IN 1154, MUHAMMAD al-Idrisi drew one of the most detailed medieval world maps, the Tabula Rogeriana, for King Roger II of Sicily (Fig. 1). The map reflects the ancient geographical theory that Africa’s eastern and western rivers share a source. This image of Africa had a longstanding effect on how Europeans conceptualized the continent’s interior, one that lasted well into the eighteenth century. As late as the 1730s and 40s, travelers were still searching for conclusive evidence on whether the Niger, the Gambia, and the Senegal were three different rivers or one and whether they converged with the Nile in the hinterland. In Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738), for instance, he points out that both Herodotus and al-Idrisi suggest that “a Branch of the Nile runs westward, and after a very long Course falls into the Atlantick Ocean…by the Gambia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, being augmented in its Passage by all the Waters which fall to the South of Mount Atlas” (28). Moore proposes, as further evidence for this, the fact that hippopotamuses and crocodiles inhabit both the Nile and the Gambia and that the two rivers exhibit similar flooding patterns (28-29).ⁱ

Not simply an abstract geographical quandary, the question of whether Africa’s western and eastern waterways connected shaped Europe’s economic and imperial engagement with the continent. In his introduction to John Newbery’s World Displayed (1759), Samuel Johnson writes that the Portuguese were told by an ambassador from Benin that a Christian country lay to the east (Abyssinia) and that “by passing up the river Senegal [the Christian king’s] dominions would be found” (xxvi). It is only after attempts to find this overland route failed that the Portuguese began sailing to Ethiopia around the Cape of Good Hope (xxviii). Similarly, British explorers like George Thompson (1618) and Richard Jobson (1620) sailed up the Gambia in the hopes that, rather than crossing the Sahara as Arabic traders did, they would be able to tap into “the golden trade, by the South-parts” (Jobson 4-5). These fantasies of access went hand-in-glove with descriptions of Africa as a land packed with untold wealth found in geographies such as Leo Africanus’s History and Description of Africa (trans. 1600), which described Sahel cities rich and cosmopolitan, or Olfert Dapper’s Description of Africa (trans. 1670), which included an image of West Africans casually scooping gold out of a stream.ⁱⁱ The discovery of a hydraulic network that spanned the continent would enable access to Africa’s interior ivory fields and gold mines, the location of which African potentates kept secret well into the nineteenth century, and it would allow Europeans to sidestep indigenous brokers.ⁱⁱⁱ Goods might also then be transported between Europe and the East Indies without needing to be shipped around the Cape or through Ottoman waters.^iv

Early maps of Africa echoed these fantasies. “Geographers, in Afric maps” may have “o’er unhabitable downs/ Place[d] elephants for want of towns” (180-82), as Jonathan Swift once quipped, but far more frequently, they placed major waterways where there are none. Maps by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1635), John Senex (1721), and Herman Moll (c. 1715) all show the major western rivers and the Nile within centimeters of one another, flirting if not outright connecting, and all three add the Congo River into the mix, indicating that it, too, might be a tributary of the Nile that extends all the way through the southwest quadrant of the continent (Figs. 2-4). ^v Their cartouches and the decorative details make promises about what one would find if one followed these rivers. Senex’s cartouche shows an African figure bent over and gathering armloads of elephant tusks scattered on the ground. Elephants and rivers are inextricably coupled in the center of Blaeu’s map and occupy more of the interior than do human settlements. The geographical story that such maps tell far exceeded the empirical data available to Europeans at the time.

Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720) enters this discourse about Africa’s rivers in ways that test the limits of early Enlightenment mapping practices. David Livingstone argues that a map’s “cultural power” (154) comes from the way it is distanced from the place it represents: such “uncoupling of text and context gives the impression that the map discloses universal truth” (158). Captain Singleton closes this distance again. Text and context are rejoined as the eponymous protagonist and a troop of Portuguese mutineers use a contemporary map of Africa to navigate from Madagascar to the European forts on the Gold Coast. The resulting narrative increasingly mirrors the story that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps told about Africa.^vi Following a serendipitously placed network of rivers through the center, Singleton and the crew reach the west coast so wealthy from the gold and ivory littering the interior that critics have read the text as unrepentant propaganda for the Royal African Company.^vii However, as Singleton moves further away from the well-documented coasts into the largely unknown center, his geographical descriptions also become increasingly incredulous, haunted by contradictory details and zoologically impossible beasts that provoke sensory stupefaction. As the text aligns early Enlightenment mapping conventions with Singleton’s suspect accounting practices, the image of “universal truth” showcased by maps, both inside and outside the text, is splintered.

Defoe’s interest in geography has been well noted, though it is often assumed that he was mimicking and appropriating, and not necessarily commenting on, the methods of his day.^viii Pat Rogers writes, for example, that “there is something mechanical about the mode of narration” in Captain Singleton, that “it is rather too easy to see Defoe poring over his maps and geography books at home” (113). This image is warranted by Defoe’s own recommendations in The Behavior of Servants in England Inquired Into (1726) and A New Family Instructor (1732) that any time one reads a history or a travelogue, they ought to do so with the appropriate maps open in front of them (47, 13). But Defoe was not an uncritical consumer of geography. He bookends his History and Principal Discoveries and Improvements with the caution that “What’s yet discover’d only serves to show/ How little’s known, to what there’s yet to know” (iv, 240), and he suggests that true knowledge of the world only comes through slow and “imperfect . . . gradations” as confirmed fact is built upon confirmed fact (305). He was aware that very real barriers prohibited Europeans from gaining ground in Africa, either literally or epistemologically. As he writes in the Atlas Maritimus and Commercalis (1728):

tho the Nile, the Niger, and the Congo are all great Rivers, yet they are navigable so little a way, or their Navigation is so interrupted by Cataracts and Water-falls, or by long overflowing of the Waters, or by the violent Currents, that there is no Correspondence by them. (263)

Access to the continent’s gold is equally stymied: the Europeans “have not a Mark of Gold in the whole Trade, but what we must get of the Negroes by fair trading . . . it is brought down from the Inland Countries by the Negroes, nor can we tell particularly from what Part of the Inland Countries it comes” (270). Though Defoe was enthusiastic about colonial projects in Africa and believed that, if Europe fully invested in the continent, it would “out-do in Profit to us the Commerce of both the Indies” (History 302), he also cautioned against undertaking “dangerous and impracticable Projects, such as mad Men cannot, and wise Men will not meddle with” and believing in “dark Schemes and unintelligible Proposals, which have neither probability of success to encourage the attempt, or rational foundation” (vii).^ix Captain Singleton, I argue, tempers its own colonial fantasies as it questions the rational foundation of European ideas about Africa’s rivers and cautions the reader not to be taken in by geographical representations that elide empirical data with speculative infilling.

Implausible though Singleton’s trek across the interior may appear, Defoe positions it within very real eighteenth-century discussions about African geography and navigation. Their journey summons in reverse the routes that men like George Thomson, Richard Jobson, and Bartholomew Stibbs hoped to discover by traveling east on West Africa’s rivers. Like the explorers of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travel narratives, Singleton and the sailors are tasked with figuring out the most efficient way to traverse Africa, with little knowledge of what lies ahead other than bits of empirical data, hearsay, personal experience, and information from indigenous guides. However, unlike their historical counterparts, who turned around when they reached the places where the Gambia or the Senegal Rivers were no longer navigable, Singleton and his crew push on. The entire continent sits between them and Europe, and the only way out is through. As the marooned sailors debate the best course to take, they consider, and then discard, the more conventional ways that Europeans got around Africa. They can’t build a boat large enough to take them east to Goa or to sail south around the Cape. Like Robinson Crusoe, Singleton has already spent time in Barbary captivity, and he fears that sailing north will result in being “killed by the wild Arabs, or taken and made Slaves of by the Turks” (38). This conversation sketches Africa’s eastern coastline and lays out the size and scope of the task before the men. It also reminds the reader how little about Africa’s interior had actually been documented and that the detailed travel accounts that Europeans did have only describe a tiny portion of the overall landmass. As Singleton puts it, “we were upon a Voyage and no Voyage, we were bound by some where and no where: for tho’ we knew what we intended to do, we did really not know what we were doing” (emphasis original).^x By describing their trajectory as both “a Voyage” and “no Voyage,” Singleton squeezes his account into the space between experiential travel and imaginative speculation, on the threshold of the known and the unknown. The starting place and the goal—the coasts—are clear, but the path that joins them is not.

The men try to decide how to accomplish the first step of this non-voyage—crossing the Mozambique Channel—and their debate reiterates the piecemeal nature of European knowledge about Africa. The sailors first turn to the locals of Madagascar. As Singleton points out, their “Correspondence with the Natives was absolutely necessary,” not only to ensure provisions and a place to stay while they gather their resources, but also for information about how to proceed (45). When they ask their African hosts about the journey, their response is that “there was a great Land of Lions beyond the sea” (46). So, the men share the lore that they have each heard about the distance between the island and the mainland. “Some said it was 150 Leagues, others not above 100. One of our men that had a Map of the World shewed us by his Scale, that it was not above 80 Leagues. Some said there were Islands all the way to touch at; some say that there were no islands at all” (46). No one type of information is more authoritative than another in this jumbled discussion. The map, though ostensibly a text that “discloses universal truth,” is not trusted above local testimony or hearsay. It, too, is squeezed into the space between experiential travel and imaginative speculation.

In fact, Captain Singleton cautions the reader throughout the first half of the narrative that seemingly objective and empirical statements are not to be taken at face value. The most obvious example of this is the extent to which Singleton himself blends the rhetoric of scientific observation with the duplicity of his piratical character.^xi As most travelers to Africa did in the early eighteenth century, Singleton adopts the role of scientific observer throughout the text.^xii The Gunner, a man who Singleton describes as “An excellent Mathematician, a good Scholar, and a compleat Sailor,” teaches Singleton everything he knows about “the Sciences useful for Navigation, and particularly in the Geographical Part of Knowledge” (73). From this education, Singleton knows what to include in his account about geographical features, weather patterns, currents, plants and animals, etc. Jason Pearl compellingly observes that, as Singleton adopts the trappings of empiricism, his narrative plays out “a dynamic exercise, moving back and forth between experimental and abstract forms of knowledge” (109). Indeed, Singleton translates specific observations about the local landscapes into the retrospective language of the global throughout the text, inviting the reader to consider the relationship between the two and how one is transformed into the other.

However, Singleton notes multiple times that he “kept no journal” of his travels (4, 6, 52), casting suspicion on his use of scientific discourse and on his representation of Africa, even as he builds a narrative treasure-trove of gold, ivory, and slaves, ready for the taking. If the lack of reliable records is not reason enough to distrust the consistency of his methods, he tells the reader early and outright that “[thinking him] honest [would be] a very great mistake” (7). Hans Turley points out that critical readings of the novel tend to divide Singleton’s piratical adventures in the second half from his overland journey in the first, which “can be seen as a precursor to such novels as Heart of Darkness and other colonial and post-colonial works” (200). Yet, Singleton’s piratical character is part and parcel of Defoe’s commentary on the geographical strategies frequently used to represent Africa. By being honest about his dishonesty, performing his own version of the classic liar’s paradox, Singleton not only renders the boundary between truth and falsehood unstable; he throws his narrative into epistemological flux.^xiii His account is neither a text that simply lies, nor one that divulges truth, but one that unapologetically collapses divides among science, speculation, and even intentional misdirection. His story is of a voyage and of no voyage, as he says, and it is impossible to tell where the accounting ends and the tales begin.

This instability has consequences not only for Singleton’s own representation of the continent, but also for those that the text invokes and evokes: the maps in Captain Singleton are put on the stand as well. Africa’s waterways, and the narratives that surrounded them dating back to classical texts, are both the physical and metaphorical guideposts of this examination. If they can agree on nothing else, Singleton says, “we all knew, if we could cross this Continent of Land, we might reach some of the great rivers that run into the Atlantick Ocean” (65), a notion that would have been reflected in whatever map they are carrying with them, as even a cursory glance of some of the most common ones shows (Figs. 2-4). Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the Gunner, that “excellent mathematician,” is the possessor of the maps, and Singleton refers to him as “our guide” throughout. But true to the scene in which the map is lumped in with other kinds of speculative discourse, it does not turn out to be a particularly steadfast tool, though it is a successfully coercive one, convincing Singleton and the sailors of its dependability even as it turns out to be wrong time and time again.

At one point, for instance, the Gunner is convinced that he’s found the Nile, or at least the lake that the Nile comes out of:

In three days march we came to a River, which we saw from the Hills, and which we called the Golden River, and we found it run Northward, which was the first Stream we had met with that did so; it run with a very rapid current, and our Gunner pulling out his Map, assured me that this was either the River Nile, or run into the great Lake; out of which the River Nile was said to take its Beginnings: and he brought out his Charts and Maps, which by his Instruction, I began to understand very well: and he told me, he would convince me of it, and indeed he seemed to make it so plain to me, that I was of the same Opinion. (120-21)

Singleton, who thinks by this point that he “undertand[s maps] very well,” has been seduced by the “plainness” of the maps and the Gunner’s explanation of them. Yet, a few pages later, they encounter another river, one that’s so big that they mistake it for the sea, and as Bob tells us, “My friend the Gunner, upon examining, said, that he believed he was mistaken before, and that this was the River Nile, but was still of the Mind, that we were before, that we should not think of a Voyage into Egypt that Way” (136). Shortly thereafter, the men have a discussion over what direction to turn next, which plots out the west coastline, just as their initial debate over how to get off of Madagascar plotted out the east. They are once again “bound by some where and no where.” Though Singleton wants the crew to go straight north in hopes of finding the Rio Grand (the Niger), the Gunner advises the crew to continue northwest in search of a tributary that runs into the Niger, the Gambia, or the Senegal Rivers. This “good Advice” was “too rational not to be taken” (147). After all, Singleton reminds us once more that the Gunner is “indeed our best Guide, tho’” it turns out “he happen’d to be mistaken [yet again] at this time.” These moments caution that seemingly objective and “plain” geographical representations, and in particular ones that suggest that the interior of Africa is filled with connected waterways large enough to be navigable by boat, can mislead and deceive.

