both because of their technical aspects and their many errors. Appendix A of this paper looks at what may be considered incidental errors—errors introduced or not detected in the production process by the authors, the reviewers, or the copy editors. Some of these errors have the potential to undermine the correct creation of the various corpora used in the Rothman group’s experiment.

What follows is a discussion of several problems that bring into question the validity of the entire study. Problems of omission and commission are explicated, and this includes the carrying over of the Hargevik errors.

II. Synopsis of the Hargevik Techniques

So even if my shortcomings are many and my method is unacceptable to some readers, I think it is high time this nest was stirred. (Hargevik I, 2)

Stieg Hargevik set out to determine if Daniel Defoe was the author of the 1728 tract The Memoirs of an English Officer. Hargevik’s study was influenced by Alvar Ellegård’s 1962 work, A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship: The Junius Letters. Without going into great detail, the following (distilled from Hargevik 21-32) makes up the Hargevik experimental plan:

1. Select and gather the Defoe Corpus: A one-million-word sample using first editions if possible. (Corpus o
2. Select and gather the non-Defoe control corpus: A one-million-word sample of writings not by Defoe, using first editions if possible. (Corpus two)
3. Obtain Memoirs of an English Officer with a text length of about 75,252 words. (Corpus three)
4. Compile Defoe’s favored words and phrases. (From corpus one)
5. Compile rare Defoe words and phrases. (From corpus one)
6. Search for and list all favored and rare items. (In the three corpora)
7. Analyze the data and determine if the Memoirs is by Defoe.

It is interesting (and telling) to note that aside from some earlier Rothman work (Rothman, “Stylometric Study” and “Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized”) and the current work by the Rothman group, the only other non-traditional authorship attribution study using the Hargevik criteria was done by Richard Newsome on the continuation of Roxana.⁵ Newsome found the method wanting:

But in attempting to replicate them [Hargevik’s results] I find that they do not provide an answer to the question of whether an unsigned work was written by Defoe or not. (5)

The results of (4) and (5) of the Hargevik experimental plan make up the bulk of the 709 basic words and phrases (and permutations) that he determined to be unique to Defoe’s style. Hargevik carried out this phase of the study in three ways: (1) he compiled all words that begin with the letter i and the prefixes dis- and ex- (because he reasoned that these words are rare in Anglo-Saxon vocabulary); (2) he gathered marker words that other stylistic studies used (e.g., those of Ellegård and of Mosteller and Wallace); (3) however, Hargevik compiled the bulk of his stylistic markers by carefully reading the two million words in his corpora in the hope of finding items that Defoe liked and disliked to use (Hargevik 31-32). Hargevik told us that “[a]fter memorizing the preliminary testing list … I re-read all the 267 text portions forming the two million [word]-samples, recording as carefully as possible the occurrences of the different items in the testing list” (36). This “testing list” consisted of 709 items and their permutations each of which could be either (1) individual words, (2) whole phrases, (3) collocations, (4) orthographical oddities in spelling, or (5) frequently occurring phrases in foreign languages. Referring to item (6) in the experimental plan, Hargevik states:

The result of this operation would, at best, be (1) a list of items more rarely used by Defoe than by most of the writers in the comparative sample, and (2) a list of items which could be regarded as characteristic of Defoe, because they occur more frequently in texts by him than in texts by the majority of contemporary writers. (24)

Another major Hargevik carryover problem I would like to point out is that using only his memory, he read through two million words noting the occurrences of the items from the preliminary testing list. Think about thi—he read one million words of Defoe and one million words of non-Defoe and determined Defoe’s favorite expressions! Hargevik knew he had a problem: “It would be unwise and presumptuous to pretend that all the occurrences of the items concerned were listed, for it is quite obvious they were not” (36). He was not even able to calculate a systematic error: “At various times I checked my own performance in order to estimate the rate of occurrences missed out. This attempt was balked, however, as my efficiency varied at different times of the day” (36).⁶ Hargevik justified the continuation and publication of his study by this quote from Elegård: “To a large extent, however, the mistakes cancel each other out by affecting both plus and minus expressions. The consistency of the results is a guarantee that the occurrences missed through inadvertence have not seriously affected the classification” (qtd. in Hargevik 36). A computer was available to Hargevik to do this sorting and counting but he did not use it. He determined that he could get “similar results but at a smaller cost and with less labor” without a computer (31). The Rothman group should have compiled their own list of plus and minus Defoe words not from the two-million-word Hargevik corpora but from valid corpora of their own construction. The Rothman group chose to use Hargevik’s fatally flawed corpora and style markers rather than redo the initial compilation. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

 III. The Primary Data —the Input Texts

Most investigators of similar stylo-statistical problems do not divulge how their samples were built up, or how sample size was estimated. It is, certainly, very sensible to leave out such compromising matter, for any attempt to lay down principles in these cases is liable to attract criticism. (Hargevik 28)

Keep this quotation in mind as you read the rest of this paper. It advocates deception by exclusion—something that Hargevik does much too often.

The first major problem of the Rothman group’s study is the Hargevik selection and subsequent Rothman group adoption of the two input corpora: the one-million-word Defoe corpus and the one-million-word non-Defoe corpus. It is crucially important that all texts in non-traditional authorship attribution studies be of absolutely certain authorship. Hargevik used ten anonymous selections in his one-million-word non-Defoe control group. This is ~75,000 words (7.75%). He knew this but chose to ignore it.⁷ And more damning, as Hargevik admitted, “it is of course also possible that one or two of these anonymous texts were written by Defoe himself” (27). Hargevik was aware that some of the Defoe texts were of questionable authorship: “Defoe’s production is vast, and there is a great deal of uncertainty as to the authorship of several texts ascribed to him” (22). But again he did nothing about this crucial problem. Hargevik is guilty of cherry picking his samples and only from the low-hanging branches.⁸ In his one-million-word Defoe sample (90 selections) my count is that ~467,000 words (46.7%) were de-attributed by Furbank and Owens—their count for this is 449,500 words (464). Obviously Hargevik did not know this. However, any study done since Furbank and Owens must delete these questionable texts from the Defoe sample before style markers are selected—even if the practitioner disagrees with the de-attribution. Rothman was aware of this and even lists some of the de-attributed Defoe works in his earlier PBSA publications but doesn’t do anything about it in the Rothman group paper (Rothman, “Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized” and “Response”). Furbank and Owens called this “an extraordinary fallacy” (464). As I have noted elsewhere in my scholarship, any study of Defoe’s style will be degraded by each inclusion of a text not of certain Defoe authorship (Rudman, “Unediting” 7). This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

Another problem with the Hargevik input corpora is that they do not distinguish among works of different genres.⁹ The consensus of non-traditional attribution practitioners is that genre trumps authorship—many of an author’s style markers that are consistent within a genre are not consistent across genres. The practitioner must stick to the genre of the questioned text. Hargevik recognized this problem but did not control for it. He even was aware of the problems caused by not eliminating sub-genres: “Defoe’s texts often contain dialogue, and it is well-known that the spoken language of any period differs from the written language” (22). Hargevik conflated nine genres in his control sample: essays; speeches and debates; sermons; histories; novels; journals and diaries; letters; dictionaries and lexicons; and play reviews. Think about this: Hargevik did not conflate just two genres but at least nine. He equated the style of such disparate genres as dictionary compilation with novel writing—play reviews with sermons. And it is important to know if Hargevik selected and analyzed only one side of a printed debate. Hargevik mixed at least four genres in his one-million-word Defoe sample: essays, histories, novels, and letters. The Rothman group was also aware of the problems caused by mixing genres but like Hargevik chose to ignore it.¹⁰ The genre in the corpora should all be what the Rothman group called “seventeenth- and eighteenth-century terrestrial and sea journeys” (Rothman et al. 95). This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

The next major problem with the input corpora is chronological overextension. A suggested chronological range for non-traditional authorship studies is ± five years from the date of the questioned work.¹¹ The tighter the chronological span, the better. This is to control for an author’s change of style over time, the zeitgeist style change over time, and the change of a genre’s style over time. The Hargevik corpora both span thirty years (1700-1730). His questioned tract, Memoirs of an English Officer was published in 1728. The Rothman group’s questioned work, Robert Drury’s Journal, was published in 1729. The chronological range of the two corpora should be from 1723 to 1731 (1731 being the year of Defoe’s death). This would eliminate most of the two million words in the Defoe and control corpora. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

Two other problems with the two corpora are (1) non-random sampling—Hargevik chose his samples by availability and convenience (non-random sampling has the potential to cause problems in the statistics and to introduce experimental bias); and (2) not always using first editions. Hargevik tried to locate first editions but was not always successful: “It is, unfortunately, possible that where later editions were used the results of the investigation were affected” (29). The Rothman group did use first editions for the several tracts they used in their analysis. But they did not tell us where they obtained all of their texts, if they were in electronic form, or if not in electronic form how they were entered. Nor do they report what types of errors and how many errors were introduced in the process.