By making the “Golden River” and the Nile one and the same, the text exposes the layers of this hydraulic fantasy. The Golden River is, of course, one of the nicknames for the Nile itself, which connotes its historical richness as the lifeblood of an ancient and wealthy civilization. The men are also literally pulling gold nuggets from the river with ease: “we seldom took up a Handful of Sand,” Singleton reports, “but we washed some little round Lumps as big as a Pin’s Head, or sometimes as big as a Grapestone, into our hands” (123). They find ivory as well, a “prodigious Quantity of Teeth” (117), “a hundred Ton of elephant’s teeth” (151). “They were no Booty to us,” Singleton laments, though the men “once thought to have built a large Canoe on purpose to have her loaded with Ivory.” They decide against it because they don’t yet know whether the path of rivers they are following will take them all the way through the continent. But once they find a village on the western side where they stay a few months with an English factor gone rogue, the English factor and several of the crew make two trips back into the interior and return with heaps of elephant tusks. Though it is unclear at times whether they will get the ivory all the way to the Dutch factory they are aiming for, Singleton tells us they ultimately do, via “the River, the Name of which I forgot, where we made rafts” (178). The fact that Singleton “forget[s]” the name of the river leaves open the possibility that any one of West Africa’s major rivers or their tributaries could lead directly into the abundant interior and join up with the source of the Nile, the Golden River. Such a connection promises both an immediate profit through the direct acquisition of gold and ivory and the long-term potential for sustainable trade. Indeed, it may not even be necessary to name which one of the western rivers leads to this wealth because perhaps they are, as some have argued, all one and the same.

Ivory and rivers replace human settlements in Singleton’s account as they do in Blaeu’s and Senex’s maps. However, Captain Singleton deconstructs this fantasy even as it repeats it. Singleton says early on in the narrative, “even the worst part of [Africa] we found inhabited” (62), and he and the crew are told by the indigenes of Madagascar “that there were a great many Rivers, many Lions, Tygers, and Elephants” on the mainland, but that there were also “People to be found of one Sort or another everywhere” (64). Whether Captain Singleton’s subsequent depiction of Africa as void of human settlement is a conscious bit of Singleton’s deception or just an inconsistency on Defoe’s part, it exemplifies the ways that contradictory or competing details about the continent often co-existed within the same representational space.^xiv This is the case even on maps that appear not to indulge in artistic speculation. Instead of filling the interior of his map with decorative detail like Blaeu, for instance, Herman Moll labels it “Parts Unknown,” but rivers run through these words, breaking them into pieces. The absence of knowledge denoted by the words is juxtaposed against the speculative presence of the rivers, which blend seamlessly with the inlets and outlets around the coast, whose positions have been scientifically verified. This juxtaposition throws into sharp relief the fact that longstanding fictions about where Africa’s access points might lead remained fundamental to how Europeans imagined Africa, even as mapmakers simultaneously acknowledged they had no empirical evidence to back up such hypotheses. After all, as Heraclitus pronounced, rivers are shifting signifiers: in eighteenth-century Africa, they were both conduits and barriers; they simultaneously facilitated and foiled penetration into the interior.

The farther Singleton and the crew move away from the coasts, the more vexed his own geographical discourse becomes. His representational strategies default to another longstanding story Europeans told about Africa’s waterways: that monstrous beasts stalk their banks. Unlike the illusion of unfettered access conjured by European depictions of African rivers, descriptions of the animals that lurk around their edges are emblematic of the limitations of European penetration into African spaces, the anxious shadows of colonial ambition. Real animals, like the crocodiles and hippopotamuses Moore cites as evidence that the Nile and the Gambia are connected, posed a danger to anyone, African or European, who traveled by river. Travelogues almost always include an obligatory brush with death via crocodile, including Singleton’s own: the Gunner has to kill one by “thrust[ing] the Muzzle of his Piece into her Mouth” because “no bullet would enter her through the hide” (116). When the Gunner thinks he has found the head of the Nile, they decide not to backtrack and follow it to Egypt in part because of “the innumerable Crocodiles in the River, which [they] should never be able to escape” (121). Such dangers were as much a part of how African rivers were imagined as their potential riches. Blaeu’s map may promise an interior full of elephant ivory, but if that ivory is going to be carried out along the major western waterways, crocodiles bar the way. And as the inhabitants of Madagascar warn Singleton, he’s unlikely to encounter the “great many rivers” of Africa without encountering its “Lions” and “Tygers” too.

While animals like crocodiles and hippopotamuses limit physical travel in texts about Africa, imagined creatures signify the limitations of epistemological access to the continent. As Pliny described in Book 8 of his Naturall Historie, African animals were thought to congregate around watering holes and breed across species:

so many strange shaped beasts, of a mixt and mungrell kind are there bred, whiles the males either perforce, or for pleasure, leape and cover the females of all sorts. From hence it is also, that the Greeks have this common proverb, That Africke evermore bringeth forth some new and strange thing or other. (200) ^xv

These hybrids break the rules of taxonomy and speciation that naturalists were developing in the early eighteenth century to quantify unknown places and their inhabitants, suggesting that Africa’s interior defies scientific categorization.^xvi

Defoe harkens back to Pliny’s proverb in other works to signify how Africa befuddles the senses of the European observer. In Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe and Xury are “anchored in the mouth of a little river,” in sub-Saharan Africa, “as soon as it is quite dark” they see “vast great creatures ([they] knew not what to call them) of many sorts, come down to the sea-shore and run into the water” (21-22). The creatures terrify Xury and Crusoe. Crusoe can’t name them or locate the place where they come from. He can’t separate them from the darkness of night. Because Crusoe “could not see” the creatures, could only hear their “horrible noises” and “hideous cries,” he concludes that “there was no going for us in the night upon that coast” (23). He exhibits the existential anxiety Roger Caillois describes when humans encounter creatures that can blend into their surroundings: a literal “fear of darkness” manifests as disorientation, even “depersonalization” (100). Rather than taming the land and its occupants through his eyes and his pen, the observer is stymied.

Similarly, as Singleton and the men are refreshing themselves on the shores of yet another “Great Lake of water,” they find themselves among “a prodigious Number of ravenous Inhabitants, the like whereof, tis most certain the Eye of Man never saw” (113). Singleton speculates, “I firmly believe, that never Man, nor a Body of Men, passed this Desart since the Flood, so I believe there is not the like Collection of fierce, ravenous, and devouring Creatures in the world; I mean not in any particular Place.” At night, Singleton and the crew are consistently surrounded by “a prodigious Number of Lions, and other furious Creatures, [they] know not what about them, for [they] could not see them” (118). Their wailing is an assault on the ears, “Noise, and Yelling, and Howling” coming from “all sides.” They are “terrible Beasts” that Singleton and his crew “could not call by their names” (131). As Singleton slips into this discourse of animal hybridity, it flags his deviation from systematized eyewitness reporting into chaotic frenzy, where things that ought not be coupled crossbreed, resulting in offspring that are confusing and strange at best and monstrous at worst, a perversion of scientific order. Africa’s interior is a “particular place” (unique) because the interior is not documented or documentable through its particulars. Its defining factors in the British imagination are speculative details and long told stories.^xvii

These eerie beasts are a critical counterpoint to the ivory and gold throughout the interior. Africa’s “open spaces are the space of the subhuman or the animal” in Captain Singleton, as Christopher Loar observes (134). The beasts’ “strange sound[s] . . . threate[n] death and madness” (136). But their uncanniness also belies the reliability of Singleton’s geographical representation. Because he can’t see, distinguish, or name any of the creatures, he is denied Adam’s dominion over the space, and he can no longer maintain the persona of the scientific observer who can objectively contain the world in a “grid of language,” as Foucault argues early naturalists did (113). As a result, the interior of Africa remains unmapped, for all intents and purposes, by the end of Singleton’s journey. It holds an embarrassment of riches, but it is also an illogical and inaccessible space, regardless of how seamlessly Singleton’s narrative connects it to the continent’s well-known and navigable coasts.

The result of Defoe’s recoupling of African maps and Africa in Captain Singleton results itself in a suspicious hybrid—a text that highlights the great distance between geographical representations and the places they purported to represent. Captain Singleton does not reproduce generic norms in a way that invites the reader to trust Singleton’s account as a probable reflection of Africa’s material reality. Rather, Captain Singleton “draws attention to” not just the “fabrication of all doctored accounts,” as Srinivas Aravamudan argues (81), but to the discursive and imaginative nature of all European representations of Africa’s interior in the early eighteenth century. Invoking maps within the text and evoking maps outside the text do not bring empirical or imperial security to Captain Singleton. Rather, the novel exposes the map as largely the product of speculative infilling rather than the product of measurements and observations from traditionally trustworthy sources. Maps, Captain Singleton reminds readers, are not universal truths over which European subjects have epistemological authority; rather, the hybridization between limited empirical data and global representation results in an unstable text. As Singleton’s own account mimics the narrative told by these early maps of Africa, it may create an alluring ideation of colonization and trade, but it also suggests that such appealing representations—like the piratical Singleton; like rivers themselves—embody a paradoxical duplicity.

Boston College

Figure 1. 1456 copy of Al-Idrisi’s world map. Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK. Wikimedia Commons. The lower left-hand landmass shows a river that stretches from the Nile Delta to the West African coast. The map is rotated 180 degrees from the original.

Figure 2. Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Africa (1635). Northwestern University Library, Evanston, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3. John Senex, A New Map of Africa from the Latest Observations (1721). Maps of Africa: An Online Exhibit. Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

Figure 4. Herman Moll, Africa, According to the Newest and most Exact Observations (c. 1715). Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 5. Relief Map of Africa (2013). Wikimedia Commons.

 

NOTES

WORKS CITED

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. Duke UP, 1999.

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

Baker, J. N. “The Geography of Daniel Defoe.” The Scottish Geographical Magazine 47.5, 1931, pp. 257-69.

Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. London, 1705.

Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-century British and American Culture. Cambridge UP, 2008.

Burwick, Fredrick and Manushag Powell. British Pirates in Print and Performance. Palgrave, 2015.

Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Ed. Claudine Frank. Trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish. Duke UP, 2003, pp. 89-105.

Defoe, Daniel. “An Account of the Commerce of the Several Countries on the Sea-Coast of Africa.” Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis. London, 1728, pp. 263-276.

—. The Behavior of Servants in England Inquired Into. London, 1726.

—. Captain Singleton. London, 1720.

—. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions. London, 1727.

—. A History and Principal Discoveries and Improvements. London, 1726.

—. A Hymn to Peace. London, 1706.

—. “On Learning.” Daniel Defoe: The Second Volume of his Writings. Ed. William Lee. London: 1862, pp. 435-439.

—. A New Family Instructor. London, 1732.

—. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. John Richetti. Penguin, 2003.

Feinberg, Harvey M. and Joseph B. Sodolow. “Out of Africa.” Journal of African History 43, 2002, pp. 255-61.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. Vintage, 1970.

Frohock, Richard. Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675-1725. Delaware UP, 2012.

Jobson, Richard. The Golden Trade: Or, A Discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians. London, 1623.

Johnson, Samuel. “Introduction.” The World Displayed. Vol. 1. London, 1759, pp. iii-xxxi.

Kiern, Tim. “Daniel Defoe and the Royal African Company.” Historical Research 61, 1988, pp. 243-47.

Knox-Shaw, Peter. “Defoe and the Politics of Representing the African Interior.” Modern Language Review 96.4, 2001, 938.

Livingstone, David. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago UP, 2003.

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

Moore, Francis. Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa. London, 1738.

Newman, Ian. “Property, History, and Identity in Defoe’s Captain Singleton.” SEL 51.3, 2011, pp. 565-83.

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

Pearl, Jason. Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2014.

Pliny the Elder. The Historie of the World: Commonly Called, the Natural Historie. Trans. Philemon Holland. London, 1634.

Rennie, Neil. Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas. Clarendon, 1995.

Rogers, Pat. “Speaking Within Compass: The Ground Covered in Two Works by Defoe.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15.2, 1982, pp. 103-13.

Scrimgeour, Gary. “The Problem of Realism in Defoe’s Captain Singleton.” Huntington Library Quarterly 27.1, 1963, pp. 21-37.

Snelgrave, William. A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade. London, 1734.

Swift, Jonathan. “On Poetry: A Rapsody.” Miscellanies, in Prose and Verse. Vol. 5. London, 1735, pp. 160-178.

Turley, Hans. “Piracy, Identity, and Desire in Captain Singleton.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.2, 1997, pp. 199-214.

Wear, Jeremy. “No Dishonour to be a Pirate: The Problem of Infinite Advantage in Defoe’s Captain Singleton.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24.4, 2012, pp. 569-596.

Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Pennsylvania UP, 2000.

 

I.

WASHED ASHORE after a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe walks distractedly about, wordlessly giving thanks to God for his reprieve, making “a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe,” and grievously lamenting the loss of his comrades (RC 41, n.284). Recalling the moment sixty years later as he writes his memoirs, Crusoe still finds it “impossible to express to the Life what the Extasies and Transports of the Soul are” when a man is saved out of the very grave. He resorts to quoting a line of verse to convey the confusion of joy and grief that he felt upon finding himself safe on shore: “For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first.”ⁱ The line is a talisman for a theme that runs throughout The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe—the power of joy, and its twin passion, grief, to render affected humanity speechless, ecstatic, even senseless. Crusoe experiences the overwhelming power of sudden joy not once, but sixteen times in the course of the first volume of his travels, and he is surprised by grief another twelve times.ⁱⁱ

Crusoe is aware that these moments have profound philosophical and spiritual significance, though he is unable to say what it is. Had he been a scholar, as Daniel Defoe was, he might have known that joy and grief (or sorrow) are the nearly indistinguishable passions in which, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, all other passions, and most narratives, terminate (Potkay 13-14). They differ only in their objects: joy tends towards the good, or union with God; grief tends towards evil, or separation from God. Of all the passions, they are the most likely to apprehend men and women suddenly, by surprise (Miller 63-4).

Of Robinson’s experiences of “sudden Joy,” the most surprising come in the course of his encounters with an unnamed figure whom he calls by such euphemisms as “my good old Captain,” “my old Patron, the Captain,” and “my old Portugal Captain” (RC 238, 240). Crusoe is profoundly affected three times by his encounters with this Portuguese captain, who treats him like a brother despite the national prejudices that separate them and the adverse historical circumstances in which they meet. It is the Portuguese captain who saves Crusoe from being lost at sea in a small boat, who carries him in freedom to Brazil and sets him up as a planter, and who, at the end of the first volume of his travels, restores his lost wealth. The extraordinary charity of the Portuguese captain, who is unrelated to Crusoe and seeks no return on his goodness, has not been fully explored by any of the commentators who have noticed him.ⁱⁱⁱ Most commentators see the captain’s kindness merely as an example of selfless humanity that does not require further examination, even though his goodness is an anomaly in Crusoe’s fictional world, which is populated largely by criminals, pirates, cannibals, mutineers, and renegades. The captain’s inexplicable goodness and his central role in the story are sufficient reasons to consider more closely his place in the history of Crusoe’s life.

II.