IV. Unediting, De-Editing, Editing

When preparing a corpus for analysis, it is essential to attend to three elements of the process: unediting, de-editing, and editing. I have previously defined these terms this way:

Unediting—The Process of removing everything that has been added to the author’s manuscript over the ages by editors, printers, or other like “commentators;”

De-editing—The removal of any and all “extraneous” text (e.g. quotations, foreign languages) that would interfere with a valid non-traditional attribution study;

Editing—In this context, the encoding, regularizing, and lemmatizing of the text. (Rudman, “Unediting” 6)¹²

However, the Rothman et al. article does not tell us what they unedited, de-edited, or edited in any of their corpora. They do tell us some of what Hargevik excised:

He eliminates titles of “texts and headings,” “simple ranks and titles in direct apposition, e.g.: King William and Lord Galway,” but others were counted when they bore special titles or titles that, if eliminated, would distort the narrative image, such as “the Earl of Peterborough, the King of France.” He excludes abbreviations except viz. and counted pronouns in two words as one—“every thing” or “some body.” He omitted “numerals in the names of regents (e.g., Henry the Eighth),” “passages in foreign languages,” although he retained words in common usage, such as “en passant,” and he omitted questions [sic, read quotations] because Defoe seldom used quotation marks. He also eliminated “Proper names of persons and places,” although he counted “names of months, festivals, and similar phenomena.” “When in a quandary,” he writes, “I omitted such passages altogether.” (108; emphasis mine)

And since the Rothman group followed the Hargevik criteria we can assume they followed suit. But in another study, Rothman advocated removing “tagwords” such as “mother” and “father” as speaker designations so as not to distort Defoe’s average sentence length. He also advocated removing Latin quotes but not biblical quotes (“Stylometric Study”). We can guess but do not know if Rothman continued removing those items in the Rothman group study. However, a few problems remain: Did Hargevik also excise the word the along with Eighth in “Henry the Eighth”? The last sentence of the above quote (in bold) actually refers to Hargevik’s comments about quotations, not “similar phenomena.” Since Hargevik excluded quotations, why did the Rothman group include them? Did the Rothman group eliminate the 666 separate words and phrases of the native Madagascan languages from the texts? Did the Rothman group eliminate the 27 word paragraph on page 241 of the Journal that is in a native language and/or did they eliminate the 39 word translation of the prayer that immediately follows (Drury 1729, 241-242)? Why did the Rothman group not quote Hargevik’s comments about his treatment of hyphenation? On this point, Hargevik had written that

Hyphenation presented a major problem. I followed Yule’s system: “familiar and accepted instances were entered as single nouns … but compound words made up for the nonce … were divided.” (Yule, The Statistical Study …, p. 125) Needless to say, consistency is feasible only with immense labour. (29)

I would also like to add something else Hargevik said that the Rothman group left out. When discussing foreign languages he writes that “in these cases, the choice between inclusion and exclusion was of necessity very subjective” (29). Hargevik’s statement that he “excluded items which appeared to be over-represented in certain texts and thus caused disproportion between the two million-samples” (36) is obviously subjective. But worse, he did not tell us what they are—making it impossible to replicate his study.

As we have seen, Hargevik was not always successful in obtaining first editions. And he realizes the problems this can cause: “Defoe’s language has been changed in a most arbitrary way by certain editors … e.g., the word ‘further’ occurs twice in the first edition and twenty seven times in Aitken’s edition” (30). The Rothman group talked about using “The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition[s] published by AMS Press” (111) based on first editions but did not tell us what they did about changes made by the editors. We can assume that both Hargevik and the Rothman group excised catchwords and signatures—but they were silent on this.

Again, it is of vital importance that we know the exact makeup of the final input text—both studies are based on the number of words in the texts and the number of words in their study blocks. Both Hargevik and the Rothman group knew this but did not let us know exactly what they excised. But they do let us know how difficult and subjective these choices can be. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

V. The Rothman Group Experimental Plan

The Rothman group set out to determine if there were sections of the Journal that could be attributed to Defoe. Their “procedure conceptualized an analysis of four types of text in Robert Drury’s Journal as the basis for an assessment of authorship” (107). These four types of text are listed below in Appendix A.

To make sure that I understood how closely the Rothman group followed the Hargevik experimental plan, I asked Verma to confirm the following statements:

1. The study used the same exact one-million-word sample of Defoe’s works that Hargevik used.
2. The study used the exact one-million-word sample of the control group.
3. The study used the same Defoe 709 basic words and phrases Hargevik identified.
4. The study used the same Defoe rare words and phrases that Hargevik identified.

Verma confirmed all of the statements, adding that Rothman “wrote to, and even visited, several libraries in the USA and Britain to get hold of the exact editions that Hargevik used” (Verma 2019). This shows to what extraordinary lengths Rothman went to so that he would exactly duplicate the Hargevik criteria. This highlights the fact that Rothman was an exemplary traditional scholar.

The Rothman group then basically followed the Hargevik experimental plan but changed the text from Memoirs of an English Officer to that of Robert Drury’s Journal. Rather than the four selections, the entire Journal should have been subject to analysis; the entire text must be subjected to analysis to avoid experimenter’s bias. The Rothman group might have avoided this problem by using David Kaufer’s Docuscope techniques that use over 40 million English language patterns that are classified into over 100 rhetorical functions that found collaboration in the Federalist papers (Collins et al.) or other techniques such as Eder’s rolling stylometry that look for interpolations in texts by breaking the text into equal and overlapping blocks for analysis. By pre-selecting sections, an experimenter’s bias was introduced. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

VI. Replication and Duplication

In stylometric analysis, as for any other experimental method, a study’s results must be replicable if they are to be considered valid. As I have previously explained, replication “means to follow the experimental plan of the original study in every detail without the slightest deviation”; this is distinct from duplication, which “means to reproduce the results using a different experimental plan, such as different style markers, different statistical tests, different control groups” (Rudman, “Shakespeare’s Canon” 311). Neither the Hargevik nor the Rothman et al. study can be replicated. We do not know the input data (the texts). If Rothman were still alive, I am sure that all questions about the study would have been answered. I asked Verma for a few pages of the “log” that they referenced in their paper. He sent a file that, “contains all the matches using the Monoconc software for the Group 4 plus queries of Hargevik on the 11K word extract from Drury’s Journal” (Verma 2017). And Verma is willing to answer other questions, which shows the group’s willingness to be as transparent as possible. We do not know enough to duplicate the study. However, the problems of creating a valid Defoe sample and a valid control sample are (as we have seen) indomitable. There is a reason that non-traditional authorship attribution scholars in the main do not tackle the Daniel Defoe canon.

VII. Conclusion

The conclusion of the Rothman et al. article was that Defoe authored some sections of the Journal but not others. These sections are specified in figure 1. Defoe is identified as the author of two sections: selection two—the 8,889 word passages on religion; and selection three—the 2,965 word Drury’s second voyage. The group identified two other sections as not by Defoe: selection one—the 11,254 word initial narrative—and selection three—the 4,917 word speeches or stories. They concluded that the Journal should remain in the Defoe canon, “with the understanding of the limitations of Defoe’s authorship” (114). The conclusion of this paper is that the results of the Rothman et al. article are not valid and are not to be believed.¹³ Many problems may result from non-vetted articles published in a well-respected venue: the results may be incorporated into an author’s canon, and the techniques and methodologies (although fatally flawed) may be incorporated into other studies. The following quote from Hargevik is telling:

Mistakes may breed mistakes if one text is accepted on too loose grounds as written by Defoe and then other texts are then assigned to Defoe on the basis of the first assignment. It appears to be necessary … to establish methods of defining authorship which are as unaffected by human prejudice and subjective thinking as possible. (4)

This is why I felt a pointed critique was in order. By following Hargevik’s choice of corpora and his choice of marker words, the Rothman group’s study was doomed from the outset. I write this essay in part to warn Defoe scholars to ignore the results of these studies and to warn non-traditional attribution practitioners to use more modern techniques, letting Hargevik’s work take its place as a flawed historical step on the road to acceptable practices.

I would be remiss if I did not compliment the work of Woodell (a linguist) and Verma (a computer scientist). They did an admirable job of taking Hargevik’s 709 words and permutations into “more than 7,000 terms to query” (Rothman et al. 104) and analyzing the staggering mountains of data. It is understandable that they would accept Rothman’s lead on the corpora construction and other areas of the Hargevik criteria. Rothman was aware of the many pitfalls facing practitioners of non-traditional authorship attribution studies that are listed above. He cited two articles that discussed the problems (Rudman, “State of Authorship Attribution Studies” and “Unediting”) but chose to ignore the caveats.

 Appendix A: Editing and Production Errors

Many if not most of the production problems that appear in the Rothman at al. article can perhaps be attributed to the state of the AMS press in its waning years—the volume containing the Rothman group’s article was one of the last publications of the press before bankruptcy and liquidation. The AMS press sat on some of the submissions for this volume for almost ten years. The Rothman group article “was submitted to the Festschrift in 2007-08, I believe” (Verma 2019). There was little or no anonymous peer reviewing of the articles. There was little or no copyediting by the press near its end. According to Verma, “As far as I know, there were no interactions with a copy editor” (2019). The startling number of typographical and other minor errors in the essay tend to confirm that it received very little editorial attention. The authors and guest editors were left in the dark for a good portion of the publication process.¹⁴ But it is important to keep in mind as you read this paper that the Rothman group had not seen their initial submission for over ten years and that it was published before they had a chance to correct or modify it. They had no chance to read any reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Much of the turmoil in this esteemed press was caused by the declining health of its founder and operator, Gabriel Hornstein. His contributions to eighteenth-century studies cannot be overstated. Sadly, he passed away on February 17, 2017—a week before the publication of An Expanding Universe. This does not completely exonerate the editors or the authors but explains how the undetected errors could slip through. However, the other essays in the volume do not evidence the kind of errors found in the Rothman et al. article.

The first problems to be pointed out have to do with the presentation of the four sections of the Journal that the Rothman group selected to be tested to see if any or all of them were written by Defoe—problems with identification and pagination. The four times that these selections are printed in the paper are listed below in figs. 1 through 4.

Problem: Inconsistency in listing the content of the four selections. Note that the Rothman group transposes selection 3 and 4 in figs. 1 and 2. They then go back to the original order of fig. 1 in fig. 3. However, they again transpose selection 3 and 4 in fig. 1 and fig. 4 (observe that they also change from Arabic numerals to letters in fig. 4).

Problem: Incorrect inclusive page and line numbers for the four selections (in fig. 3). In the first selection the page and line numbers are given as 39:1-71:11. The actual numbers are 1:1-56:20. It did not take long to determine that the 39:1-71:11 numbers are from a different edition—the 1890 edition that was edited and expurgated by Pasfield Oliver even though the Rothman group stated that these numbers are from the 1729 edition (112). There are two sections that make up their second selection. They got the first of the two correct. The second of the two they gave as 230:8-88. The numbers should be 230:8-256:9. The ‘88’ is a mystery—it is not the page number, the number of pages, nor the number of lines. The numbers of the third selection are correct. The fourth selection has three sections. The first two are correct. The third one is given as 105:17-105:37. The actual numbers are 105:17-115:25. There are no pages of the 1729 edition of the Journal with 37 lines.