Crusoe’s first encounter with the Portuguese captain occurs soon after his escape from the North African port of Salé, after having been held in captivity for two years by a Turkish rover. A timeline of the significant dates in Crusoe’s life suggests that the year of his escape was 1654.^iv In that year, Oliver Cromwell dictated to King John IV the terms of a treaty of peace between England and Portugal, which ended an “undeclared war” that had begun around 1650.^v The treaty gave English merchants the right to trade with Portuguese colonies in Brazil, so long as the goods passed through Lisbon in transit. In the next year, 1655, an English fleet under Admiral Robert Blake forced the Bey of Algiers to repatriate the English slaves in his dominion, which would have included Crusoe (Napier 424).^vi Defoe may have chosen 1654 because, prior to that year, England and Portugal were still at war, and an Englishman would have been unwelcome on board a Portuguese ship; after 1655, it is unlikely that Crusoe would have been held as a slave by the Algerian pirates, thus precluding his escape, his subsequent adventures in Brazil, and his confinement on a Caribbean island. The year 1654 was therefore the most probable time in which Defoe could frame Crusoe’s friendly encounter with the Portuguese captain.

Fig. 1. “Crusoe picked up by the Portuguese Ship.” Engraved by W. J. Linton. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London: Cassell, Petter, & Galpin, 1863.

 

After escaping from his Algerian “Patron or Master” (18), Crusoe sails south in a small boat with Xury down the coast of Africa. After a voyage of about a month, Crusoe rounds Cape Verde and sees the Atlantic Ocean before him, with the Cape Verde Islands about 300 miles to windward. Uncertain about the safety of the mainland on his left and unsure if he can reach the Islands on his right, Crusoe faces the prospect of sailing on into the South Atlantic, with no landfall until he reaches Brazil, 2500 nautical miles distant. In this unhappy predicament, Xury cries to him, “Master, Master, a Ship with a Sail” (29). All ships at sea at this time had sails, so presumably the ship that Xury sees is a carrack, a square-rigged vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic, rather than a caravel, a coasting vessel with a lateen, or triangular sail (Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire 27-8, 207).^vii Crusoe deduces correctly that a carrack sailing westerly from the coast of Guinea must be a Portuguese ship carrying slaves. Crusoe is himself an escaped slave, though a European, so he knows that there is nothing to prevent the captain of the Portuguese ship from taking him prisoner, as well as Xury, and selling them both when they arrive in Brazil, particularly because Crusoe must assume that England and Portugal are still at war. In this “miserable and almost hopeless Condition” (30), Crusoe faces either a slow death at sea or life in servitude. His despair suddenly converts to “inexpressible Joy” when the ship’s captain, having discovered that he is an Englishman, “bad me come on board, and very kindly took me in, and all my Goods” (29). In gratitude for being delivered from his desperate circumstances, Crusoe offers “all I had to the Captain of the ship” (30). The Portuguese captain graciously declines Crusoe’s offer with a speech that is an example of Christian charity, such as one would expect to find in a sermon rather than on a slave ship at sea. The captain promises to treat this English stranger as he would hope to be treated himself in similar circumstances: he assures Crusoe that “I have sav’d your Life on no other Terms than I would be glad to be saved my self, and it may one time or other be my Lot to be taken up in the same Condition” (30). The captain’s speech is a plain-spoken paraphrase of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

In the Gospel according to Luke, the same ethical principle is presented dramatically. A lawyer challenges Jesus to explain the way to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks the lawyer what is written in the law, and he replies by quoting two commandments of Moses: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your Heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:25-8).^viii When the lawyer asks whom he should consider his neighbor, Jesus tells him the parable of the good Samaritan: A man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked by thieves, who wounded him and left him for dead. His body was passed by a priest and a Levite, neither of whom assisted him. A Samaritan, however, felt compassion for him, poured oil and wine on his wounds, conveyed him to an inn at Jericho, and provided for his care during his recovery. Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three has fulfilled Moses’s second command, and the lawyer answers, “He that showed mercy on him,” to which Jesus replies, “Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:29-37).

Defoe’s re-telling in Robinson Crusoe of the Samaritan parable makes use of several salient features of the original. The Portuguese were considered an inferior, mixed-race people by many Europeans, much as the Samaritans were regarded as inferior by the Jews, so the charity of the Portuguese captain is as extraordinary as the Samaritan’s mercy toward his “neighbor,” the traveler. The captain buys Crusoe’s boat and goods at a very generous price, as well as Crusoe’s boy Xury, though he might easily have confiscated these goods without payment. He promises to free Xury after ten years, thus granting Crusoe cover for his unchristian act of selling the boy’s liberty. The Portuguese captain pours oil and wine, albeit in the form of his kind words and deeds, on Crusoe’s fears and grief and carries him to Brazil (or, in the parable, the inn at Jericho), where his cure begins. He frees Crusoe of any debt for the passage and sets him up on a sugar plantation. He helps Crusoe obtain “a kind of a Letter of Naturalization,” which (many years later) Crusoe admits required him to profess himself a Roman Catholic (241).

Crusoe and his neighbor, an Anglo-Portuguese named Wells, are able to grow enough food in Brazil to subsist on, but very little more (31). By the intervention of his old friend the captain, who has not yet returned to Portugal, Crusoe is advised to write “Letters of Procuration” that will allow his banker in London to send money and goods to Lisbon, which the captain will re-export to him in Brazil. This seemingly complicated financial arrangement is, in fact, necessary for historical reasons: due to the provisions of the Anglo-Portuguese trade agreement of 1654, no English ships could travel directly from the British Isles to Brazil; all trade had to pass through Lisbon, where it was licensed for export and additional duties were paid (Boxer, “English Shipping” 213). The captain returns to Lisbon, where he receives a cargo of “all Sorts of Tools, Ironwork, and Utensils necessary for [Crusoe’s] Plantation” (33) and brings them in his own ship to Brazil. When the cargo arrives, Crusoe is “surprised with the Joy of it,” particularly because the captain has also bought for Crusoe, with his own commission of £5, a “Servant under Bond for six Years Service,” perhaps a replacement for Xury, whose sale Crusoe now regrets. Like the Samaritan who provides for the wounded man’s care at Jericho, and also promises further assistance when he returns, the captain plays an essential role in facilitating Crusoe’s transformation from slavery to a subsistence farmer to a capitalist planter. The captain’s service to Crusoe is an extraordinary act of charity, particularly surprising because it is performed by a person of a mixed, and thus supposedly inferior, race. Nothing would have prevented the captain from absconding with Crusoe’s goods and money in Lisbon, except his resolve to treat his neighbor as he would be treated himself. Crusoe’s joy proceeds from his discovery that such goodness may be found in the world, even in a Portuguese.

Unfortunately, the benevolent captain’s return to Lisbon prevents him from extending any further guidance to Crusoe, who is tempted by a “secret Proposal” from a company of merchants and planters in Brazil to undertake a slaving voyage to the coast of Guinea. As Crusoe knows, such a voyage was forbidden except to contractors who held an asiento from the Spanish government (Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire 330).^ix Prior to 1640, contracts to transport slaves to Brazil were granted to the Portuguese, but after the revolution in that year, there was no asiento until 1662, when Genoese merchants were granted contracts to convey slaves in ships from the (Dutch) West Indies Company and the (English) Royal African Company. All other traders were interlopers, subject to severe punishments. Presumably, if Crusoe had the guidance of “my kind Friend the Captain” (32), his head would not have been so “full of Projects and Undertakings beyond my Reach,” which were to “cast [him] down again into the deepest Gulph of human Misery that ever Man fell into” (34). Crusoe blames his subsequent misfortunes on his neglect of his father’s advice to live “a quiet retired Life,” but in fact, he had long since rejected that advice and had prospered without it. His misfortunes, including shipwreck in an ill-advised slaving voyage, are more likely due to the absence of the Samaritan-like counselor, the Portuguese captain, whose advice and assistance had twice brought him joy.

After his deliverance from a twenty-eight-year confinement on the island, Crusoe arrives back in England on the 11^th of June 1687, a date that was celebrated by many Protestants as the anniversary of the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated invasion of England in 1685 (Novak 82-6). (It is also very likely the time that Crusoe may be supposed to have read the poem by Robert Wild, a satirical welcome to the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 that was indirectly related to Monmouth’s Rebellion). Crusoe’s family, other than two sisters and two nephews, is “extinct,” meaning that his inheritance is gone, and his former benefactor, the widow who had invested his money for him, is now “very low in the World,” having lost both his money and her own as well (234). Defoe seems to use the coincidence of dates to suggest a comparison between Crusoe and Monmouth: both men went into exile, both suffered trauma upon their return, and both knew grief as a result of their reverses. There is, however, one major difference: Crusoe is to be saved again by his Samaritan, who binds up his wounds and makes him whole, while the Duke found no friends among the priests and courtiers.

At his lowest ebb since arriving on that other island, Crusoe resolves on a voyage to Lisbon in order to seek out news of his estate in Brazil. In Lisbon, he quickly locates the Portuguese captain who, more than thirty-five years earlier, had rescued him at sea. The captain remembers Crusoe and is as improbably good to him as he had been on their first meeting. He knows Crusoe’s old partner in Brazil and the stewards, both secular and religious, who hold Crusoe’s estate in trust; his own son is managing the plantation and has paid his father the first fruits of income in trust for Crusoe, which the old man has unfortunately lost. However, the old man is ready to give Crusoe all of his money on hand, plus a half interest in his ship. Defoe uses an unmistakable marker of what would later be called the sentimental novel to express the confusion of grief and joy that overtakes his hero: “I could hardly refrain Weeping at what he said to me,” Crusoe sniffs (237). When he wonders at the captain’s generosity, the captain admits that, while “it might straiten him a little,” the money is Crusoe’s, and “I might want it more than he” (237), another proof of the unworldly selflessness that the captain showed in their first encounter. The old man’s affection for him so touches Crusoe that, once again, “I could hardly refrain from Tears while he spoke” (237-8). When all of the accounts are cast up and all of Crusoe’s ships have come in, “I turned pale, and grew sick; and had not the old Man run and fetch’d me a Cordial, I believe the sudden Surprize of Joy had overset Nature, and I had dy’d upon the Spot” (239). This grave consequence of sudden joy is averted when a physician is called, who, by letting Crusoe’s blood, is able to give vent to his animal spirits and prevent his death. The confusion of joy and grief that deprives Crusoe of speech and threatens his life is forcefully expressed in the illustrations of Robinson Crusoe by J. J. Grandville (1840) and J. D. Watson (1864) (Figures 2 and 3).

Fig. 2. “Robinson Crusoe surprised by joy.” J. J. Grandville and others, Aventures de Robinson Crusoé. Paris: H. Fournier ainé, 1840.

Fig. 3. “Crusoe needs a Physician.” J. D. Watson. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1864.

Having accumulated and consolidated his capital, which had grown to an estate of some £5000 and an income of £1000 per year (240), Crusoe addresses the problem of what to do with his surplus wealth. In the absence of an international banking system, he must transport it back to England himself. A sea route would expose him to Algerine pirates or to shipwreck, both of which he fears from personal experience (242). Once again he turns to the Portuguese captain, whom he identifies first as “the old Man” (235), but who becomes “this ancient Friend” (237), “my good old Captain” (240), “My old Patron, the Captain” (240), and “my old Pilot” (243)—all euphemisms that stress the captain’s age, wisdom, and goodness. The old captain advises him to travel by land through Spain and France, crossing the Channel at Calais, thus greatly reducing his exposure to shipwreck or capture by pirates. The captain further assists him in forming a party of three English and two Portuguese merchants, who with two servants and Friday form a “little Troop” (243) under Crusoe’s leadership. This “little Troop,” which is transnational, multiracial, and unstratified by class, represents humanity in the allegorical reading of the Samaritan parable, which was codified by the patristic fathers of the Roman Church, among them Irenaeus, Origen, Ambrose, and Augustine. Origen was the first to identify the injured traveler in the parable as Adam, the “original” of humanity, who after the Fall is ministered to by Jesus, represented allegorically by the Samaritan (Roukema 63). Crusoe confirms this allegorical reading of the parable when he accepts the honor of leading the troop “as well because I was the oldest Man, as because I had two Servants, and indeed was the Original of the whole Journey” (243). If the Portuguese captain is analogous to the Samaritan, and the Samaritan is an allegorical representation of Jesus, then the captain is a latter-day personification of Jesus, and the joy that his acts of charity provoke in the Adamic Crusoe (who seems unaware of the allegory that explains his joy) may be more easily understood.^x

Even if it is granted that the captain’s goodness mimics that of the Samaritan and that the captain is thus an allegorical emblem of Jesus, it is still unclear why this captain should be Portuguese. The association of goodness with a Portuguese is extraordinary in that it radically contradicts the character of the Portuguese sailors, soldiers, and explorers that was generally held among the English, and perhaps even by Defoe.^xi The fullest expression in Defoe’s works of the English national prejudice against the Portuguese is The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, published in June 1720, ten months after the Farther Adventures and two months before the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. Bob Singleton receives his early education at the hands of the Portuguese, from whom, he says, “I learnt particularly to be an errant Thief and a bad Sailor” (Singleton 22). As the cabin-boy for the “old Pilot” of a Portuguese carrack, not unlike the slave ship in the first volume of Robinson Crusoe, Singleton learns “every thing that is wicked among the Portuguese, a Nation the most perfidious and the most debauch’d, the most insolent and cruel, of any that pretend to call themselves Christians, in the World” (23). Thus begins a long stream of invective against the Portuguese, whom Singleton describes as “the most compleat Cowards that I ever met with”; a people capable of “Thieving, Lying, Swearing, Forswearing, joined to the most abominable Lewdness”; a nation “so brutishly wicked . . . so meanly submissive when subjected; so insolent, or barbarous and tyrannical when superiour, that I thought there was something in them that shock’d my very Nature” (23). Putting these xenophobic and racist views in Singleton’s mouth, rather than his own, allows Defoe to both express them and, ultimately, disown them as Singleton’s hatred of the Portuguese is, like Crusoe’s wanderlust or Colonel Jack’s thieving, revealed as a perversity of youth from which he is to be cured through the charity of the Samaritan-like character, William.