Problem: There are other (perhaps inconsequential) irregularities and inconsistencies. In fig. 1 under Selection 1 and Selection 2, “a” should be “an.” In fig.3 under 2 note that there are no quotation marks before “He” or after “them.” Also in fig. 3 under 4 note that the phrase “enter’d the Country without Opposition” is extraneous and should not be there. In fig. 4 under C, “words” should be singular.

However, there are serious problems with these four selections. The Rothman group re-used the “Sam’s Story’s” seven pages from selection one. They were included in selection four (see fig. 1). This duplication is not obvious from reading the Rothman group article because of the errors in the page numbers. It only becomes obvious when you look at the correct page numbers and read the selections. We do not know what that does to the results for selection one but it does cast a cloud over the results. The Rothman group also tainted selection four by including some explanatory material before their third part of selection four, part three (see Selection 4 of fig. 1). Furthermore, this selection is by the narrator (which is not a “different voice” as advertised). This also taints the selection.

Fig. 1 —From Rothman et al. 1. Note: I changed Rothman et al.’s word “corpus” in this figure to “selection” in order to avoid confusion with their other uses of the word corpus.

 

Fig. 2 —From Rothman et al. 112

 

Fig. 3 —From Rothman et al. 113

 

Fig. 4 —From Rothman et al. 113

Of course, most of the problems highlighted in this appendix do not invalidate the results of their study—it is the rare scholar who has not seen an error creep into a published work (and I will not cast the first stone). However, the errors are frustrating as the reader tries to understand the authors’ methods. And these many errors do give rise to the specter of other undetected errors in the reporting of the experimental plan, the analysis, and the results.

Carnegie Mellon University

Notes

¹ See Holmes for a good basic overview. For two encyclopedia entries that give an overview of the topic, See Rudman, “Authorship Attribution” and “Stylometrics.” Also, see Rudman, “State of Authorship Attribution Studies” and “State of Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution” for two more comprehensive articles.

² The term ripost is used in the non-traditional authorship attribution community to refer to the totality of a multi-faceted pointed critique of a non-traditional attribution experiment.

³ The scope of this paper does not allow for an up-to-date general survey of the field of non-traditional authorship attribution studies. Nor does it allow for a complete presentation of a proper experimental plan for a valid way to do a non-traditional study of the Defoe canon. At the time of publication, this Zotero group offers a searchable bibliography of about 4,000 entries of non-traditional studies, as well as a list of suggested readings for those new to the field. For two truncated exempla of Defoe experimental plans see Rudman, “Non-Traditional Authorship” and “Unediting.”

⁴ See Rudman, “Shakespeare’s Canon” for a more complete treatment of the collaboration concept.

⁵ The Furbank and Owens (“Stylometry and the Defoe Canon”) vs Rothman (“Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized,” “Response”) give and take that took place in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America covered some of the same problems with the work of Ellegård and Hargevik that are explicated in this paper.

⁶ See Beers for a detailed treatment of Hargevik’s errors.

⁷ I compiled the numbers and percentages about the texts from Hargevik, Appendix I (pp. I-VIII) and Appendix II (pp. IX-XVIII).

⁸ See Rudman, “Cherry Picking” for a more complete treatment of cherry picking.

⁹ Genre is an important variable in non-traditional authorship attribution studies. It must be controlled for. If genre cannot be controlled for, the practitioner must calculate a systematic error and fold it into the final result. The studies that come closest to questioning this are ones where the genres follow similar linguistic rules, such as tragicomedy and comedy. No one questions the need to separate sonnets from essays. Another point to keep in mind is that genre separation must also include separating sub-genres—e.g., poetry within a novel, a song within a drama.

¹⁰ The Rothman group was aware of my 2005 paper that had the following comment on genre:

It has been shown empirically that style-markers vary significantly over different genres (Karlgren and Cutting) (Stamatatos, Fakotakis and Kokkinakis). Burrows has shown that stylistic differences are greater among the various genres written by the same author than they are between different authors writing in the same genre. He has a telling graph that “shows a complex pattern in which genre transcends authorship” (Burrows 101-102). Binongo reinforces this: “When the essays and plays are brought together into one picture…the differences in genre predominate over other factors (Binongo 114).

¹¹ This suggested range was arrived at by looking at all of the studies that determined a stylochronological change—e.g., Boyd 7, Evans 128, Bramer and Miltos, Stamou, Hoover, Pennebaker and Stone.

¹² See Rudman, “Unediting” and “Shakespeare’s Canon” for a more complete treatment.

¹³ Note that this paper does not discuss Hargevik’s “distinctiveness groups” or the way his statistics determine authorship. This essay’s focus is on the validity of the Rothman team’s results. If the input data (the texts) are invalid, the results of any tests would be invalid.

¹⁴ This information was garnered from conversations with James E. May, who published a chapter in the volume, and Kevin L. Cope, one of the volume editors.

Works Cited

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Bramer, Max, and Miltos Petridis. “Stylochronomerty: Timeline Prediction in Stylometric Analysis.” Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXXII, edited by Carmen Klaussner and Carl Vogel, Springer, 2015, pp. 91-106.

Burrows, John. “Not Unless You Ask Nicely: The Interpretive Nexus Between Analysis and Information.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 7, 1992, pp. 91-110.

Carleton, George. The Memoirs of an English Officer: who serv’d on the Dutch war in 1672. To the peace of Utrecht, in 1713. London, 1728.

Collins, Jeff, et al. “Detecting Collaborations in Text: Comparing the Authors’ Rhetorical Language Choices in The Federalist Papers.” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 38, no. 1, 2004, pp. 15-36.

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—. Madagascar: Or, Robert Drury’s Journal, During Fifteen Years Captivity on That Island. London, 1729.

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Rothman, Irving N. “A Response to P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 96, no. 3, 2002, pp. 465-469.

—. “Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized under Hargevik Criteria: Applying Stylometrics to the Canon.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 94, no. 3, 2000, pp. 375-398.

—. “A Stylometric Study of the Variant Styles of Daniel Defoe.” South Central Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Convention, 25 Feb. 1999, Shreveport, LA. Conference Presentation.

Rothman, Irving N., et al. “Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis.” An Expanding Universe: The Project of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Essays Commemorating the Career of Jim Springer Borck, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Cedrick D. Reverend II, AMS, 2017, pp. 93-116.

Rudman, Joseph. Review of ‘Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis, by Irving N. Rothman et al. Scriblerian, vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 10-11.

—. “Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies of William Shakespeare’s Canon: Some Caveats.” Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 5, 2016, pp. 307-328.

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Abstract: The article revisits a relatively neglected novel in the Defoe canon, Memoirs of a Cavalier. It argues that whilst the Cavalier’s political affiliations were certainly not accidental, they could be said to be incidental. And, moreover, that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the author, designed to undercut any simpler political or cultural affinities which might be found elsewhere in myriad similar “memorials” published in the early years of the eighteenth-century. In short, Defoe presents his readers with a Cavalier who is anything but cavalier. The article first revisits Defoe’s literary politics, in order to contextualize the Memoirs, before proceeding to re-read the narrative itself. More closely still it explores the extent to which the narrative realizes the particular aspiration stated in its Preface, to “correct” Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. It closes reflectively, wondering about the possibility that the Cavalier somehow ended up fighting on the wrong side, and perhaps writing on it too.

Keywords: Memoirs of a Cavalier, Clarendon, Gustavus Adolphus, King Charles I, Marvell

THERE are a handful of images of Daniel Defoe. Two in particular tend to be ubiquitous, though the provenance of both remains contested. It is a shadiness that seems somehow apt for a novelist who spent much of his middle years working as a government agent. An engraving by Michael Vandergucht “after” Jeremiah Taverner, from around 1706, and a portrait presently attributed to an “artist unknown, in the style of Sir Godfrey Kneller.”¹ The comparison intrigues. Powdered, wigged and slightly podgy of face in the Vandergucht, a fair bit thinner, and rather more sober, in the “style of Kneller.” The intervening couple of decades had been wearying, and, provenance permitting, it shows. There is report that the younger Defoe had been a little dandyish in his tastes.² He certainly liked a good wig. But in neither image can he be said to look particularly cavalier. Back in 1703 the London Gazette had published an advertisement offering a reward of £50 to “whosoever shall discover” the said Daniel Defoe, together with a brief description of a “middle siz’d spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown-coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, and a large mole near his mouth” (West, Defoe, 75). Hardly cutting much of dash then.

It seems apposite, for this article is about Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, a relatively neglected novel in the canon.³ Like so many of Defoe’s writings, the Memoirs is a rather elusive piece; the closer it is read, the more it unsettles expectations—not least in the presentation of its eponymous protagonist, who does not, on closer inspection, seem to be particularly cavalier either.⁴ It will be argued that Defoe made his protagonist a “cavalier” for reasons that were incidental, rather than simply accidental. Accidents happen, incidents are measured, more commonly devised. Physicists project intersections in lines or beams of light, epidemiologists calculate the probabilities which attach to alternative strategies of medical intervention, economists model the consequences of targeted taxation policies. None of them leave incident to chance.