Another instance of anti-Portuguese prejudice is found in the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Early in the story, Crusoe returns to his Caribbean island and speaks with one of his colonists, a “grave and very sensible Man,” who tells him that “it was not the Part of wise Men to give up themselves to their Misery, but always to take Hold of the Helps which Reason offer’d” (Farther Adventures 76). The man, who is a Spaniard, quotes a Spanish proverb, which Crusoe translates as “In Trouble to be troubl’d, / Is to have your Trouble doubl’d.” The man explicates his proverb by saying that

Grief was the most senseless insignificant Passion in the World; for that it regarded only Things past, which were generally impossible to be recall’d, or to be remedy’d, but had no View to Things to come, and had no Share in any Thing that look’d like Deliverance, but rather added to the Affliction, than propos’d a Remedy. (76)

He praises Englishmen for their “Presence of Mind in Distress,” while he laments that his own

unhappy Nation [Spain], and the Portuguese, were the worst Men in the World to struggle with Misfortunes; for that their first Step in Dangers, after the common Efforts are over, was always to despair, lie down under it, and die, without rousing their Thoughts up to proper Remedies for Escape. (76)

This disparaging stroke at the Portuguese, which resembles Singleton’s remark about Portuguese cowardice, appears at first to be gratuitous, but it serves Defoe’s narrative purpose by licensing English explorers to challenge the claims of Spain and Portugal to the exclusive right to settle colonies in the Americas on the grounds that these Iberian nations have, through their grief and neglect, turned away from God and forfeited their right to the land.^xii

In his non-fiction writings as well, Defoe exploits the national prejudice against the Portuguese in order to advance his political and colonialist goals. In the Review of June 1704, “Mr. Review” mocks the Portuguese army, which he says is led by a “Wooden General” (the statue of St. Anthony of Padua, a miracle worker, which was carried before the troops). This “Hobgoblin Officer,” he scoffs, leads his troops in a “Wooden C[au]se,” and he laughs, “here is an Army of Portuguese; an Army of Portuguese, An Army of Old Alms Women! we should say….” (Defoe, Review 203-4).^xiii Mr. Review’s sarcasm supports Defoe’s political argument that the “Portuguese war” must be fought with Anglo-Dutch troops, because the Spanish and Portuguese armies will make a “comedy” of it. At the other end of his writing career, in his Plan of the English Commerce (1728), Defoe encourages England to adopt Portugal’s colonial policy, even though Portugal itself is “an effeminate, haughty, and as it were, a decay’d Nation in Trade.” (Plan 121). Defoe claims that Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Africa currently import “above five Times as many [European manufactures] as were sent to the same Places, about 30 to 40 Years ago” (120), because the Portuguese cultivate their colonies as markets for their goods, rather than regarding the native populations as savage peoples to subjugate. The Portuguese, says Defoe, succeed by “bringing the naked Savages to Clothe, and instructing barbarous Nations how to live” according to “the Christian Œconomy, and . . . the Government of Commerce” (121). Defoe’s slighting allusion to Portugal as “effeminate, haughty, and . . . decay’d” is meant to suggest that Portugal’s monopoly on the trade in slaves, sugar, and coffee from Africa and Brazil, re-exported via Lisbon to English and European markets, could easily be usurped, either by separate traders (such as young Robinson Crusoe) or by the Royal African and South Sea companies. If England were to intervene in this trade and adopt a Samaritan-like policy of treating their neighbors (i.e. colonial populations) as they would be treated in their place, then the expanding English colonies in the Americas would be more civil, more religious, and more prosperous trading partners than they now are.

III.

In closing, we return to the sudden surge of joy that Crusoe experiences at pivotal moments in his life, particularly in the presence of the Portuguese captain. As we have seen, Crusoe is “surprized with Joy” at the goodness of the captain, which seems to rival that of Providence itself. The captain’s benevolence is inexplicable until we recognize the pattern in which it occurs. Crusoe suffers grief or sorrow, such as the prospect of dying at sea in his small boat, or starving as a subsistence farmer in Brazil, or ending his life in poverty after losing his fortune, but his grief is suddenly reversed into joy through the captain’s intervention. The captain is only an ordinary sailor, but in his acts of kindness he performs the part of the Samaritan in the biblical parable, binding the wounds of the fallen traveler. The patristic fathers of the Church interpret the parable allegorically, such that the Samaritan represents Jesus and the fallen traveler Adam, the “original” of humanity whose sins are redeemed by Jesus. The instrumental role of the Portuguese captain in the story is all the more perplexing in that the Portuguese, like the Samaritans in the Bible, were the least powerful, the most despised, and the least likely of all the European nations at the time to offer salvation to wounded humanity. But the very paradox of discovering charity on board a Portuguese ship moves Crusoe closer to understanding God’s providence toward post-Edenic humanity and what mankind must do to retain it. A principal duty of humanity, as Adam Potkay suggests, is to transform the extravagant joys of survival into the spiritual joys of obedience to God’s plan for the world and to become an agent in that plan (93-4).

A dramatic illustration of the effects of joy and grief on humanity is found in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which Crusoe, moved by the memory of his rescue by the Portuguese captain, rescues, in his turn, the crew and passengers of a French ship that has caught fire at sea (Farther Adventures 14-19). Their “inexpressible Joy” at being rescued allows Crusoe to describe at length the “strange Extravagancies” of joy they display, which resemble the “greatest Agonies of Sorrow” (16-17). Of the sixty-four who were saved, some were

stark-raving and down-right lunatic, some ran about the Ship stamping with their Feet, others wringing their Hands; some were dancing, some singing, some laughing, more crying; many quite dumb, not able to speak a Word; others sick and vomiting, several swooning, and ready to faint; and a few were Crossing themselves, and giving God Thanks. (17)

Crusoe turns his narrative account into a taxonomic case study: many sailors and passengers give vent to their joy in a manner indistinguishable from grief; some are speechless, or ecstatic; only a few retain command of their passions and give thanks to God. On the next day, the ship’s captain and one of the priests offer to Crusoe all of the money and possessions saved from the ship in return for rescuing them, which Crusoe refuses. His refusal mirrors and repays the Portuguese captain’s generosity upon saving Crusoe many years ago. Crusoe explains that “if the Portugal Captain that took me up at Sea had serv’d me so, and took all I had for my Deliverance, I must have starv’d, or have been as much a Slave at the Brasils as I had been in Barbary” (19). In his refusal, Crusoe assumes the mantle of his mentor, the Portuguese captain, and like him, pours oil and wine on the wounds of fallen humanity. Whether he fully understands and accepts the allegory of the Samaritan parable that underlies his act is unclear and, ultimately, unimportant; what matters is that his story, as he says, “may be useful to those into whose Hands it may fall, for the guiding themselves in all the Extravagancies of their Passions” (19). If it also serves England’s colonial interests, who will say him nay?

Rutgers University, Camden

The author is grateful to Gabriel Cervantes for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

NOTES

“Lord! what a miserable creature am I?”

-Robinson Crusoe

CRUSOE WAS CERTAINLY no Linnaeus. The word creature appears some 114 times in Robinson Crusoe (1719), and while it is almost exclusively deployed to signify an animal that Crusoe cannot identify, it also snakes its way into the characterization of human others. The indistinguishable nature of creatures thwarts Crusoe, and the unsteady use of the word inhibits his ability to distinguish a creature, ostensibly defined by animality, from a human. The word first appears following the shipwreck that waylays Crusoe and Xury: “as soon as it was quite dark, we heard such dreadful Noises of the Barking, Roaring, and Howling of Wild Creatures, of we knew not what Kinds, that the poor Boy was ready to die with Fear, and beg’d of me not to go on shoar till Day” (22-3). Xury’s excessive creaturely zoophobia—so extreme that he might “die with Fear”—is meant to foster Crusoe’s indomitable masculinity, situating him as protector-extraordinaire, especially of young racialized boys. Xury is, of course, Friday in beta test form. Yet, as Crusoe’s journal turns to his final years on the island, there is a sudden semantic shift in the term creature. “I was now entred,” he narrates, “on the seven-and-twentieth Year of my Captivity in this Place; though the three last Years that I had this Creature with me ought rather to be left out of the Account, my Habitation being quite of another kind than in all the rest of the Time” (193, emphasis added). “This Creature” to whom Crusoe refers is none other than Friday.

This essay examines the recycling of the word creature throughout Robinson Crusoe to trace and thus apprehend its unsteady and opaque significations.ⁱ First used by the narrative to signify indeterminate animality, Crusoe’s pronouncement of Friday as also belonging to creaturedom bespeaks the slippage between the human and nonhuman. Such an opacity becomes even more muddied when, after leaving the Island of Despair, the word creature is bestowed on the bear—“a vast monstrous One it was, the biggest by far that ever I saw”—who Friday first antagonizes and then shoots in the head for putative entertainment (247). To visualize the precarity of animality, I trace how Crusoe registers nonhuman animals, Friday, and, in a lone moment, himself as creatures, in a trajectory that corresponds with what Laurie Shannon calls “zoography.” For Shannon, “early modern writing insists on animal reference and cross-species comparison, while at the same time it proceeds from a cosmological framework in which the sheer diversity of creaturely life is so finely articulated” (8). While the novel may reflect a diversity of creatureliness—that is, who or what might be considered a creature—the granular specificity of what constitutes a creature is deliberately nebulous and rarely consistent. Thinking alongside environmental literary criticism and postcoloniality, the bearbaiting scene helps us better comprehend how both the racialized human other—Friday—and the animal are paired as some form of comedic minstrel by way of Crusoe’s deployment of the term creature.ⁱⁱ I argue that Robinson Crusoe ultimately encodes an alchemical calculus wherein the designation of creature—in the moments I map here—confers an unstable hybridity wherein human and animal bodies mesh with profound yet troubling effects.ⁱⁱⁱ My premise is not that the bear becomes human or that Friday becomes animalized; instead, I am interested in how Crusoe’s narrative repurposes the appellation creature to signal a radical otherness that incites violent engagement and results in the dispossession of stable identity categories: human, colonist, racialized companion. As the novel demonstrates, creatureliness, at its core, renders unsettling, befuddling, and titillating effects that blur boundaries and unmoor human supremacy.

The circulation of creatureliness, as scholars have demonstrated, is fundamental to apprehending Crusoe’s companion species while on the Island of Despair, and Defoe’s works more generally.^iv Stephen H. Gregg has recently argued for the instability of human and animal categories in Defoe, though not in Robinson Crusoe, emphasizing how such a binary is obfuscated by issues of comportment (with regards horses) and cognition (with regards to swallows and hounds).^v In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside notes of Robinson Crusoe that “Creatureliness is a major thematic preoccupation of the novel, and the central telos of its plot” (64). Keenleyside is invested in Crusoe’s creaturely companions that make visceral the logics of speaking (to and with) and eating (or being eaten by). “Crusoe,” she writes, “senses the precariousness of his status in a creaturely world in which human sovereignty is neither possible nor justified—a world in which persons are personified creatures, and ‘some-body to speak to’ can also be something to eat” (90). The consuming, precarious creaturely world that Keenleyside highlights is an important springboard for this discussion, and also for considering the hierarchy that might (consistently) impose the human above the nonhuman. Diverging from Gregg’s and Keenleyside’s analyses, I consider a broader spectrum wherein creatureliness is not a particular affect or ability, but rather a subtle reminder of mutable, interchangeable, and constantly fungible human and nonhuman positions. Perhaps more macrocosmic in outlook, I am interested in the loose use of creature, which varies contextually to denote an otherness characterized by inferiority, animality, sickliness, and/or race. Variety is the hallmark of creatureliness, especially in the ways its invocation repositions and dispossesses.

In concert with Donna Haraway’s provocation that animals are not “surrogates for theory; they are not just here to think with,” I magnify the oft-forgotten moment between Crusoe, Friday, and the bear to underscore the instability of creaturely hybridity while also drawing attention to depictions of animal cruelty that masquerade in the novel as comedy (5). Though I have yet to locate materials that would demonstrate that Defoe witnessed, or advocated for or against, bearbaiting, Robinson Crusoe unmistakably stages an execution of the bear, which reframes depictions of injustice and tyranny as power abuses exercised only by human actors.^vi Reading the ursine moments in the novel and in relation to Aesop’s Fables and graphic cultural histories of bearbaiting, I attend to the recurrence of the bear throughout the early eighteenth century as a figure that serves as a didactic foil to the human, both physiologically and morally. In both Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe, the potential yet never realized violence enacted by the bear defines, by contrast, the actual and perpetrated violence wielded by the human. Put another way, in both episodes neither bear enacts harm. Such (sole) anthropocentric violence intends to mark the human (male) figures as impenetrable and superior. Yet, the novel’s use of creature undermines such static conceptions of stalwart dominance. Though painted with humorous hues, the bearbaiting moment disguises a frightening realization: it emblematizes the slippery and elusory ways in which nonhuman animality and racialized otherness are positioned as competing entities for superiority. This battle royale is mediated by gross violence and death. In Perceiving Animals, Erica Fudge opens with bearbaiting to consider the blurring of the human-animal boundary that incites and reifies modalities of animal cruelty.^vii “The violence,” she writes, “involved in taming wild nature—in expressing human superiority—destroys the difference between the species” (19). I see Robinson Crusoe’s articulation of creature and depiction of bearbaiting to similarly dissipate difference. The novel’s creaturely bent exemplifies the uneasy status of human supremacy and induces a taxonomic indeterminacy that violently exposes the fragility of the human/nonhuman divide.

Ursine Origins

Crusoe’s interaction with the bear is a short anecdote, one that is rarely anthologized or remembered. In this episode: Friday and Crusoe traversing the borders of France and Spain by way of the Pyrenees encounter a pack of wolves (more on this later) and, immediately after, a bear. Friday deliberately engages in bearbaiting in an effort to please his gleeful audience. Friday, Crusoe narrates, intends to “g[i]ve us all (though we were surpriz’d and afraid for him) the greatest Diversion imaginable” (246). Crusoe notes that despite the shock of finding a bear, it “offer’d to meddle with no Body” (247). Friday antagonizes the bear by pelting it with stones. The bear (with good reason) turns against the group. Friday scales a tree; the bear follows. Friday climbs down from the tree; the bear follows. And on the bear’s slower descent, Friday “clapt the Muzzle of his Piece into his Ear, and shot him dead as a Stone” (249).

Generally considered a “sport,” animal-baiting—including but not limited to bearbaiting, bullbaiting, horsebaiting, monkeybaiting, and lionbaiting—has a deep early modern history, which resurfaces in this anecdote.^viii Rampant from at least the twelfth century until the nineteenth, bearbaiting was the practice of capturing bears—exclusively from the continent because bears are not native to England—chaining them to posts and siccing dogs upon them in a fight to the death.^ix For Rebecca Ann Bach, animal baiting, especially bear and bullbaiting, is centrally about dominion and its reinscription of the anthropocentric and colonialist prepotence found in Genesis (22-3). Fudge agrees that baiting exemplifies iniquitous power distortions, suggesting that it “reveals the truth about humans,” namely that “to watch a baiting, to enact anthropocentrism, is to reveal, not the stability of species status, but the animal that lurks beneath the surface […] The Bear Garden makes humans into animals” (15). As Jason Scott-Warren explains, bear-gardens (the socially-condoned site of these fights) were figuratively “a place of strife and tumult,” and literally, a proto-zoo where bears were chained and confined for the deliberate purpose of canine and human antagonism (63). In line with this antagonism, throughout the seventeenth century, the bear gardens that abutted the Southbank of the Thames were sites of enduring debauchery and were so popular that, “the large and often dangerous crowds which assembled on the Bankside caused the authorities much uneasiness” (Hotson 278). Bearbaiting was officially outlawed in 1835 but declined, in A.S. Hargreaves’s words, “only slowly” (n.p.). Crusoe’s framing of the bear vignette recapitulates bearbaiting as an entertainment commodity, but forgoes the usual artificial setting and locates the sideshow in the bear’s native place.

Defoe’s bear episode would not have been, for eighteenth-century audiences, a non sequitur. Thomas Keymer pinpoints Defoe’s potential source for the vignette: a January 1718 article in Mist’s Weekly Journal (a publication to which Defoe contributed) records villagers near Languedoc attacked by “a troop of wolves and six bears” (306).^x In addition to this source, at least one of its cultural antecedents lies in Aesop. Aesop’s Fables resonated widely with the long eighteenth-century reading public, as is evidenced by the countless editions, revisions, and republications of the morally-didactic narratives meant for even the “Meanest Capacities.” Published just a decade before Robinson Crusoe, A New Translation of Aesop’s Fables, with cutts (1708) features three anecdotes that showcase a bear.^xi The second of the three, “Two Friends, and a Bear,” details two companions wandering the forest when they stumble upon a bear. The first friend, steeped in adrenaline and fearful for his safety, ascends a nearby tree. The second friend, also fearful for his safety but a less gifted tree climber, flops on the ground and plays opossum. The bear, excited by the commotion but too lazy to scale the tree, paws at the second friend, but he [the bear] “found no Breath nor any Appearance of Life, disdain’d the Carkass, and Walks off and leaves him” (Aesop 157). The bear having left the two, the first friend descends from his arboreal sanctuary, and pointedly asks the second “what the Bear whisper’d in’s Ear” (Aesop 157). The second friend reveals the bear’s infinite erudition: keep better company. A moral about friendship immediately follows:

Chuse not an empty Talker for a Friend:

Fair Complements, but weakly recommend.

True Friendship most substantial Weight must bear.

Professions, without Service, are but Air. (Aesop 158)

“Two Friends, and a Bear” clearly makes a proxy of the bear—the pun on “must bear” illustrates this—by which valuable human friendships are put to the test. Aesop’s bear then operates as an animal sage disseminating fortune-cookie-like platitudes, but, as with Crusoe’s bear, the ursine inclusion invites readers to see beyond mere symbolism.

I invoke “Two Friends, and a Bear” in correspondence with the ursine interaction in Robinson Crusoe for several reasons, least of all being that bears surface in both. Not only do the episodes extend a cultural fascination with the bear in its native place (and thus a growing awareness of animal natural history and an emerging ethological science), but paired together, these two excerpts draw the reader’s attention to bear faces: the secrets bears whisper in confidence in the fable and Friday’s ursine assassination. Both demonstrate an important proximity of bear and human faces, especially as this facial intimacy may pertain to aurality.^xii Both Defoe’s and Aesop’s illustrations access and recapitulate a mythos about the bear that would have been debunked but available to an early modern audience. As Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray suggest, “bear whelps were thought to be born as lumps of matter—sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything—that the mother bear then licked into shape” (xvi). The potential for bear mouths, especially maternal bear mouths, to effect into being is fundamentally a gesture of worldbuilding.^xiii There is then something about the bear mouth that enacts a genesis by way of the tongue. In Aesop, it is the bear who places its muzzle to the human’s ear: the bear is the arbiter of moral advice who pushes the second friend to an epiphany on friendship. The bear’s words “lick into shape” the moral reckoning. Defoe—writing after and during Aesop’s popularity in English print culture—implicitly or explicitly recycles this narrative through inversion. The bear in Defoe is mute and instead the ursine voice is transmuted through a pun on “muzzle.” When Friday “clapt the Muzzle of his Piece into his Ear,” the result is a punny elision of animal and object. The double meaning of “muzzle” positions it both as an extension of the gun, and thus the means of facilitating violence, and also a reframing of an animal’s muzzle or snout. The gun/animal elision suggests a particular ferocity and capability of violence, both of which can be harnessed for and by humans.^xiv At the same time, Friday’s placement of the “muzzle” to the bear’s ear also instills a particular physical closeness, which is, of course, undergirded by violence.

Whereas Aesop’s bear may be merely instrument to the fable’s moral, the bear in Robinson Crusoe is not, and there is no moral to be learned from the episode. Even more, it is in this moment that Crusoe’s narrative confuses and repurposes the use of creature. Following the insistence that Friday’s bearbaiting is “the greatest Diversion imaginable,” Crusoe details a curious ethological history of the bear:

[T]he Bear is a heavy, clumsey Creature, and does not gallop as the Wolf does […] so he has two particular qualities […] First, As to Men, who are not his proper Prey […] he does not usually attempt them, unless they first attack him: On the contrary, if you meet him in the Woods, if you don’t meddle with him, he won’t meddle with you; but then you must take Care to be very Civil to him, and give him the Road; for he is a very nice Gentleman. (246-7)

These details are included in a single paragraph, a paragraph that offers the bear as both a “clumsey Creature” and a “very nice Gentleman.” The gendering of the bear aside, Crusoe’s explication of observational (but completely fictionalized) ursine behavior doubles-down on the overlap wherein creatures can simultaneously be gentlemen. Whereas Crusoe’s emphasis on creature here pinpoints a particular physiology—the bear’s weight and clumsiness confer creatureliness—the disclosure of the bear as gentleman follows an understanding of the bear as mirroring civility, which is itself not a physical characteristic but rather a personality trait—the way one comports oneself.^xv The hybridity that Crusoe describes here locates creatureliness within the parameters of the body and gentility within the confines of cognition, emotion, and sociality. But this civility quickly sours, as Crusoe explains, when the bear has been affronted.

[I]f you throw or toss any Thing at him, and it hits him, though it were but a bit of a Stick, as big as your Finger, he takes it for an Affront, and sets all his other Business aside to pursue his Revenge; for he will have Satisfaction in Point of Honour; that is his first Quality: The next is, That if he be once affronted, he will never leave you, Night or Day, till he has his Revenge, but follows at a good round rate, till he overtakes you. (247)

Crusoe’s haunting depiction of bears as vengeful demons hellbent on satisfaction is jarring. What is unclear is if this subsequent depiction of the bear is somehow indicative of the animal’s creaturely state—animals can be affronted and enact retribution—or his gentlemanly state, which might suggest that the capacity for revenge is reserved for humans alone, a topos that is well-situated throughout eighteenth-century fiction. Regardless of what Crusoe intends to suggest here, it is the implicit violence that might accompany the revenge—“he will never leave you till he has his Revenge”—that muddies certifying the bear as either creature or gentleman, and acknowledges a blending of human and nonhuman capacities for revenge. For Crusoe, the bear is clearly both, but whether this elevates animals by way of anthropocentrism or derogates humans to vicious beasts remains unclear.

Friday, My Pet

Crusoe may be the David Attenborough of the bear episode, narrating it with an entertained but aloof distance, but Friday is the participant who deliberately engages the bear for the viewing pleasure of Crusoe and the other expeditioners. “O! O! O! says Friday, three Times, pointing to him [the bear]; O Master! You give me te Leave! Me shakee te Hand with him: Me make you good laugh” (247). Friday repeats this line three times, which seems to follow the triplet “O!” that marks both his excitement and some form of onomatopoeic expression meant to visualize Friday’s mouth in action. Crusoe’s insistence that Friday repeats himself three times has additional import given that this is the moment that triangulates the human/animal hybridity among Crusoe, Friday, and the bear. Put another way, Crusoe reminds us of this triplet repetition as a formal indicator that draws our attention to this scene, and in so doing, highlights the blurring that transpires between colonizer, colonized-racialized companion, and creaturely-gentlemanly bear. The violence conducted under the auspices of entertainment makes fuzzy the categories of creatureliness and colonization. Crusoe maintains little control over the entire episode and instead is at the mercy of Friday’s secretive bearbaiting mission and the bear’s somewhat unpredictable actions. Friday’s position as both colonial understudy and creature (by Crusoe’s assessment, at least) obscures his ability to properly dispense with the bear: that is, to kill it outright, rather than to engage with it in a playful, didactic way.

Back on the Island of Despair, Crusoe enfolds Friday into his island life as a means of domesticating the creature—a gesture of petkeeping—and blurring the boundaries between humanness and creatureliness. Srinivas Aravamudan has similarly read Friday as Crusoe’s pet, which, in Aravamudan’s larger characterization of petkeeping in Tropicopolitans, becomes an identity that mediates racialized otherness, obeisance, and inferiority: “Friday is also Crusoe’s pet, approaching him on all fours, digging a hole in the sand with his bare hands, following him close at his heels, and even calling his own father, Friday Sr., ‘an Ugly Dog.’” (75).^xvi The concept of creature similarly blends these categories. “It came now,” Crusoe narrates, “very warmly upon my Thoughts and indeed irresistibly, that now was my Time to get me a Servant, and perhaps a Companion, or Assistant; and that I was call’d plainly by Providence to save this poor Creature’s Life” (171). In what follows, and under the auspices of religion, Crusoe morphs Friday into his industrious servant and companion, though the narrative does not release Friday from the confines of creatureliness. Turning to the last year of his durance on the island—and having fully proselytized Friday at this point—Crusoe details:

I was now entred on the seven-and-twentieth Year of my Captivity in this Place; though the three last Years that I had this Creature with me ought rather to be left out of the Account, my Habitation being quite of another kind than in all the rest of the Time. (193)

In one reading, Crusoe’s use of “this creature” to refer to Friday is innocent; it is merely a pet name that establishes familiarity and endears one to the other. But I am less convinced that Crusoe’s dependency and engagement with Friday is indicative of any form of mutual beneficence, which would be akin to a facile presumption of colonialism as that which is equally beneficial to colonizers and colonized. Despite teaching Friday to speak English, practice Protestantism, and model deft marksmanship, Crusoe’s recurrent reference to Friday as creature noticeably differentiates the two—Friday will never be Crusoe’s equal—while emphasizing the types of “pet names” or taxonomic categories that hierarchize their differences.

As with Xury, the journalistic narrative is adamant in reflecting the queer contingency the racialized other places on Crusoe. I employ “queer” here in its multitudinous dimensions: to acknowledge non-heterosexual relationality, to pinpoint a distortion of normative kinship models, and also in its baser form to signify strange, uncanny, or odd. Like Xury who seeks patriarchal Crusoe for protection from unknown and feral animal threats, Friday replicates this puppy dog act, a suggestive turn of phrase I will return to momentarily. Plotting his escape back home, Crusoe narrates his plan to Friday, who is incensed that Crusoe might wholly abandon him:

Why you angry mad with Friday? what me done? I ask’d him what he meant; I told him I was not angry with him at all. No angry! No angry! says he, repeating the Words several times; Why send Friday home away to my nation? Why (says I) Friday, did not you say you wish’d you were there? Yes, yes, says he, wish we both there, no wish Friday there, no master there. In a word, he would not think of going there without me. (190)

Crusoe’s paternalism is immersive and inescapable, and thus Friday’s intention to always be with his “master”—the first word Crusoe teaches him—underscores Friday’s reliance on Crusoe and positions him as subordinated sidekick.

Crusoe’s petkeeping practice similarly absorbs Friday into the fold, especially as it pertains to this moment of bearbaiting, resonating with the early modern practice of pitting one’s prized dog against the bear. The likeness I trace here is not an animalizing projection; it is one that Crusoe emphasizes in calling Friday—albeit playfully—a dog. Though Crusoe’s trusty dog dies earlier in the novel, Crusoe’s relationship with Friday seems to recast that human-master/animal-servant relationship through a literal pet name. And Crusoe underscores this in his humorous tête-à-tête with Friday during the bearbaiting: “You Dog [Friday], said I, is this your making us laugh? Come away, and take your Horse, that we may shoot the Creature” (248, emphases added). As Oscar Brownstein suggests in his overview of early modern bearbaiting,

Bears had proven themselves capable of imitating men for centuries by performing as gymnasts, wrestlers, and dancers; the bear’s size, strength, and upright fighting stance made him an inevitable sparring parting for the man-fighting mastiff. Thus in the traditional bear-baitings the gentry would wager on their own dogs in competition with others to score hits on several bears. (243)^xvii

Friday is by Crusoe’s own words transformed into a “dog” that is risibly sicced on the bear.^xviii Aravamudan reads Friday in mode with the trope of the enslaved human pet—Oroonoko being the exemplar—wherein the racialized, subservient body becomes the recipient of bodily violence, which is played out with comedic tones. But here, Friday is not the recipient of violence; he is the arbiter. In this same breath, Crusoe differentiates the appellation “dog” from “creature,” which seems to hierarchize the animal-other based on their proximity to and intimacy with Crusoe. Friday need no longer be creature because he has both been transformed into a dog—at least in title—and because creatures, in this context, are prey and recipients of violence. Even more strangely, Brownstein notes that “the bears and apes [and dogs forced upon them], unlike the bulls, were given human names” (243). Crusoe’s refusal here to use Friday’s non-consensually given name—that is, Friday—and instead to replace it with “dog,” positions Friday and the bear closer to one another in that neither are bestowed proper human names, which would seem to cast their lots together. This is cemented by the following sentence in which Crusoe uses the creature moniker to immediately refer back to Friday:

And as the nimble Creature run two foot for the Beast’s one, he turn’d on a sudden, on one side of us, and seeing a great Oak-tree, fit for his Purpose, he beckon’d to us to follow, and doubling his pace, he gets nimbly up the Tree, laying his Gun down upon the Ground. (248)

Friday in his navigation of the forest space becomes the creature, and the bear becomes a beast, which underscores an understanding of creatureliness for Crusoe as contingent on spatial distance and difference from his own embodiment, habits, and mannerisms.

The metamorphosis wherein Friday becomes creaturely in this moment is similarly echoed in the illustration to Aesop’s “Two Friends, and a Bear,” which I above located as an ursine cultural accompaniment to Robinson Crusoe. The woodcut that accompanies “Two Friends, and a Bear” seems to amplify the disorientation of this fable given that there are neither two human friends nor a bear illustrated (Fig. 1). Instead, the woodcut features two wolves—another creature of infinite importance with which I conclude—who have cornered a man in the crook of a tree. Despite this printing mishap, or, at best, considerable artistic license, I want to read the dissociative nature of the fable and the woodcut as integral to understanding the elision between human and nonhuman animal, especially as it may pertain to understanding the bear.^xix In the woodcut, the two friends are transformed into animals themselves: one stands aggressively on the left while the other seems to pant in pain, perhaps a reaction to the axe lodged in its back. The aggressive wolf on the left comes to the defense of the wolf on the right, having successfully scared the hunter—a hunter that bears a striking resemblance to the illustration of Crusoe from the novel’s first edition—up a tree. By numbers alone, the woodcut seems to transmogrify the two friends into two wolves and the bear into the man. In both woodcut and fable, the single entity (bear/man) is the aggressor who is capable of doing harm, and the aggrieved parties are those two whose numbers exceed that of the singleton. Such a reading of this woodcut further mires the fungible, porous nature of animal/human hybridity that is at the heart of both Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe. The woodcut offers a visual illustration of the interchangeability of human/animal hybrids. Inasmuch that the woodcut does not portray the “creature” described by the accompanying fable, it is the woodcut alongside the fable that enables a discursive episteme wherein creatureliness is a status of ambiguous being.