And the same is true of writers, whether conceiving a novel or scripting a history. The writing rationalizes, giving coherence and meaning to contingencies various imagined, in the process fashioning incidents from seeming accidents. Richard Rorty refers to contingent “ironies,” fashioned by situated, essentially narrative, selves (5-6). As we will see, at various points in the Memoirs, Defoe will insinuate that his “cavalier” might have fought for either side in the various wars through which he stumbles. But that does not make his choices accidental. It simply means that they were shaped by the context of their author in his moment. In this way incidental histories, whether purporting to be fictional or otherwise, betray their peculiarly historicist prejudice.⁵ It can be argued that no English novelist has evinced a greater sensitivity to this prejudice than Daniel Defoe, a writer whose own politics can be notoriously difficult to pin down (see Richetti 20-2, 70-84, 126-7). No English novelist indeed better fits the mould of the Rortian ironist, constantly adjusting to contingent political conditions, seeing how incidental “encounters go” and poeticizing their consequence (Rorty, 60-1). And no novel that Defoe wrote evinces this sensitivity more acutely than the Memoirs of a Cavalier.⁶

In the first part of this article, we will explore further the moment in which Defoe conceived and wrote his Memoirs. It was, as we will see, an exercise in ironic self-fashioning. We will then turn to the text itself, investigating its pretended provenance, its notably sceptical commentary on war and its intriguing comparison of two differently warring kings, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and King Charles I of England, before contemplating the place of religion in the mind of Defoe’s cavalier. The final section is more speculative still, wondering not least if the eponymous anti-hero ended up fighting on the wrong side in the English civil war. We will also wonder the extent to which the Memoirs might be considered a history and, if so, of what?

I. The Moment

Memoirs of a Cavalier was published in 1720, early in what was Defoe’s third career. A first, as a hosiery and woollen factor, had failed by the closing years of the seventeenth century. It would be followed by a necessarily tendentious foray into the world of party-political journalism, working as Robert Harley’s spin-doctor.⁷ A position he secured as an inadvertent consequence of publishing a brilliant satire entitled The Shortest Way with Dissenters at the end of 1702, the closer subject of which was “occasional conformity.” The consequence of publication for Defoe was prosecution for seditious libel, three days in the pillory, and a rather unflattering advertisement in the London Gazette. ⁸

Harley fell from power in summer 1714, taking Defoe with him. Six years of rather eclectic writing would follow, scattered pieces on domestic manners, “stock-jobbery,” and Scottish Church history.⁹ Before the appearance, in 1719, of a first novel, Robinson Crusoe, to be followed the next year by two more, Captain Singleton and Memoirs of a Cavalier. Three novels sharing some evident similarities. Three very masculine heroes embarking on journeys of discovery, not least within themselves, each of which melded picaresque adventure with the classic redemption story.¹⁰

And, in the case of the Memoirs, something else too. For the Memoirs is also a historical novel, its protagonist journeying back into a still-recent past to remind readers of what England used to be like not that long ago. For this reason, the Memoirs can be categorized with Defoe’s slightly later Journal of a Plague-Year. Both texts were designed to be didactic.¹¹ In the case of the Journal, it was to advise the possible consequence of another plague.¹² In the case of the Memoirs, it was to warn of prospective Jacobite insurgencies, a fear heightened only a year earlier by another abortive uprising in Scotland; itself only four years after the more concerted rebellion in support of the “Old Pretender.”¹³

Both rebellions might have been repelled, but their spectres remained to haunt the London imagination. Something emphasized by Edward Thompson in his brilliant study of the so-called “Black” Acts. The closer purpose of the Acts might have been to tighten anti-poaching legislation in Waltham and Windsor forests, but their enactment spoke to far broader anxieties regarding prospective Jacobite insurgencies in the “home” counties (Thompson 67-72). It was these same anxieties which, as Defoe well knew, would fuel the sales of his Memoirs of a Cavalier. And continue to do so. Two years after publication, Walpole’s government would suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, as a caution against rumours of another Jacobite uprising across the south of England.¹⁴

The Memoirs were then both didactic and fashionable. The previous twenty years had witnessed a stream of histories and “memorials,” of the English civil wars especially, facilitated, in part at least, by the lapse of the Licensing Act regulations in 1695. Amongst the more cavalier could be counted the Memoirs of Sir Philip Warwick, personal secretary to the martyred King Charles, and those of Sir Thomas Herbert, who pretended to have been the same King’s best mate. Rounder-headed alternatives included the Memorials of Bulstrode Whitelock, The Shorter Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax, the Memoirs of Denzil Holles, the Discourses of Algernon Sidney and the Life of John Milton. And the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow. We should pause here for a moment, for there is something importantly odd about Ludlow’s “memoirs.”

Former parliamentary war hero and commissioner at the trial of King Charles I, Ludlow had escaped to the town of Vevey, near Bern, in 1660, where he was visited, shortly before his death in 1692, by his old friend, Slingsby Bethel. Bethel returned a few months later with a draft manuscript entitled The Voice from the Watchtower. A very big manuscript, it transpired, unlike the published Memoirs, which appeared in three volumes in 1698-99, and was shorter by three quarters of a million words. The shorter Memoirs also told a rather different life.¹⁵ Ludlow the fierce puritan had become Ludlow the champion of revolution “principles.” Quite who took a knife to the original draft remains uncertain. Bethel possibly, but more likely the publisher John Toland, already busy writing up Fairfax, Holles and Milton. Editing, in effect, a serialised prequel to the “glorious” revolution, fashioned as a set of “memoirs.”¹⁶

We can only conjecture, but it is reasonable to assume that Defoe was familiar with most, if not all, of these histories. The Memoirs certainly intimates a reading of Whitelock and Ludlow. It has been suggested that Defoe was writing against their politicization, seeking to present a history uncorrupted by “Faction,” and that his choice of genre was intended to facilitate this (Seager, 481-4, 489, 500). A “Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read,” as the editor of the second edition would hazard half a century on (Seager, 480, 491). We will return to matters of genre and provenance shortly, as we will the narrative of the Memoirs. We should, though, pause to contemplate a particular insinuation written into the Preface.

An allusion to what would become the most influential of all the “memoirs” of the civil wars. The History of the Rebellion, written by Sir Edward Hyde, later Lord Clarendon. Or at least mainly written by Sir Edward, for there was again some editorial interference, this time on the part of Sir Edward’s son Lawrence, who composed a cautionary preface for the second edition, which appeared in early 1703. It should be remembered, Lawrence told his readers, that in an “an age when so many memoirs, narratives, and pieces of history come out as it were on purpose to justify the taking of arms against the King, and to belittle, revile and ridicule the sacred majesty of an anointed head,” only half a century ago a dreadful “murder” had been “committed on a pious prince.”¹⁷

And a dreadful injustice inflicted on Lawrence’s father. The History of the Rebellion was, first and foremost, a history of its author. The published version of the History, which had finally appeared a year before, incorporated draft sections of a Life by Himself. Something which could only add to the testamentary, and exculpatory, tone. A greatest hits album, selected by the artist himself and his son. Not that it was billed as such. On the contrary, the History promised a “full and clear narration,” without any “mixture of private passion or animosity,” the integrity of which was enhanced by the simple fact that it only contained accounts of what the author had personally experienced.¹⁸

The integrity of the account also depended, of course, on Sir Edward’s reputation: a man of “innate goodness and justice,” as well as “wonderful tenderness,” ever motivated to “maintain the government and preserve the law”; the epitome of the “honest and wise” councillor, to whom the late King had so often cause to express “thanks” for his many “good services” (Clarendon 1843, 933-7, 992-3); and a historian whose word could not be doubted, who had recorded events with “all faithfulness and ingenuity,” attesting the “faults and infirmities of both sides,” and cherishing the central tenet of this faith, that the “love of truth” is the “soul of history.” Only the historian who admits this, and does this, “deserves to be believed.” Like Sir Edward: “I know myself to be very free from any of those passions which naturally transport men with prejudice towards the persons whom they are obliged to mention and whose actions they are at liberty to censure” (Clarendon, 1).

Peculiarly well-placed, then, to write a definitive history of the “great rebellion.” Purposed to entertain, of course, but also to counsel, as Laurence emphasized, so “that posterity may not be deceived,” to make “visible” how easily “all foundations of law and liberty” might be destroyed (Clarendon, 1). The intimation was plain enough; time to start paying attention to the still “perplexed condition of our times” or the same might happen again. Small wonder that Queen Anne made her displeasure known.¹⁹ Lawrence editorialized his father’s History for much the same reason as Toland took his scalpel to Ludlow’s Memoirs. Refurbishing the past, to make the present seem familiar.

This is precisely what Defoe set off to do when he resolved to write his Memoirs in the necessary shade of Edward Hyde and his History, like pretty much everyone else who, over the coming century, would venture to write a history of the “rebellion.”²⁰ The Preface to the Memoirs confirmed that it was published as a corrective: “In a Word, this Work is a Confutation of the many Errors in all the writers upon the Subject of our Wars in England even in the extraordinary History written by the Earl of Clarendon” (3). Except that, on second glance, it is difficult to see precisely what the Cavalier is really correcting.

II. The Memoirs

The Memoirs of a Cavalier is structured in two parts, telling the story of the protagonist’s participation in successive military campaigns. The subtitle of the original edition was A Military Journal. The first part follows our hero to the continent, starting with some scattered adventures in France and Italy, before he wanders, almost inadvertently, into the Thirty Years War, ending up fighting in the army of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. He then returns to fight in the English civil wars on the side of King Charles. Understandably, the Memoirs can, as a consequence, read like a very long list of battles and sieges, something that would be of evident value to military historians, but less interesting, perhaps, to anyone else. Unless, that is, they dig a little deeper under the surface, at which point it becomes apparent that nothing is quite what it seems.

Provenance

Starting with the matter of provenance. The question of veracity arose early in the publishing history of the Memoirs, the editor of the second edition wondering the extent to which they were more “romance” than “history.” The Preface addresses the matter head-on. Unavoidable, given that they were intended as a “corrective” to all the other “memoirs” flooding the market, but in so doing hardly adding much by way of assurance. The very first sentence is designed to unsettle. The “Memorials” have been discovered by “great Accident” and might have been “written many Years ago” (1). Or maybe not.

Another editorial tease follows, confirmation that the manuscript was found amongst the “Plunder” after the battle of Worcester in 1651, and fell into the possession of the narrator’s father, a Major in a Parliamentarian “Regiment of Horse.” And apparently untouched, or maybe just tidied up, or scalped à la Toland? Who knows. But before anyone starts to worry too much about any of this, Defoe is quick to point out that history will be the poorer if pedants are allowed to distract themselves, and everyone else, with such matters. The “Actions here mentioned have a sufficient Sanction from all the Histories of the Times to which they relate” (1). Of which two are much the most obvious: For the first part of the Memoirs, William Watt’s The Swedish Intelligencer, published in 1632; for the second, Hyde’s History.

The circulating conversation of history. Not that the reader discovers the identity of the conversationalist who has written up his Memoirs. A “Concern” which the Preface also addresses, assuring the reader that “no small Labour has been thrown away” in trying to find out who he might be, but to no avail. A Shropshire gentleman, born in 1608, is all we are told. ²¹ An evasion that is reminiscent, of course, of the similarly nameless chronicler in the Journal of a Plague Year. Evasive protagonists are hardly unusual in a Defoe novel, but they matter more where there is a greater pretence to experiential authenticity. The narrator, as the Preface urges, has been “present in every Action here related” (2).

Accordingly, there is only brief comment on the death of Gustavus at the battle of Lutzen, because “it is not my Design to write a History of any more of these Wars than I was actually concerned with” (110). And the same is true for the rather different death of Charles I, and its consequence. The “History of the Times will supply the Particulars which I omit, being willing to confine my self to my own Accounts and Observations.” Having taken oath not take up arms again, and not wishing to be “hanged,” the Cavalier takes no part in the second civil war in summer 1648, for which reason he is “now no more an Actor, but a melancholy Observator of the Misfortunes of the Times” (270, 279). We will revisit these particular “misfortunes” shortly.

Meanwhile, we can speculate some reasons for Defoe’s refusal to name his protagonist. First, it was fashionable to hide identities, even in published “memoirs.” It might even have added a sense of verity, rather than just making up a name. A further layer of mystery too, paradoxically, and, of course, if written to type, there was no real need. Except that, as we will discover, the Cavalier is another of Defoe’s protagonists who does not play to type. He should be “Wrong but Wromantic,” but turns out to be neither really.²² A chastened Cavalier, in the end, haunted by self-doubt, who ends up writing a “memorials” which, if not quite puritan, is a long way from being cavalier. Which, of course, makes the story so much more human and believable. A young man, more restless than idealistic, who drifts off to the continent in search of adventure and ends up becoming a soldier. And then, by dint of what Defoe liked to term “hard Fate,” begins to wander.

The Experience of War

The idea that Memoirs of a Cavalier might be read as a redemption-novel hardly comes as a surprise.²³ It is only the context which shifts from one Defoe “adventure” to another; Robinson Crusoe on a desert-island, Bob Singleton lost at sea, the chronicler of the “plague-year” wandering the streets of a dystopian London. Each enduring their fate with a commendable stoicism, all, in the end, coming back to their God. For the Cavalier, it is an experience inscribed on the battlefield.

He sets out for the Continent aged just twenty-two, suitably impressionable. A few months spent confirming what all of Defoe’s readers would have known, that France was a country full of conmen and papists, and most of Italy too, and prone to civil unrest as a consequence. So violent that it leaves the young Cavalier with an “Aversion to popular Tumults all my Life after” (21). Departing Italy, he wanders into Germany, encountering the Imperial army at the siege of Magdeburg. Horrified by the atrocities which follow the capture of the city, he decides to join the Saxon army instead, after which he will move on to the Swedish. Wandering armies, much as he wanders countries, almost a mercenary. The Cavalier does not speak too much of fighting for money, but he lives by it.²⁴ At least he ends up on the right side, on this occasion, fighting for the right king, Gustavus Adolphus. One who is not only a military genius, but who also appreciates that wars, contrary to more romantic imaginings, are not at all “pleasant” (58-9).

As yet, the Cavalier is too young to properly appreciate this wisdom. He will need to fight, and lose, another war, and the losing streak has, in fact, already started. Following Gustavus’s death, the Protestant armies suffer a series of reversals, and, all the fun draining away, the Cavalier decides to move on. A leisurely trip through the Low Countries and then back to England for the next adventure. Unable to express anything other than “secret Joy” on hearing that a different Protestant prince, Charles Stuart, would like him to accept a “Commission” in his army, he ventures north to defeat the perfidious Scots:

I have often reflected since, that I ought to have known better, that had seen how the most flourishing Provinces of Germany were reduced to the most miserable Condition that ever any Country in the World was, by the Ravaging of Soldiers, and the Calamities of War (121-2).

Here again, though, it is not a wisdom which the Cavalier presently enjoys. Even as he discovers, on arriving in Northumberland, the most “despicable Appearance of Men in Arms to begin a War” that he has ever seen in his “Life” (123). A sobering portent.

When the English civil wars break out, the Cavalier stays with the King, for no better reason than he likes fighting. An incidental choice, in other words. The collateral question of why he picked the King’s “Side” is something to which we will return. Here again, older and wiser, the Cavalier will reflect on his decision to fight at all:

I went as eagerly and blindly about my Business, as the meanest Wretch that listed in the Army; nor had I the least compassionate Thought for the Miseries of my native Country, ’till after the Fight at Edgehill.

And again, a few pages later, having recounted the course of the battle, overcome by a “strange secret and unaccountable Sadness upon my Spirits to see this acting in my own native Country” (165). No war, as the Preface confirms, is so “unnatural” as a civil (3). But still, in the moment, there is no question of retiring from the fray. The Cavalier will fight on, for another four grim years.

He will later wonder if his experiences in Germany had not, in fact, inured him against the “inhuman Barbarity” of war:

Whether this had hardened me against the natural Tenderness which I afterwards found return upon me, or not, I cannot tell; but I reflected upon my self afterwards with a great deal of Trouble, for the Unconcernedness of my Temper at the approaching Ruin of my native Country. (125)

Myriad incidents of such “ruin” litter the ensuring narrative; “the ravishing of Women, and the murthering of Men,” the “Rudeness” of soldiers on both sides (226). Along with the same recurring tone of regret:

It grieved me to the Heart, even in the Rout of our Enemies, to see the Slaughter of them; and even in the Fight to hear a man Cry for Quarter in English, moved me to Compassion which I had never been used to… Here I saw my self at the cutting of the Throats of my Friends; and indeed some of near Relations. (165)

But still he keeps fighting and making excuses. Trying to blame the sacking of Leicester in early 1645 on the recalcitrance of the defenders, recounting that he personally ordered his troops to attack one house in the city on the grounds because he needed to “make them an Example” (242). A modern jurist might recognise a war crime. As did contemporaries. When King Charles was put on trial at Westminster in January 1649, the siege of Leicester was presented as a heinous example of the breaches of the “laws of war.” Otherwise, though, the Cavalier breezes through the sacking, leaving just a few statistics behind.

The account builds. Riding through Lincolnshire, his Dragoons commit “some Disorders” and treat the locals “very coarsly” (252) before riding off towards Huntingdon to do the same. The sense of unease might be growing, but for now the Cavalier is still unable, perhaps unwilling, to desist.²⁵ He will fight to the bitterest of ends, after which it will be time to atone—in part, by writing up a “Memorials,” for the edification of later generations. A “corrective” to Clarendon on its face, perhaps, but, primarily, a corrective to his former self.

A Tale of Two Kings

In terms of tally, the Cavalier wins one war, and loses another. The reasons might be various, but one matters most. The Cavalier enjoys a series of victories in his first war because the King of Sweden is a military genius, and he suffers a sequence of debilitating defeats in his second war because the King of England is not. So much is given away at the very outset, the Preface advising the reader that they will shortly be invited to compare the “great Actions of the glorious” Gustavus Adolphus with the recurring “Mistakes” of Charles Stuart, which end up with the “Overthrow of his Armies, the Loss of his Crown and Life, and the Ruin of the Constitution” (3). Nothing new here, of course, except that the Cavalier is peculiarly well-positioned to inform the reader, having met both kings, with Charles indeed, recalling “frequent Discourses” (247).

Cloying accounts of Gustavus were au courant. The “Caesar and Alexander of our times,” Watt proclaimed in his Intelligencer. The young Cavalier’s audience with the Swedish king leaves him suitably “overcome with the Goodness of his Discourse” (59). So much to admire, as commander-in-chief and man: the sobriety, the shared distaste for whoring and ill-discipline, the restraint which he demands of his soldiers in the wake of their various, stunning victories. If there is any quality which really shines, aside from the innate humanity, it is the decisiveness.²⁶ If only every Protestant prince was like Gustavus Adolphus.

And not only Gustavus Adolphus. Various other pen-portraits in the Memoirs serve to reinforce the sense that Charles Stuart was an oddly uninspiring prince. The French “Queen Mother,” for example, Marie de Medici. If she had been “at the Helm of England” in 1642, there would probably never have been a civil war.²⁷ He is hardly sympathetic to her politics, but the young Cavalier is very impressed by how she quells the “mutinous people of Lyons” (21). And then, later in the narrative, comes a laudatory sketch of the parliamentarian commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax: “He was a compleat General, strict in his Discipline, wary in Conduct, fearless in Action, unwearied in the Fatigue of the War, and withal, of a modest, noble, generous Disposition” (238). The English Gustavus.

Charles Stuart, in comparison, lacks pretty much all of this. There is a kind of modesty, but it is the wrong kind. The crippling shyness which inhibits decision-making, and which Clarendon indeed acknowledges. A prince so readily “prevailed” upon, brought down ultimately by the “irresolution and unsteadiness of his own counsels” (Clarendon, 540). Charles lacks presence, both metaphorically and figuratively. A king “seldom seen amongst us,” too closeted, too persuadable, too easily “bullied” (126-7). The King, in short, whose tragedy centres the History of the Rebellion, a “good king,” but blighted by “infirmities and imperfections” (Clarendon, Preface, 5).