Figure 1. Illustration from Aesop’s “Two Friends, and a Bear” in A new translation of Æsop’s Fables (1708). Google Books.

 

 

Bear-y Funny

In staging bearbaiting, Defoe provides an opportunity to reconsider Aesop’s narrative and the publisher’s woodcut in their rendering of human-bear relations. Despite Crusoe’s warning to readers to heed an encountered bear, Friday does not abide the caution and instead takes great pleasure in antagonizing the animal. Having successfully bid the bear to follow him up a tree, Friday prepares the cruel act that is meant to garner laughter: “Ha, says he [Friday] to us, now you see me teachee the Bear dance” (248). Upon seeing the bough shake, “indeed we did laugh heartily” (248). Like Crusoe’s didacticism before him, Friday here intends to relay this model of education by “teachee” the bear to dance. Whereas Crusoe’s lessons are seen as serious and useful—religion, gunmanship, food customs—this lesson is one that serves no use, and it is the uselessness of dance that subtends the humorous appeal. In order for the bear to learn the dance, Friday must first model it: “Friday danc’d so much, and the Bear stood so ticklish, that we had laughing enough indeed” (249). Friday’s bearbaiting coincides with and is an extension of Crusoe’s colonizing mission, and yet perverts that mission by making a comedy show out of a creature who is about to be ruthlessly and senselessly murdered.

But the dancing is not the “funniest” part of the episode; the murder is. “No shoot, says Friday, no yet, me shoot now, me no kill; me stay, give you one more laugh” (249). With his audience awaiting the graphic punchline, Friday descends the tree, picks up his rifle, and awaits the bear’s pursuit.

[A]t this Juncture, and just before he [the bear] could set his hind Feet upon the Ground, Friday stept up close to him, clapt the Muzzle of his Piece into his Ear, and shot him dead as a Stone. Then the Rogue turn’d about, to see if we did not laugh, and when he saw were pleas’d by our looks, he falls a laughing himself very loud; so we kill Bear in my Country, says Friday; so you kill them, says I, Why you have no Guns; No, says he, no Gun but shoot, great much long Arrow. This was indeed a good Diversion to us. (249)

Though bears are found in a variety of locations across the globe, it is unlikely that Friday would have been familiar with any bear species given the approximate location of the Island of Despair. Alexander Selkirk, the sensational figure on whom Crusoe is based, was found on what is today the San Fernández Islands—one of which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966—off the western coast of Chile. The only species of bear indigenous to South America is the Spectacled Bear, which is found exclusively in the Andes Mountains. As Keymer notes with regards to the wolf attack that precedes the bear incident: “wolves in America are to be found as far south as Mexico, though not in Friday’s homeland” (306). Given the unlikelihood that bears too would be autochthonous to “Friday’s homeland,” Defoe makes a racialized proxy of Friday, which serves a troubling purpose. This minor detail metonymizes Friday as a racialized catch-all that appears as universally indigenous given his alleged familiarity with all forms of flora and fauna. The rendered effect engenders something like hybridity wherein Friday must navigate (often unsuccessfully, according to the narrative) human/animal and colonizing/colonized positions. It is the familiarity with nature—especially his knowledge of bears and wolves—that positions Friday as lesser than Crusoe, closer to animality, and thus less civilized. Such an implicit (racist) elision has historically vilified indigeneity and deprivileged indigenous modes of being and knowledge. Friday’s supposed foreknowledge of bears furthers this colonizing divide, drawing Friday closer to the naturalness of the bear (and thus wild) and further from Crusoe’s hallmark of “civilized” masculinity.

The appellation creature, though, returns immediately following the bear’s death, and it is this moment that tips the scales of understanding a fundamental aspect of creatureliness within the novel: deathliness. “We should certainly have taken the Skin,” Crusoe writes, “of this monstrous Creature off, which was worth saving, but we had three Leagues to go, and our Guide hasten’d us, so we left him, and went forward on our Journey” (250). Not only does the bear episode convey the moment of bearbaiting as humorous entertainment, but it renders the “monstrous Creature” detritus. A sense of creatureliness is then imbued with both its capacity to die an unimportant death and also to be death itself: to rot in place, brain matter spewed outwards. It is in this way that the bear as creature epitomizes the liminality at stake in one of the many definitions of the word offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a living or inanimate being.” The short-lived bear episode demonstrates the short-livelihood of creaturely habitation within the novel, especially as it mediates the necropolitical possibility of becoming death: a death that is neither useful nor can be used.^xx The waste of the bear’s body—it is not eaten, shorn, or kept—reflects the uselessness of not only the ursine body but also of the senseless violence that similarly serves no point. By the narrative’s standards, the bear’s single value is a comical death that perversely satiates the travelers’ expeditionary ennui.

The sense that creatureliness is a mediation of the peripheries of life and death, though, becomes an epistemology (perhaps even an ontology) that Crusoe weaves throughout his narrative. In the singular moment wherein Crusoe refers to himself as creature, this mediation becomes abundantly visible. As the epigraph to this article foreshadowed, when Crusoe catches a fever on the Island, he cries out in anguish, “Lord! what a miserable creature am I? If I should be sick, I shall certainly die for want of help; and what will become of me! Then the tears burst out of my eyes, and I could say no more for a good while” (78). As with the bear, Crusoe registers an identical reading of creatureliness that signals sickliness and thus proximity to death. This is not to suggest that Crusoe sees the bear’s creatureliness similar to his own. Friday’s creatureliness may be adjacent to the bear’s, but Crusoe works diligently to describe himself as both different than and superior to both. In his exasperated state, Crusoe self-identifies as a “miserable creature” to approximate his near-death state, and thus his distance from the livelihood that is indicative of non-creatureliness. Creatures then are those enacted against, often without mercy, who fence-sit on the borders of life and death, often succumbing to the latter, thus positioning their existence as ephemeral, and with the case of the bear, meaningless.

Creatures Fight Back

The last use of creature in the novel does not refer to Crusoe, Friday, or the bear. Instead, following the bear’s death, the expeditioners face an onslaught of “ravenous” and “hellish” creatures: wolves (252-3).

But here we had a most horrible Sight; for riding up to the Entrance where the Horse came out, we found the Carcass of another Horse and of two Men, devour’d by the ravenous Creatures; and one of the Men was no doubt the same who we heard fir’d the gun; for there lay a Gun just by him, fir’d off; but as to the Man, his Head and the upper Part of his Body was eaten up. This fill’d us with Horror, and we knew not what Course to take; but the Creatures resolv’d us soon, for they gather’d about us presently, in hopes of Prey; and I verily believe there were three hundred of them. (252)

The multitudinous creatures that populate the narrative return in full force here, outnumbering with bloodlust. From these final moments of the novel, it is impossible not to locate a reading of the creature with an ominous foretelling of death, an uncomfortable radical otherness that stuns the human. Whereas the bear is the recipient of gross and allegedly humorous violence, it is the wolves who are capable of offering a retributive justice.^xxi If the wolf is enfolded into the pack of all other creatures throughout the novel, then it is this attack that centrally demonstrates how creatureliness can dethrone human supremacy by reciprocating the exercise of violence. It is as if, in the amassing of “three hundred of them,” the novel’s creatures return—some borne from their deaths—in full, frightening force. But the creaturely retributive justice is not entirely successful. After killing “three Score of them [wolves]” and surviving the incident with Friday, Crusoe reiterates the threat of the creature:

For my Part, I was never so sensible of Danger in my Life; for, seeing above three hundred Devils come roaring and open mouth’d to devour us, and having nothing to shelter us, or retreat to, I gave my self over for lost; and as it was, I believe, I shall never care to cross those Mountains again: I think I would much rather go a thousand Leagues by Sea, though I were sure to meet with a Storm once a Week. (254-5)^xxii

For Crusoe, creatureliness is escapable, but only within the thin margin of his life, and there are casualties: both human and nonhuman. The creature comforts (and often discomforts) Crusoe experiences and narrates into being are not singular objects that are bereft of agency, feeling, or possibility. Creatures, by the novel’s wielding, violate and are violated, enact revenge, and serve as reminders of a lesser state of being that is proximate to death. Robinson Crusoe then demonstrates the potential for the subaltern creature to intervene by forcing the renegotiation of hierarchies of supremacy, and that is of great comfort to this reader.

University of California, Santa Barbara

 

NOTES

WORKS CITED

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McCants, Kristen. “Making an Impression: Creating the Woodcut in Early Modern Broadside Ballads.” The Making of a Broadside Ballad. Edited by Andrew Griffin, Patricia Fumerton, and Carl Stahmer. Santa Barbara: EMC Imprint, 2016. http://press.emcimprint.english.ucsb.edu/the-making-of-a-broadside-ballad/woodcutting

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“On the Intelligence of Animals.” The Lady’s Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge 1, Nov. 1792, pp. 270-77. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online.

Palmer, Megan E. “Cutting through the Woodcut: Early Modern Time, Craft and Media.” The Making of a Broadside Ballad. Edited by Andrew Griffin, Patricia Fumerton, and Carl Stahmer. Santa Barbara: EMC Imprint, 2016. http://press.emcimprint.english.ucsb.edu/the-making-of-a-broadside-ballad/woodcutting

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Stokes, James. “Bull and Bear Baiting in Somerset.” English Parish Drama. Edited by Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Husken, Rodopi, 1996, pp. 65-80.

Wheeler, Roxann. “‘My Savage,’ ‘My Man’: Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH 62.4, 1995, pp. 821-861.

CRITICAL ANALYSES of Daniel Defoe’s 1720 novel Memoirs of a Cavalier have focused on the work as an attempt to revise popular histories of the Civil War to reflect the political theatre of the early eighteenth century. According to Nicholas Seager, the novel was a bid to “correct the party-inflected historiography of the English Civil War” by drawing upon the many memoirs and reflections of the conflict that began to appear in print from the end of the seventeenth century (481). Elsewhere, both Paula Backscheider (123-35) and Robert Mayer (198-99) argue that the aim of the Memoirs was to remind its readers (faced with the imminent threat of Jacobite uprising) of the horrors of civil war, while Morgan Strawn reads the novel as a call for a “vigorous monarch” to uphold the state religions of England and Scotland, lest hostile nations exploit dissent for their own benefit (330-31). Andrea Walkden, in her analysis of the novel as an attack on seventeenth-century aristocratic kingship, reads it as a demonstration of the hero’s increasing disillusionment with the royalist cause and his strained heroic aspirations (1064), while Katherine Armstrong goes further, reading the novel as a deliberate exposure of royalist motives and a justification of the 1688 Revolutionary Settlement (29-50). Read through these critics, the Memoirs are revealed as a work that courts the political past while simultaneously editing it so that historical circumstance might better conform to the mores of the early eighteenth-century mainstream, which largely favored stability, toleration, and representative government.

While these readings of the text have been primarily concerned with its explorations of the nature of war, politics, and heroism—understandably so, given the novel’s narrative focus on martial campaigns—critics have paid less attention to the Cavalier’s behavior and activities outside of a wartime context. This is in spite of the fact that the cavalier social “type” has been associated with distinctive fashions, attitudes, and modes of social conduct since the middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the image of the cavalier that exists in the popular imagination—he of the lavish dress, the bouts of drinking, the public swagger, and the Continental manners—was as crucial to the construction of cavalier mythology as his political and martial affiliations. The cavalier aesthetic proposed a masculine identity equally designed for both the pleasures of peace and the glory of war: a spy who crept into a royalist camp in 1642 described seeing “many of these Cabalieros richly deck’d with long shag hair, reaching down to their heels who were Commanders to a Troop of horse that were all armed in jet; the Coronet bearing these words in the Banner, Damme we’ll win the day” (Nocturnall Occurrances sig A2v). The report may have been a piece of parliamentarian propaganda, but it was propaganda that the cavaliers themselves were willing to adopt, as Thomas Corns has suggested (52-53). Throughout the 1640s and 1650s, the cavalier configured his social performance (and particularly his heavy drinking) as part of his soldierly identity and loyalty to his king (Lemon 157-161). For Charles Cotton, “Wine makes the Soul for Action fit” (443), while Robert Heath demanded: “Let’s drink then as we us’d to fight, / As long as we can stand” (22). Defoe, writing over sixty years after Cotton, Heath, and other cavalier poets, also uses his narrator’s social behaviour to inform his political and martial sensibilities, but disrupts the sociable/warlike balance to shift the cavalier hero’s reputation away from convivial excess.

Defoe published the Memoirs at the end of a decade which had capitalized on scrutinizing male manners against the social norms of the previous generation and promoting a version of politeness that brought “aesthetic concerns in close contiguity with ethical ones” (Klein 4). Polite gentlemen were now expected to eschew competition and favor order, negotiation, and eloquence as solutions for resolving their disagreements. These new social expectations were met with hostility by some, who argued that politeness was merely politesse, a French import, and relied heavily on social intercourse with women, who would act as compassionate guides through this new realm of manners and morals. Female influence, critics claimed, would only serve to dilute rugged English masculinity. This was a misrepresentation of many advocates of politeness: for Shaftesbury, for example, politeness could only be achieved through friendships between educated men. Likewise, many proponents of good manners emphasized the importance of plain, unaffected speech, and disliked stiff and grandiose conversation. Nevertheless, as Michèle Cohen has shown (44-61), criticisms of politeness as effeminate resounded throughout the eighteenth century.