Which are now reinvested by the Cavalier:

I cannot, without Regret, look back upon the Misfortune of the King, who, as he was one of the best Princes in his personal Conduct that ever reigned in England, had yet some of the greatest Unhappiness in his Conduct as King, that ever Prince had, and the whole Course of his Life demonstrated it. (137)

A weakness of character which was never more brutally exposed than when going into battle. Recalling Edgehill, the Cavalier cannot but compare Charles with “my old Heroe” Gustavus (156). A man of decision, who knew precisely when to attack an unsuspecting enemy. Unlike Charles who, as Clarendon confirmed, dithered until late afternoon on the day of the battle, before deciding to take the initiative, and then afterwards, wasting the chance of pressing on towards London.²⁸ Not that it was entirely his fault. The chance of securing a decisive “victory” at Edgehill “vanished” when Prince Rupert charged off into the middle of nowhere (Clarendon, 308-12). A recurring habit, as Clarendon’s depiction of the battle of Naseby confirmed. Clarendon did not much rate Rupert, and neither does the Cavalier. Not just reckless, but negligent too, repeatedly allowing his soldiers to inflict “Cruelties” and “great Spoil among the Country People” (167).

We will, very shortly, contemplate the rather breathless conclusion to the Memoirs. So rushed, indeed, that the narrator has little time to say anything about the trial of the King in January 1649. “In this Hurry they sacrificed their King,” the Cavalier writes hurriedly (270). The reason, of course, is the pretence to experiential veracity. The Cavalier was not at the trial, and so is unable to add much to existing reports. The “History of the Times,” as we have already noted, will be left to “supply the Particulars.” Not that they were to be discovered in much greater detail in Clarendon’s History, and for much the same reason. A page and a half on the trial itself, mainly the “insolences” suffered by the King in Westminster Hall, followed by another on his “character.” Enough to confirm the King as a “lover of justice,” and to reiterate his lack of “resolution,” a man who “abhorred all debauchery” but was not “very enterprising” (Clarendon, 695-8). Hardly a cavalier of the dashing variety, or any other.

Instead of dwelling on the “sad” events of January 1649, the Cavalier leaves his readers with a summative commentary on how things came to such a pass. In essence, a recount of what Charles Stuart got wrong. He notes two errors in particular, both of which are once again identified in Clarendon’s History: First, the stubborn refusal to negotiate, even as the reality of defeat loomed. The most conspicuous example being his failure to properly engage parliamentary commissioners at Newcastle in summer 1646. Second, the foolish sanctioning of a second civil war in 1648. Hardly an excuse to slaughter God’s anointed, but still, when the reckoning is done, there was really only one person to blame for the mess that Charles Stuart got himself into.

A Man of God

Something else that is conspicuous in its absence in the Memoirs is talk about religion. Curious for a variety of reasons, not least because religion was so important to Defoe, even if it became more so in its secular expression. The fear of popery never really left an early eighteenth-century dissenter. In a reprise of the Shortest Way, published in the Review in 1705, Defoe slyly alluded to the Church assuming once again its “Coercive Power, by the Regency of her own Ecclesiastical Instruments.”²⁹ This fear assumed more threatening proportions at particular moments, as rumours of Jacobite insurgencies swirled, of atrocities in Ireland, the death of a childless monarch.

But if the English civil wars were indeed “wars of religion,” as modern historians like to suppose, it is not much apparent in the Memoirs.³⁰ Any more than it was in the various “memorials” that Toland was busy editing. Or in Clarendon’s History, wherein might be found an appreciation that the “brawls which were grown from religion” contributed to heightened tensions during the 1630s and early 1640s, along with the succinct observation that there was nothing in Church “ornaments” that was “worth the charge” of a civil war (Clarendon, 929).

And an attitude which again chimes with Defoe’s cavalier:

For my part, I confess I had not much Religion in me, at that time; but I thought Religion rightly practiced on both Sides would have made us all better Friends; and therefore I began to think, that both the Bishops of our Side, and the Preachers on theirs, made Religion rather the Pretence than the Cause of the War. (165)

The fact that the younger Cavalier was disinclined to speculate more deeply is no surprise, nor is the fact that he ended up recommending a broad toleration. It is what his creator would have wanted.

There are nevertheless limits to tolerance, which most certainly did not extend to popery. A distaste affirmed in the Cavalier’s early experience of Rome, the “Empire of Priests,” and high-class prostitutes, and then again with his brief flirtation with the Imperial army, which turns out to be full of blood-thirsty sociopaths. In comparison with the improbably disciplined Swedes, marching off to battle, sword in one hand, Testament in the other. A “new model” army, in all but name, characterised by “their exact Discipline, their Order, the Modesty and Familiarity of their Officers, and the regular living of the Soldiers,” and, just as importantly, absent the “Regiments of Whores and Rags as followed the Imperialists” (51).

Notably, whilst the young Cavalier is distinctly unimpressed with Rome, he is very admiring of the Venetian Republic, for reason of the “Civil Authority having a visible Superiority over the Ecclesiastical” (34). This supposes that he would not have been very sympathetic to the Laudian reforms presently being implemented back in England. No more than Clarendon, whose History famously opens with an account of an early audience with Laud in 1630. Clarendon never doubted the archbishop’s piety, but very quickly doubted the consequence of his zeal. Only one year into the “personal rule” of Charles I, but Star Chamber was already gearing up. Later that year the Scottish Presbyterian James Leighton would be convicted of sedition, pilloried, whipped, and have his nose slit and ears cropped.³¹ Defoe might have felt his shame.

The meddling “priests” motif runs through the narrative, alongside the King’s naivety in listening to them (126). The “Heat of the Clergy, to whom” the King “was exceedingly devoted, and for whom he ruined himself” (137). Indeed, it is Laud who gets the blame for going to war in the first place. Later in the narrative, the Cavalier joins those urging the King to accept the terms offered in the draft Treaty of Uxbridge, but “foresaw the Clergy would ruine all” (227).³²

There is little in the text which hints at any closer religious affinity on the part of the Cavalier. A later aside, which suggest that a “Catholic Gentleman of Lancashire” was a family friend teases, but probably no more (272). The same might be said of the list of “strange” coincidences which brings the Memoirs to a close; inspired by the same “Gentleman.”³³ Providential certainly, but hardly a Catholic preserve. Or indeed a Presbyterian, which is another possibility. The “memorials” evince some sympathy for those Presbyterians who, by 1648, would have “gladly joined the Royal Party,” whilst, at the same time, casting an obvious aspersion, culpable in realising “their Error when it was too late” (270-1). This leaves Anglicanism of the more moderate variety, the affinity of Edward Hyde indeed. And the incidental faith, we can reasonably infer, of so many other young men not much animated by faith.

Loyalties

The temptation to over-read authorial presence is unavoidable, with any writer, whatever they write, and Defoe is certainly no exception; whether it is religious affinity or cultural or, of course, political. Before we indulge some more whimsical reflections on the Cavalier’s loyalties, we might see if we can discern some clues in the text of the Memoirs. What reasons, in short, does the Cavalier give for his decision to fight for the King?

Evidently not principle. There was anyway, as he later muses, “something to be said on both sides” of the argument (192). But in the moment of choice, the argument barely registers at all:

I confess, when I went into Arms at the Beginning of this War, I never troubled my self to examine Sides: I was glad to hear the Drums beat for Soldiers; as if I had been a meer Swiss, that had not car’d which Side went up or down, so I had my Pay. (125)

The allusion to “Pay” is supposed to convince the reader that it was not that. As we noted before, the Cavalier prefers not to talk about money.

So not principle, and not pay. Sentiment perhaps, gut-instinct, flattery maybe; the King invites him to renew his “Commission.” A lifestyle choice, a natural cavalier? It has been surmised that Defoe might have had the fated Viscount Falkland in mind when he conceived his Cavalier. Or at least Clarendon’s Falkland, the young man of such “humanity and goodness to mankind” who, in apparent despair, rides off into a hail of musket-shot at the first battle of Newbury (Novak, 591). Maybe. But there is not much that is evidently idealistic about the Cavalier, less still that might be said to be poetic.³⁴

Another possibility is kinship. Some families, like the Verneys famously, would find themselves “by the sword divided.” But family affinities were more commonly binding. The Cavalier’s family, as the text repeatedly confirms, was royalist. His father even raises a regiment for the King, as “old as he was” he “would not leave his royal Master” (148). An aligned religious affinity too, perhaps; though hardly compelling, as we have just noted. Simple nationalism seems to play a part, repulsing successive Scottish armies. A visceral dislike of the plebs too. The Cavalier is repelled by “popular Heats” wherever he comes across them, and is horrified at the prospect of a “new Parliament tyranny” founded on the same, a settled constitution “sacrificed to the Fury of the Rabble” (21, 142-3).

Here again, there are sharp resonances with Clarendon. Not just fear of the “rabble,” but the collateral accusation that it was Parliament which, in nurturing popular discontent, was most responsible for upsetting the “happy Constitution of his Nation.” The “mixarchy” for which Clarendon had spent the 1630s and the first part of the 1640s arguing, before the King succumbed to the hotter heads. Modern historians call it “constitutional royalism,” the kind which the celebrated Jacobean Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, had fiercely recommended: the King ruling “in parliament,” and in accordance with the common law. ³⁵ At a variant, the Aristotelian idea of “harmonious” governance recommended a generation earlier by Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (146-7). The affinity of commonwealth and common law which defined the English in the poetry of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. There is nothing in his “memorials” to suggest that the younger Cavalier spent much time in the library, but if he had alighted across Hooker’s Laws, or indeed any of Coke’s Reports, there is equally little to suppose that he would have found much to his distaste.

III. Whimsies

It is reasonable to suppose that Defoe wanted his readers to be intrigued by his creation, to spot the incidents, the incongruities, and the evasions. The art of the picaresque.³⁶ And, as a consequence, to engage some more whimsical reflections, some “virtual” history, to use a fashionable phrase. It is in the spirit of incidental or “contingent” history, playing along the diminishing margins of the factual and the fictive.³⁷ We will contemplate three whimsies; each of which is teased in the Preface to the Memoirs. The first wonders what the Cavalier did next. The second asks if he might not, somehow, have fought on the wrong side. The third invites us to think more closely about how we might, as historians, read his “memorials.”

          What next?