For critics invested in soldiers as social performers, the question of whether military men could truly display polite behavior became an interesting thought experiment, and Julia Banister has drawn attention to Richard Steele’s struggle to make soldiering compatible with politeness (26-33). While soldiers’ profession placed them in an inescapably competitive (and primarily masculine) environment, their heroic return to England as defenders of the nation’s honor helped to induct them into polite society. This ability to occupy both separate worlds of war and society would seem to make the soldier a perfect candidate for a figure who could be both polite and manly. Yet while a fictional soldier like Steele’s Captain Sentry might glide through London coffee houses and dinner parties, diverting his friends with stories of wartime valor and fraternizing with landed gentlemen as their equal, his is a “frank,” “irregular” type of sociability, distinct from other men’s politeness (Steele 2:368). In the Memoirs, Defoe likewise commends the narrator’s “Soldierly Stile” in the novel’s preface (sig A2v), and curtails his hero’s toleration for social norms—the Cavalier clashes with both “bad” foreigners and other cavaliers who engage in the riotous social performance of the traditional cavalier narrative—and foregrounds his friendships with other soldiers. Upending narratives of cavalier exile during the Interregnum, Defoe’s Cavalier specifically elects to go abroad in the capacity of a soldier rather than as a scholar or private gentleman, taking with him his friend “Captain” Fielding, a man who “had certainly the Lines of a Soldier drawn into his Countenance” (Memoirs 5-6). Destined for war even as he sets out to tour Europe, the Cavalier’s narrative should be read in the context of eighteenth-century debates about soldierly civility.

In fashioning his hero, Defoe had eighty years of well-established (if heavily mythologized) cavalier behavior to draw upon, and in select passages throughout the novel, he manipulates and subverts traditional narratives of cavalier social performance so that his hero’s conduct more closely resembles eighteenth-century civility. Defoe’s Memoirs were one of several works written in the early eighteenth century whose form suggests an interest in freeing the cavalier from poetic fancy. While the earlier cavalier mode had been celebrated chiefly in poetry and drama, genres that privilege aesthetics and license whimsy, Defoe utilized prose much like more recent representations of the cavalier, which included the “commonsense” Spectator papers and authentic Civil War biographies, such as Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698-99) and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702-04). Employing a prose style that underplays the action, as Melinda Rabb has noticed (121-123), Defoe’s plain and unaffected English invites his readers to accept the truth of his narrative. Likewise, his emphasis on martial events, even subtitling the work “A Military Journal,” also shifts away from the sociable/warlike balance of the historical cavalier. Yet by noticing Defoe’s debt to biography and journalism, we should not be indifferent to the Memoirs as fiction; indeed, Defoe “was courting […] an identification” of his novel with contemporary romances, and some readers believed it to be fiction at least as early as the 1750s (Seager 491-93). Despite cavalier literature’s new trade in plain-spokenness, Defoe exploits the sobriety of prose to produce a text that is often ambiguous in what it describes. My reading of the Memoirs is less cynical than Sharon Alker’s, which suggests that the novel shows a narrator who elides his participation in wartime violence to sustain the veneer of heroism, but whose psyche eventually breaks down after the trauma of war. Nevertheless, Alker is correct to query the transparency of the narrative: she, like Rabb, has drawn attention to the Cavalier’s evasiveness when describing the atrocities of war. Among the novel’s scattering of social performances, I wish to analyse an earlier example of his ambiguity in his description of an encounter with an Italian courtesan, to show that Defoe deliberately obscures his account to avoid painting his hero as either a rake or a prude.

In Memoirs of a Cavalier, Defoe counters the depictions of the drunken revelry, sexual braggadocio, casual violence, and elaborate costumes which had traditionally been so closely linked to the cavaliers, and so offers up a new version of the royalist hero for an eighteenth-century audience. No longer one who acted upon strong passions such as love, honor, and hatred, the cavalier is now a man who prized contemplation, fraternity, and social responsibility, and his oft-expressed distaste for French and Italian culture punctures the historical obsession with Continental fashion. Concurrently, the Cavalier shuns many of the qualities of eighteenth-century politeness, such as polished conversation or friendship with women, and thereby evades some of the sharpest criticism against polite behavior. Examining the Cavalier’s social performance in the Memoirs enables us to decipher the vexed and unstable attitudes towards these controversial seventeenth-century heroes and contribute towards the on-going discussion of how men should behave in the early Hanoverian age.

I.

The cavalier of the mid-seventeenth century, as royalists and royalist-sympathizers depicted him, often appears as a chivalric ideal, a descendent of the “parfit gentil” knight of old, whose actions are dictated by the principle of honor. Largely conservative, these works put forward a narrative that idealizes a pre-bellum age of patrician political domination and social pleasures. Lovelace’s cavalier who longs for a bucolic arcadia away from the battlefield has become the prototypical example of this type, but similar variants abound in seventeenth-century literature. For example, in Gondibert (1651), William Davenant sketches out a cavalier ideal of a benevolent government populated by well-educated aristocrats. The cavaliers’ natural place at the center of society was further bolstered by their appreciation for the “good life,” as Earl Miner names it (43-99). Cavalier literature praised the ale-house as a central gathering place for men to meet, drink, and enjoy good fellowship with one another, “an expression and reinforcement of personal and lasting bonds of early modern ‘friendship’” (Hailwood 218), and depictions of the louche cavalier swagger thrived in the drinking songs that connected cavalier freedom with loyalty to the king and hatred of Cromwell: “Hey for Cavaliers, / Hoe for Cavaliers, / Drink for Cavaliers, / Fight for Cavaliers, / Dub-a-dub, dub-a-dub, / Have at Old Beelzebub, / Oliver stinks for fear” (Butler 313).

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 would seem to confirm cavalier supremacy. The “good life” hailed in earlier royalist literature came together with the hedonistic pursuits cavaliers had enjoyed during their years in exile on the Continent. According to Charles II, the age’s great arbiter of materialist taste: “All appetites are free and […] God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure” (von Ranke 79). Their spectacular appetites bled into the literature written in sympathy towards the cavalier ethos, which balanced the quasi-chivalric narrative with the enthusiasm for perpetual revelry. For example, George Etherege’s The Comical Revenge (1663) offers two equally-flattering perspectives on the cavalier in the parallel high and low plots. The first utilizes the classical cavalier themes of love and honor to depict a love triangle which ends in a duel. The second plot is a comic portrait of the capers of young cavaliers in Interregnum London, who enjoy drinking and casual dalliances, often mirroring the structure and events of the high plot. Later authors resisted the cavalier epithet for their heroes but upheld their social performances in the rakes of the 1670s. Throughout this decade, heroes continued the cavalier pastimes of drinking, whoring, and fighting, and were not condemned for doing so. Examining the protagonists of Aphra Behn’s plays, Robert Markley writes that “the innate goodness of her heroes ‘naturally’ leads them to embrace both Royalist loyalties and libertine lifestyles; wenching, drinking, and spending money are ‘natural’ manifestations of their inherent virtue” (117). The mode peaked with Behn’s The Rover (1677), written in conscious imitation of the cavalier aesthetic of the 1650s to produce a nuanced portrait of the cavalier social performance, one that heavily mythologizes the shared experiences of the men who had spent the Interregnum years together. As one of the cavaliers concludes: “Sir, my Friends are Gentlemen, and ought to be Esteem’d for their Misfortunes, since they have the Glory to suffer with the best of Men and Kings” (82).

It was not until the 1690s that the cavalier narrative came to be seriously reconsidered. A new “type” of soldier emerged after the 1688 Revolution: the gentleman officer, who entered the public imagination due to the significant army reforms initiated by William III. Unlike the cavalier, whose historical military experience had always been balanced by his social performance, the gentleman officer was defined by his status as a well-behaved soldier. The reformed army demanded patriotic loyalty, boasted a meritocratic approach to advancement, and highlighted a modest, unaffected self-conduct as the mark of a gentleman officer: martial victories were won by soldiers who were both mannerly and moral. The ideology of the reformed army quickly entered the public imagination through popular plays like The Constant Couple (1699), while the cavalier was aging out of relevance; fictional characters in the 1690s and 1700s who were explicitly identified as cavaliers, such as Major-General Blunt in The Volunteers (1693), were old men, harmless and slightly foolish parental figures. The Rover was performed rarely, and when it was revived in the early eighteenth century, many of the racier lines were changed or eliminated, while the focus of the titular rover’s romantic plotline began to shift away from the tragic Spanish courtesan Angellica Bianca towards the high-spirited Hellena, whom he marries at the end of the play. The cavalier social performance was difficult to reconcile with the new soldierly ideal, and in 1699, James Wright spelled out the sentiment bluntly: “Cavalier is a Word as much out of Fashion as any of ‘em” (96-97).

Steele produced a more positive depiction of a cavalier in the form of Sir Roger de Coverley, who was introduced in the second issue of the Spectator in March 1711 and appeared as a regular character until he was killed off in October 1712, two months before the end of the periodical’s first run. As has already been suggested, the use of prose, a format with no obligation to follow the linguistic conventions or structural mnemonics of poetry and drama, gave Steele flexibility to fashion the cavalier in a way more palatable for early eighteenth-century London. An older man, de Coverley had participated in the cavalier social performance that dominated London society in the decades following the Restoration: he had been “a fine Gentleman, had often supped with my Lord Rochester and Sir George Etherege, fought a Duel upon his first coming to Town, and kick’d Bully Dawson” (1:8). But (as the references to the long-dead London icons firmly establish) this behavior is part of the distant past. In maturity, de Coverley participates in no activity that we associate with the traditional cavalier narrative: he rarely attends plays, exists in chaste devotion to his “Perverse Widow,” and is uninterested in wearing the latest fashionable clothing (1:8). His Tory politics are not those of a Jacobite, but rather a country squire, and he seeks to maintain stability rather than to incite revolution. In one number he describes receiving abuse from both roundheads and cavaliers during his childhood; “Sir Roger generally closes this Narrative with Reflections on the Mischief that Parties do in the Country; how they spoil good Neighbourhood, and make honest Gentlemen hate one another” (1:125), thus rejecting cavalier political loyalism. His present-day pastimes are strongly reminiscent of the “good life” seen in the pastoral cavalier literature of the pre-Restoration period. His social life is conducted in predominately male spaces, such as the London coffee shops and the country estate where he lives as a bachelor, surrounded by male servants, and which he runs as an idealized feudal system. His drinking habits are tame and jovial rather than dissolute: Mr Spectator notes with amusement that when de Coverley’s friends are unwell, he presses wine possets upon them, “for which reason that sort of People who are ever bewailing their Constitution in other Places are the Chearfullest imaginable when he is present” (2:157).

De Coverley was one of the most recognizable fictional cavaliers of the 1710s. He featured prominently in essays throughout the Spectator’s run, and numbers after his death include letters of condolence from the readership. The periodical itself remained very popular even after it ceased publication, and continued to be printed in collected volumes, which entered a fifth edition in 1720. Yet Steele never explicitly identifies him as a cavalier; it is an identity generated through the description of the cavalier social performances he conducted in the 1660s. Steele’s refusal to name him as a cavalier allows him to avoid the political connotations of the term and instead sentimentalize him as an old Tory “rather beloved than esteemed” (1:8), a man of common sense and social stability, who cherishes male friendship, without becoming engrossed in libertine excess, and represents no political danger. De Coverley offers a version of the cavalier narrative that rejects the social exclusivity and misbehavior of the mid-seventeenth century in favor of the accessibility, amiability, and domesticity promoted in the Whig ascendency, acting as an important intermediary between the corrupt libertine of the seventeenth century and Defoe’s austere hero of the eighteenth.

II.

Defoe’s catalogue of material prior to 1720 makes him an unlikely author of a work appreciative of cavaliers, as he had little patience for the aesthetics of love and honor. In the 1660s, The Comical Revenge had made the duel the climactic point of heroic virtue; forty years later, Defoe deplored the practice throughout the run of his periodical the Review of the Affairs of France. Likewise, although he admired the craft behind Rochester’s poetry, he disliked his lewd modern imitators: “Pleas’d with the Lines, he wish’d he had not Writ / They Court his Folly, and pass by his Wit” (More Reformation 13). Politically, Defoe frequently wrote in opposition to cavalier tenets. His 1706 verse satire Jure Divino was a ruthless attack on divine right monarchy, and a declaration of support for William III and his victory over the cavalier icon James II. As Andrew McKendry has argued, this panegyric cast the King favorably against biblical rulers, as he “refashions 1 Samuel 8–12, the account of Saul’s accession, into an origin story for popular sovereignty” (84). Finally, although Defoe had previously written pamphlets both for and against war, he could be critical of soldiers and keen to keep them “at arm’s length” from society, as Banister writes (25-26). It is difficult to imagine the convivial seventeenth-century cavalier, or even Steele’s genial Tory, emerging from any of Defoe’s earlier works.

Defoe’s interest in the cavalier narrative had less to do with an exploration of the minutiae of its ideology than the fact of its success. Re-fashioning biblical stories to justify William III’s ascendency had given him experience in transforming inherited ideas into allegories palatable for an eighteenth-century readership, and the Memoirs perform a similar task. Although the royalist cause had been defeated three times between 1642 and 1651, it had eventually triumphed with Charles II’s restoration and twenty-five-year reign. As such, and despite the cavaliers’ hedonistic reputation, their claim to legitimate power still held weight in the early eighteenth century. This weight had immediate relevance, as the cavaliers’ claim to power had an uncomfortable parallel with the current Jacobite invocations of patrilineal legitimacy and rightful inheritance. The eventual victory of the cavalier cause in 1660 after years of martial and cultural defeat had the potential to act as a rallying cry for Jacobite loyalists. Far better, then, for those opposed to Jacobitism to claim the cavalier for one of their own, to demystify his status as a “lost cause” figure, and furnish him instead with the mentality of a modern gentleman officer. Written and published in the years immediately following the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion, but framed in Defoe’s introduction as having been found “in the Closet of an eminent publick Minister, of no less Figure than one of King William’s Secretaries of State” (sig. A2r), Memoirs of a Cavalier is an attempt to do just that.

Born into a family “of a very plentiful Fortune […] nearly allied to several of the principal Nobility” (2), the Cavalier’s early life resembles that of his upper-class predecessors in seventeenth-century literature. He is furnished with a good education through private tutors and at Oxford, and he spends his leisure time hunting on his family estate with his father. Like both the seventeenth-century cavalier and the modern polite gentleman, friendships with men are vital to the Cavalier’s narrative. His relationship with his father is a template for the subsequent friendships he forms with other men throughout the novel: his father does not demand absolute obedience from the Cavalier; he will act as an “Advisor, but will never impose” his authority over the Cavalier’s plans (4). The Cavalier finds an additional ally in the “generous free” Fielding, his near-constant travel-companion for the first section of the novel, and the two men even nurse one another through the plague (28). Although the Cavalier refers to his presence only infrequently, this is suggestive of the close, almost brotherly relationship that Defoe employs in his novel Captain Singleton, published in the same year as the Memoirs. Stephen Gregg has drawn attention to the friendship between Bob and William in the latter novel, in which neither man “had or sought any separate Interest,” as indicative of the early eighteenth-century homosocial bond (122-23): the two men are so alike that they think and act as one. Following this, the infrequent mentions of Fielding in the Memoirs suggest that he is a silent observer to all that the Cavalier sees and concurs with the Cavalier on all matters.