The Memoirs finishes in something of a rush. The Preface wonders the possibility that there might be a later volume of “Memorials” somewhere, awaiting discovery. But then thinks not, surmising instead that the Cavalier would be so appalled by the “Dissentions and Factions” of the Restoration that he would not have cared “to trouble himself.” He might even have gone “abroad again,” like Clarendon, in the end, or Ludlow (4). Or he might not. Leaving the reader to speculate: what did he do?

Fifty-two at the time of the Restoration, a good age, especially for a professional soldier. Retirement is a possibility. We might imagine him as Andrew Marvell described Sir Thomas Fairfax in later middle age, retiring to his gardens at Appleton, turning over borders and digging in tubers. Evenings spent musing together on the “pricking leaf” of conscience which “shrinks at every touch.”³⁸ Sunlight evening in Shropshire then, chatting with his father, writing up his “memorials,” and salving his own conscience in the process? Maybe, though he hardly seems the retiring type.

A couple of other possibilities occur, better suiting the cavalier temperament. A “knight of the road,” perhaps, roaming heathlands terrifying unwary travellers with threats of unscheduled dance routines. Macaulay included a famous account of the legendary highwayman, Claude Duvall, in his celebrated History of England. How he had “stopped a lady’s coach, in which there was booty of four hundred pounds; how he took only one hundred, and suffered the fair owner to ransom the rest by dancing a coranto with him on the heath.”³⁹ The “knights” were very much a Victorian invention, commonly associated with dispossessed “cavaliers” like Duvall. The renowned society-artist William Powell Frith devoted 1859 to painting Duvall and his “fair” lady. William Harrison Ainsworth famously made a picaresque hero of Dick Turpin.⁴⁰ The real Turpin was a sociopathic thug who passed his spare evenings beating up farmers and raping their maids.

A harsher reality, which might make us hope that Defoe’s Cavalier found something else to do in his semi-retirement. Go to sea perhaps? A life on the ocean waves, looking for treasure, adopting parrots and drinking copious amounts of rum. Defoe was fascinated by pirates. By the time that the Memoirs appeared, he was already plotting out his pirate-novel, Captain Singleton.⁴¹ Again, though, the reality of pirate-life was rather different, as readers of both would discover. Day after day sat in the scorching sun, mending sails and eating broiled turtle.

The realism, as ever with Defoe, militates against the romance. The extent to which Defoe fits the mould of the picaresque writer remains a matter of critical conjecture, uneasily dependent on whether there is a mould. The tendency to set up romantic heroes, only to bring them crashing back to the ground, presents a problem. We might even conjecture something of a revisionist in Defoe, albeit borrowing a term that would have meant nothing in the moment: the Cavalier as an anti-hero, ending up disillusioned with war, with the King and his cause, with the very idea of a being a cavalier?⁴² Which bring us to our next whimsy.

The Incidental Cavalier?

Put plainly, did Defoe’s Cavalier fight on the wrong side in the English civil war? He could hardly be said to be an accidental cavalier. But he might be supposed to be an incidental one, who ended up fighting for the King as much by chance as conviction.⁴³ If, we might wonder, his dad had been a parliamentarian, might the Cavalier have fought under Fairfax instead? Probably. He would have been just as happy, likely happier. We have already noted his broader indifference to matters of political principle, and his admiration for the “puritan” militancy of the army of Gustavus Adolphus. We might, in this circumstance, join our Cavalier on three particular evenings.

Starting on October 22, 1642, the day before the battle of Edgehill, where the Cavalier would have fought beside Lord George Stuart, 9^th Seigneur D’Aubigny and cousin to the King. George is the subject of one of Antony van Dyck’s most renowned cavalier paintings, dressed as a shepherd, with the inscription “Love is Stronger than Me.” George had two brothers, John and Bernard, subject of a still more renowned van Dyck, also painted in 1638.⁴⁴ Hard to imagine any more romantic-looking cavaliers, with their ringlets, satins, natty boots, and a suspicion of gingling too.⁴⁵ George probably quartered in Banbury that evening, like many officers in a local tavern, including our Cavalier. We might imagine a chance encounter, and a conversation, excitable, hopeful, inebriate. A drink to the health of the King, whose inadequacies as a military commander were not yet apparent, at least not for another twenty-four hours.

Very different three years later, on 13 June 1645, the evening before the battle of Naseby. All three Stuart brothers were dead. George did not survive Edgehill. John was disembowelled at the battle of Cheriton in March 1644. Bernard, who commanded the King’s Lifeguard, was shot to death a couple of months later at the battle of Rowton Heath. A lost generation of extremely well-dressed young men, dying hideously. It is poetic license which saves Defoe’s Cavalier from the same fate. A hardened man by summer 1645, as we have already noted, and perhaps a more questioning man too. A moment for sober reflection, then, as news arrived that Fairfax’s army was rather nearer than first thought, and considerably larger. Staring into a campfire, we can only wonder if the Cavalier, Stoic even then, had doubts—about the cause for which he was fighting, and the King, and his chances of surviving the day.

Just a mile away sat thousands of New Model troopers, some of whom would no doubt have been contemplating similarly. Most, though, would have been assured that God was on their side and that victory was certain; as it had been for most of the previous twelve months. And, most intriguingly, of course, thinking as Defoe would surely have thought, had he been alive in that moment. It is hard to imagine a young Defoe enlisting in any army other than the Parliamentarian in summer 1642. Facing down his Cavalier, and his King, at Edgehill perhaps? At the least, marching out to Turnham Green a few weeks later, having joined one of Philip Skippon’s “Trained Bands,” along with thousands of other eager young London apprentices.⁴⁶ Legend has it that Defoe left London in spring 1685 to join the Duke of Monmouth’s fated West Country uprising against King James II, similarly eager. Which, if true, suggests that he was up for an adventure, as well as a scrap.

Our third evening takes us to the balmier surroundings of the French Riviera. Montpellier to be precise, some time in spring 1668. The home, in that moment, of the recently exiled Sir Edward Hyde. Given time to make a reasonably graceful exit, pending impeachment charges, Hyde had left England the previous November. He spent the best part of three years in Montpellier, much of it bringing together drafts of his Life and History. Lawrence does not appear to have made it to Montpellier, though he did get as far as Moulins, where his father moved in 1670.

Sadly, few of Sir Edward’s family, and fewer friends still, appear to have made the same effort. So, if the Cavalier did, he might have expected a warm welcome, an opportunity to reminisce together, over a glass of port or three.⁴⁷ They were of an age; Sir Edward was born just a few months after the Cavalier, and had, after all, fought on the same side (insofar as Sir Edward had actually gone to war, as opposed to spending his time desperately advising his King not to). Pushed ever further from the King’s ear, Hyde had ended up serving as tutor to Prince Charles, accompanying him into exile in early 1646, at which point he started writing up a History. ⁴⁸

They would, surely, have talked about the King, his mistakes mostly. They might, at the Cavalier’s prompting, have made comparison with Gustavus, Fairfax too, Oliver Cromwell even. The Cavalier does not have much to say about Cromwell. But Hyde’s History did, in studiously compromised terms, describing a man of undoubted “mischief,” but also of “courage, industry and judgment” (Clarendon, 861-4). They would surely have talked about how the war had been lost too, and the consequences for both of them. Sage nodding at the thought that the King’s greatest failing was not heeding their counsel. The Cavalier claims that he only “once” made a “Proposition to his Majesty,” recommending the urgent consolidation of forces after Naseby, which was ignored (247). Sir Edward cast the entire History around the same theme: always ignored when it really mattered.

They would have discussed the Restoration too, the themes of fate and ingratitude, and presumably a fair bit on how to write a “memoirs.” How hard should they try to write a “true” account; to what extent could they import their own impressions and prejudices? At what point might their respective “memoirs” drift over the murky line which purports to define the historical from the fictional? They might, in passing, have wondered about the wisdom of writing the kind of Preface that Lawrence would add in 1703. Sir Edward might have appreciated the filial gesture, even if it went against his deeper instinct, not to aggravate a monarch. The Cavalier might have expressed greater doubts, of the kind which have encouraged some Defoe scholars to wonder if the Memoirs were written less to confute the History than its Preface.⁴⁹ This brings us to our final whimsy, to wonder the extent to which our incidental Cavalier might also have been an incidental historian.

          The Incidental Historian?

The “great seventeenth-century time,” as Dickens termed it, retained its fascination. It can be credibly argued that the shaping of English historical writing was, in large part, animated by histories of this moment. Whig history was all about cherishing the “great and glorious” revolution, and its prequel, the English civil war. And romanticizing it. There is no better example than Macaulay’s History of England, the first volume of which was published, by no coincidence, in 1848, the “year of revolutions.” This was in large part to convince middle England that, unlike their continental counterparts, they did not need another revolution. At the very centre of the History is the famous account of the coronation of William and Mary, on February 13, 1689. Macaulay invites the reader inside Westminster Abbey to witness the moment when Lord Halifax offers the crown, on terms. And then back out to join the cheering crowds and wonder at such a “peculiar” revolution thus “consummated” (Lord Macaulay, 286-7). We might surmise Defoe amongst their number; he certainly took part in the Lord Mayor’s pageant a few months later.⁵⁰

It was precisely this conversational tone which made coming generations of revisionists shake their heads in despair. Thomas Carlyle, S.R. Gardiner, C.H. Firth, each revisiting the same “great” time, to make it reassuringly duller. None would have seriously countenanced the possibility that the Memoirs of a Cavalier could be read as history. Neither, most certainly, would Herbert Butterfield, whose Whig Interpretation of History was perhaps the most brutal of all revisionist critiques. Butterfield was not against historians engaging the “imaginative sympathy” of readers, but he was against history written as if by “strolling minstrels and pedlars of stories.”⁵¹ Historians are not storytellers.

Or maybe they are. The reinvestment of history as art, as a matter of writing truths, as well as trying to discover them. History as the “description” of possibilities, an expression of “poetic justice” indeed, just as likely found in Shakespeare or Dickens or Defoe.⁵² Trying to reconcile the more and less poetic, Richard Evans deploys a nice metaphor in his Defence of History. There is a path for the historian to follow in the pursuit of facts, but there is also time to pause and have a poke about in the “verges and ditches,” to see what might have been cast aside (Evans, 244).

Searching out incidents, we might say, and peculiarly resonant for the historian of the eighteenth-century, certainly for anyone familiar with the related art of the picaresque and the petite histoire, as epitomized at the end of the century by Horace Walpole. “I write casual memoirs,” Horace once proclaimed, “I draw characters, I preserve anecdotes, which my superiors, the historians of Britain, may enclose into their weighty annals or pass over at the pleasure.”⁵³ Horace knew the difference, and he knew it was contrived. A historian who loved nothing better than poking about in the “verges,” Horace was the supreme “self-fashioner,” not just in how he wrote his history, but in how he lived his life as a historian.

Precisely the same is true of Daniel Defoe, another historian who, as Tom Paulin supposes, appreciated that history is an art-form precisely because it is written from the imagination, derived from “anecdote, petite histoire, lodged in the memory,” and then re-shaped to write the narrative (Paulin, xv). John Richetti, too, recognizing in Defoe a writer who worked “from particular anecdote and vividly remembered experience outwards towards generality” (36). In a slightly different context, Defoe termed it “Writing History by Inches.” ⁵⁴ Smaller stories writing bigger histories.

Which is exactly what the Preface to the Memoirs advertises: a history which is “embellished with Particulars which are nowhere else to be found, that is the Beauty we boast of.” Thus, the exciting accounts of munitions-raids near Nuremberg, and mad scrambles across Bramham Moor trying to evade Parliamentarian search-parties. The “Particulars” of these stories “so preserved, so nicely, and so agreeably describ’d” (4). A compromise, of course, having made so much of provenance, and the integrity of the author and his “memorials,” but justified in the simplest of terms. For “do those Relations,” discovered in texts such as the History of the Rebellion, “give any of the beautiful Ideas of things formed in this Account?” (3). A question of the more leading variety. And probably one best avoided that balmy evening in the south of France.

 Newcastle University

Notes

¹ The latter is held in the National Maritime Museum in London.

² For a commentary on Defoe’s slightly dandy-ish traits, see West, 13 and 74.

³ The place of the Memoirs in the canon is the subject of some familiar speculation, but few seriously dispute Defoe’s authorship. In their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, Furbank and Owen conclude, at 193, that Defoe’s authorship is at least “probable,” despite the fact the Memoirs was first attributed to Defoe by the “rascally” Francis Noble in 1784.

⁴ For contrasting views here, see Backscheider, 124, and Novak, 591.

⁵ The critical history on “new” historicism and cultural materialism is vast. An original statement is found in Greenblatt.

⁶ The Memoirs is not the only “historical” novel that Defoe wrote, of course. There is also, obviously, The Journal of a Plague Year. For a discussion of the Journal as an “incidental” novel that speaks not just to its moment but to ours, see Ward, “Henry Foe’s Dilemma,” 175-95.

⁷ The first tabloid journalist it has been surmised, working for the first “prime minister” who appreciated the need for a “spin-doctor.” See West, xvi, 93.

⁸ Pilloried on three occasions in July 1703, at Cornhill, Cheapside and Temple Bar. Before an impressed Harley paid Defoe’s bail. The essay went to the darkest edge of satire, recommending some “gentle and easy methods” with which the “contagion” of dissent might be “rooted out,” including the execution or banishment of the “ring-leaders.” In Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, 141-3.

⁹ The Memoirs of the Church of Scotland appeared in 1717, two years after The Family Instructor.

¹⁰ For this affinity in Defoe’s novels, see Gladfelder, 33-8.

¹¹ See MacNeill, 1-2, and also Seager, 481, 505.

¹² In the moment Defoe was particularly worried by reports of plague in Marseilles.

¹³ The 1715 rebellion is well-documented. The 1719 rebellion was something of a damp-squib. Comprising some scattered Jacobite levies and a small Spanish expeditionary force, which landed at Stornoway. It all ended a few weeks later with a comprehensive defeat at the battle of Glen Shiel. For the Memoirs as an anti-Jacobite novel, see Armstrong, 29; Alker, 46, and Mayer, 198-9.

¹⁴ The Atterbury plot, named after its chief protagonist, Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. Atterbury, along with other Jacobite Tories, hatched a plan to seize the Hanoverian royal family, along with the Tower and the Mint and various other buildings, in the hope of stimulating a popular rebellion. Easily uncovered by Walpole’s agents, Atterbury ended his days in exile in France.

¹⁵ As would become apparent three centuries later, when the original draft was recovered; or at least one part, covering the years 1660-1677. The definitive account of Ludlow’s make-over is found in Worden, chapters 1-4.

¹⁶ The conclusion reached by Worden, 117-21.

¹⁷ Preface to Lord Clarendon, vol.1, 4-5.

¹⁸ Preface, 4. A “personal vindication,” as Brian Wormald puts it in his Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640-1660, (Cambridge UP, 1989), at xxxvi.

¹⁹ A ridiculous editorial “vanity,” according to Anne. Lawrence was shortly after relieved of his duties as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and advised to keep his distance from Court.

²⁰ Hume would famously read a Tory-glossed prologue to the “glorious” revolution, a text which “pleases us at the same time as we disapprove it.” Too prejudicial, but still evincing “imagination and sentiment” (Hume, 154). Burke similarly. Even Catharine Macaulay. Hardly sympathetic to the politics, but acknowledging that there was no more “faithful account of the facts” of the “great rebellion.” See Hill, 27.

²¹ An edition published in 1750 would suppose that they were the “memoirs” of Colonel Andrew Newport, a royalist. The real Newport was, though, only a child in the 1630s, when the Memoirs begin.

²² To be contrasted with the “Right but Repulsive” roundheads. Phrases taken from Sellar and Yeatman, 75. Silly in one sense, brilliantly perceptive in another.

²³ See here Walkden, 1066-7.

²⁴ Various “skirmishes” about plunder and booty interject the narrative (68, 70). It is noticeable that the Cavalier prefers to receive his plunder by proxy, leaving others to do the pillaging. There is an oblique reference to mercenaries later in the text when the Cavalier reflects on why he fought for the King in the civil wars. Likening himself to a “Swiss, that not car’d which Side went up or down, so I had my Pay” (125).

²⁵ See Alker, 61, noting the “slippage from observer” to “perpetrator of atrocity.”

²⁶ Made most explicit, perhaps, in the “Design” to capture the “magazine” at Freynstat (102-3).

²⁷ Second wife of Henry IV, Marie would eventually be retired by her son Louis XIII. In 1630, though, very much at the height of her powers.

²⁸ Instead being persuaded to wander back into the East Midlands to lay siege to a couple of castles, most notably Lord Say’s house at Broughton.

²⁹ In Richetti, Defoe, 93.

³⁰ For the definitive statement, see Morrill, chapters 2 and 3.

³¹ Leighton had published a treatise entitled An Appeale to Parliament, or Sion’s Plea Against Popery.

³² The Uxbridge negotiations were conducted during the first three weeks of February 1645. By which time, as the Cavalier appreciates, the military situation for the King looked precarious. The parliamentary demands were stringent, and included the King taking the Solemn League and Covenant. His counter-proposals were drafted by, amongst others, Sir Edward Hyde, and offered instead a bill for the easing of “tender consciences.” The negotiations failed.

³³ An “odd” conclusion intended to unsettle the reader, and cast a larger doubt over the ‘credibility’ of the ‘memoirs’, according to Alker (66).

³⁴ See Walkden, 1063-4 and 1076-7, suggesting that, if anything, Defoe was ironizing the chivalric ideal.

³⁵ See D. Smith.

³⁶ Characteristic of the “criminal” picaresque in particular, according to Gladfelder, 33-8.

³⁷ See White, 27-9, 107-11, and Rorty, 5-6.

³⁸ Marvell, lines 57-8, in Kermode and Walker, 64. For a longer account of Marvell at Appleton House, see N. Smith, 96-101.

³⁹ Quoted in Sharpe, 38. Duvall operated around north London and the “home” counties during the later 1660s. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1670.

⁴⁰ In his 1834 novel Rookwood: A Romance. Which contained the famous account of Turpin’s overnight ride from London to York. Which did not happen, and could not have happened. The idea, interestingly, came from an account of the similarly legendary highway-man, “Swift Nicks,” which Ainsworth discovered in Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, which appeared between 1724 and 1726.

⁴¹ It is possible that he went on to write a very large History of the Pyrates, though authorial provenance is contested. See here Grasso, 21-3.

⁴² Or at least the idea of being a cavalier of the “heroic” variety. See here MacNeill, 5-8, suggesting that the Memoirs might be read as a critique of shifting perceptions of the cavalier as a “gentleman.”

⁴³ See Seager, 496, suggesting that the Cavalier’s choice of affiliation was as much a result of “circumstances.”

⁴⁴ Entitled Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart.

⁴⁵ Gingling referred to sound made when a spur spun around; an affectation commonly associated with overly-dashing cavaliers.

⁴⁶ Arrayed to deter the King’s march on London. A “shameful” moment, the Cavalier recalled, of the King’s ensuing decision to turn back (173-4).

⁴⁷ Clarendon had a fine “palate,” as the History confirms, and was riddled with gout from middle age.

⁴⁸ The itinerary took them from the Scilly Isles, to Jersey, and then France. Lawrence confirmed that Clarendon began drafting his History whilst in Jersey.

⁴⁹ See here Walken, 1071-2.

⁵⁰ As a member of a Royal Regiment of “Volunteer Horse.” The same Regiment formed part of the guard of honour when William first entered London in December 1688.

⁵¹ Butterfield, 11-13, 39-41, 64.

⁵² See Nussbaum and Rorty, 5-6.

⁵³ In Mowl, 257. Walpole developed his liking of the petite histoire following a tour round France, during which he met Voltaire.

⁵⁴ In an essay on French foreign policy. See Richetti, 93.

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