Other friends arrive late in the narrative: the Cavalier finds a friend and a mentor in Sir John Hepburn (a historical figure whose biography bears similarities to the Cavalier’s own), who is instrumental in assisting him with his military career, and during his time fighting on the Continent, the Cavalier also “obtained some […] very close Intimacies with the General Officers” (131). The gracious, considerate relationships that men have with one another in the novel act as an important counterpoint to the behavior of seventeenth-century cavaliers. Defoe’s Cavalier and his friends do not commit acts of vandalism, or challenge one another to duels, show no interest in fashion, while gambling is mentioned only once, negatively, as part of an “old English proverb”: “Standers-by see more than the Gamesters” (29). For politics, ambivalent feelings towards Charles I temper loyalty to the royalist cause. Drinking occurs infrequently, and never to excess: the Cavalier occasionally drinks wine as a guest in foreign households, while Hepburn at one point has a “Glass of Leipsick Beer” (58). A later troop of “bad” cavaliers demonstrate the consequences of excessive drinking: during the war in England, the Cavalier’s Major captures a parliamentarian house and gets very drunk with his men. The lady of the house launches an attack with her servants and the Major and his men, “too drunk to rally,” are unable to fight back. The Cavalier arrives to rescue them, but “the Men […] when they came to run for their Lives, fell over one another, and tumbled over their horses, and made such Work, that a Troop of Women might have beaten them all,” and the Major hides in humiliation for a fortnight (200-02). Unlike Cotton, Heath, or Butler before him, Defoe cannot make the cavaliers’ excessive drinking compatible with martial valor; it is rather evidence of weakness, compounded by a defeat by a woman and her servants. The Cavalier and his friends drink only in moderation and are thus not party to humiliations akin to those of the Major and his men.

The Cavalier’s adventures begin at twenty-one, when he decides to leave England for the Continent. His professed desire to travel derives from his belief that he “thought a Gentleman ought always to see something of the World before he confined himself to any part of it” (5)—a statement that paints his tour as a detached survey of foreign culture rather than an epicurean debauch. As a tourist, the Cavalier is not easily impressed: he discerns “nothing very remarkable” in the cathedral at Amiens (8); “there was not much to be seen” in Paris (10). Most damningly, the French court “looked like a Citizen’s House when the family was all gone into the Country” (11). The lauded sights of the great French cities, the reader gathers, ultimately disappoint. The Cavalier’s experience in France shows a land fraught with corruption, with a society that places more value on politesse than on Christian decency. Almost as soon as the Cavalier and Fielding arrive in France, they become lost. Eventually a priest comes to their aid and provides the two Englishmen with food and wine at his home before helping them get back on the road and offering them some money. For this assistance the Cavalier is grateful, but he adds to his description the spiteful remark that “though Civility is very much in Use in France […] ’tis a very unusual thing to have them part with their Money” (7-8). And indeed, soon after this first encounter, the Cavalier and Fielding are robbed. In fact, theft and violence characterize most of his French experiences. After dismissing the splendors of Amiens Cathedral, he describes seeing a “Mountebank Doctor” selling his wares to a great crowd, and nearby a gang of thieves work hard to trick other tourists out of their money, by picking their pockets and then bringing forward the wrong man to be identified by the victim. “This was the first French Trick I had the Opportunity of seeing; but I was told they have a great many more as dexterous as this,” the Cavalier assures us (8-10).

Cavalier narratives traditionally presumed a violent social culture: groups of cavaliers attacked other men, women, and property; cavaliers fought one another in private combat; cavaliers acted as seconds to their friends in duels. For Defoe’s Cavalier, the only instance of violence that occurs outside of a wartime context happens when he is in France and works to show the bonds of friendship between the Cavalier and Fielding against foreign enemies. The Cavalier receives word that Fielding has been ambushed and attacked by a group of men, and that he must go to assist him. The passage reads:

I […] followed the Fellow […] into a large Room where three Men, like Gentlemen, were Engaged very briskly, two against one: the Room was very dark, so that I could not easily know them asunder; but being fully possessed with an Opinion before of my Captain’s Danger, I ran into the Room with my Sword in my Hand: I had not particularly Engaged any of them, nor so much as made a Pass at any, when I received a very dangerous Thrust in my Thigh, rather occasioned by my hasty running in, than a real Design of the Person; but enraged at the Hurt, without examining who it was hurt me, I threw my self upon him, and run my Sword quite thro’ his Body. (13)

At this point, the Cavalier realizes that there has been a mistake: Fielding is not one of the other combatants and the Cavalier has no way of explaining himself. Bleeding heavily from his leg and confused by the labyrinthine “Entries and Passages” of the Parisian streets, he eventually manages to return to his lodgings. He cannot stay long, however: rumors emerge of the other man’s death, and as he has committed a capital crime, the Cavalier is forced to flee. He recuperates at a safe house for ten days before leaving Paris for good. On the road, his wound reopens, “in a worse Condition than before,” and he is forced to be treated by a “sorry Country Barber” in a remote village outside of Orleans (13-15).

This picaresque incident offers a flavor of the libertine cavalier narrative while simultaneously rewriting it to fit better with the sensibilities of the early eighteenth century. Although the men who are fighting are “like Gentlemen,” part of a higher social class like the seventeenth-century cavalier, and the Cavalier himself seems to fall into fighting with enthusiasm, this is certainly not a formal duel, nor is it the consequence of a bout of drinking turned violent. The Cavalier is acting in response to an unfair ambush on his friend, “two against one.” “Honor,” a word of crucial importance in the seventeenth century for justifying acts of violence, is not used at any point in the passage. Unlike the seventeenth-century cavaliers who fight with and against their friends over casual slights, Defoe’s Cavalier only becomes violent with civilians as foreigners who have launched an unfair attack on his friend. Like the later depiction of the drunk major bested by the parliamentarian lady, the affair is robbed of any sense of gallant adventure in the Cavalier’s confused journey home and collapse from blood loss. The rest of his time in France is spent in uncomfortable obscurity, fleeing from the law while attempting to allow his leg to heal. The Cavalier may have been justified in fighting when he thought he was rescuing his friend, but the chaos of the aftermath confirms that there is nothing glamorous about his heroism.

After his French adventures, the Cavalier leaves for Italy, where he has his only significant encounter with a woman described in the narrative. Although meaningful friendships between men resonate throughout the Memoirs, the Cavalier largely snubs relationships with women. His mother disappears after the opening pages. Before leaving on his tour, he gains a fiancée, whom he never meets, and much later in the narrative he misses a battle “owing to two Days Stay I made at the Bath, where I met with some Ladies who were my Relations” (225). In Italy, however, the Cavalier encounters a courtesan, who appears in a three-page passage (33-35). He records having spent an evening at her apartment, during which time he was “prevailed upon rather than tempted” to sleep with her (33). That the courtesan was a woman of great beauty, the Cavalier readily admits; he relates that she also possessed great taste, sang and danced divinely, and “her Conversation exceeded, if possible, the best of Quality, and was […] exceeding agreeable.” Upon realizing her profession, however, his attraction to her disappeared, “the Place filled me with Horror, and I was all over Disorder and Distraction.” The woman offers him food and wine to placate him, but the Cavalier goes on: “I began to be in more Confusion than before, for I concluded she would neither offer me to eat or to drink now without Poison, and I was very shy of tasting her Treat” (34). At the end of the evening he manages to escape her apartment, unpoisoned and unseduced, but nevertheless gives her five pistoles before he leaves, as well as his word that he would meet with her again.

The Cavalier’s next encounter with the woman occurs outside a church. He had resolved to break his promise to meet with her, but after she greets him kindly, the Cavalier allows the rest of their relationship to be a mystery: “I cannot say here so clearly as I would be glad I might, that I broke my word with her; but if I saw her any more I saw nothing of what gave me so much Offence before,” the Cavalier admits to his reader, before concluding that “if I did any Thing I have some Reason to be ashamed of, it may be a less Crime to conceal it than expose it” (35). These two final, meandering sentences are deliberately obscure, designed to draw a delicate curtain over the relationship. He does not admit that he slept with her and insists that there was no repeat of their first encounter at her apartment, with wine, dancing, and sexual propositions. Nevertheless, he is unable to deny that he saw her again, and his very suggestion that he might be concealing rather than exposing a source of shame by refusing to describe his later encounters with her leads us to the obvious conclusion that they conducted a sexual relationship in secret.

As with the Cavalier’s fight against his friend’s attackers, the story of his encounters with the courtesan is both a nod to and a rewriting of the libertine cavalier narrative. The seventeenth-century cavalier had a justly-earned reputation for whoring, but Defoe is careful not to place the meetings with the courtesan as a series of raucous encounters. She is deliberately written as beautiful, refined, and socially respectable—Defoe wants his eighteenth-century readers to recognize her as a woman of some worth. It is only when she admits her profession that he realizes that she is not a woman of “quality,” provoking his disgust. Although the relationship continues, the Cavalier does not flaunt it—rather the opposite. His refusal to admit to any impropriety with the woman, as “it may be a less Crime to conceal it than expose it,” differentiates the Cavalier from his seventeenth-century counterparts: he has no interest in boasting of his sexual conquests. Nevertheless, his refusal to deny a sexual relationship suggests that Defoe was unwilling to allow that his narrator simply spent an evening in friendly conversation with the courtesan. Men who enjoyed platonic dialogue with women could be stereotyped as French and effeminate (Cohen 50-51)—a sacrifice too far in salvaging the cavalier for modern manners. To avoid thus compromising his stoic English hero, Defoe is forced to prevaricate, rejecting the plain speech he had employed up to this point and claim to “conceal” the truth merely out of propriety. It is for the reader to decide what exactly happened in the courtesan’s apartment—although her determined pursuit of him is a hint that the Cavalier possesses his own sexual allure.

Although the Cavalier’s encounters with the courtesan are dominated by feelings of fear and guilt, he is contemptuous of the rest of Italian culture. He writes: “I saw nothing but lewdness, private murders, stabbing men at the corner of a street, or in the dark, hiring of bravos, and the like.” To this, he adds dismissively that despite enjoying the classical architecture in Rome, he had “no gust to antiquities” (Memoirs 31-32). In neither France nor Italy, the countries to which he devotes the most pages of his Grand Tour, does the Cavalier find anything that he can adopt as part of his own way of life. Particularly indicative of this is that the elaborate cavalier dress sense, so infamous both in the seventeenth century and afterwards, is not a prominent theme in the novel. Accordingly, the Cavalier makes no mention of the stylish French or Italian clothing in fashion among his fellow officers during his time abroad. Descriptions of clothing are brief and dismal: when his portmanteau is ransacked in France, the thieves find only “Linen and Necessaries” to steal (8). Later, the dirty clothes of the Duke of Saxony’s army are evidence of men’s physical fortitude, as they “were used to camp in the open Fields, and sleep in the Frosts and Rain,” while the Cavalier also admires the Swedish soldiers who “were well clad, not gay” (52-56). His most detailed description of his own clothing occurs when he goes disguised to spy during wartime: “dressing my self up a la Paisant, with a white Cap on my Head, and a Fork on my Shoulder […] I thought my self very awkward in my Dress” (248). In fact, the most thorough critique that he makes of any clothing comes much later in the novel, in his description of the Highlanders’ finery at the 1638 Treaty of Berwick:

The Oddness and Barbarity of their Garb and Arms seemed to have something in it remarkable […] Their Dress was […] antique […]; a Cap on their Heads, called by them a Bonnet, long hanging Sleeves behind, and their Doublet, Breeches and Stockings, of a Stuff they called Plaid, striped a-cross red and yellow, with short Cloaks of the same. These Fellows looked, when drawn out, like a Regiment of Merry Andrews ready for Bartholomew Fair. (156)

Until this point in the Memoirs, the Cavalier has largely ignored the costume of those around him. The sudden interest in the bonnets and tartan of the Scottish Highlanders, and the insistence on the “oddness” and “barbarity” of their clownish appearance, is a comment on early eighteenth-century political sensibilities rather than a reflection of the sartorial interests of a seventeenth-century cavalier. This description of the Highlanders is as unflattering as the description of Italy: their tribal dress identifies them as ridiculous and old-fashioned. As a counterpoint to these “bad” Scots, the novel offers up a “good” Scotsman, Sir John Hepburn, who is the colonel of a “Reformado” Scottish regiment within the Swedish army. A man with “as much Gallantry in his Face as real Courage in his Heart” (57), Hepburn plays a prominent role in the first half of the novel, assisting the Cavalier in his ambitions as a volunteer in the Swedish army by introducing him to King Gustavus Adolphus. However, other than his name, there is little in the text that is identifiably Scottish about Hepburn; nothing in his speaking, dressing, or thinking that differentiates him from the Cavalier, leaving us to conclude that the ideal Scotsman, in Defoe’s mind, is indistinguishable from his English hero.

Unlike earlier narratives, Defoe underplays the importance of social performance in the formation of the cavalier: the Memoirs’ emphasis on military events accentuates the hero’s martiality, while his social experiences and private thoughts primarily serve to subvert the traditional expressions of the cavalier mode. After a prolonged army experience in Germany, he spends “two Years rather in wandring up and down than travelling” (131): he is, like Behn’s Willmore before him, a rover, but one whose rootless drifting inspires a return to England and Civil War rather than Continental debauchery. The narrative breaks off after the Royalist defeat; how the Cavalier occupied himself throughout the 1650s is left to the reader’s imagination, although it seems probable that his adventures were not the libertine cavalier narratives of seventeenth-century legend. These men may still exist within the Memoirs—the debauched cavalier Major and his men whose drunken mishaps result in their humiliation—but their actions can no longer be parsed as heroic, and Defoe offers up a new version of the cavalier hero as a plain-spoken man whose dominant impulse is the pursuit of military heroics.

WORKS CITED

Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. The Spectator. Edited by Donald F. Bond, Clarendon Press, 1965.

Alker, Sharon. “The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.1, 2006, pp. 43-68.

Armstrong, Katherine A. Defoe: Writer as Agent. English Literary Monograph Series, 1996.

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation. UP of Kentucky, 2015.

Banister, Julia. Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689-1815. Cambridge UP, 2018.

Behn, Aphra. The Rover; or, the Banish’d Cavaliers. London, 1677.

Butler, Samuel. The Posthumous Works of Mr Samuel Butler, (Author of Hudibras) Complete in One Volume…Fourth Edition. London, 1732.

Cohen, Michèle. “Manliness, effeminacy and the French: gender and the construction of national character in eighteenth-century England.” English Masculinities, 1660-1800. Edited by Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, Routledge, 2014.

Corns, Thomas N. “The Poetry of the Caroline Court.” Proceedings of the British Academy 97, 1998, pp. 51-73.

Cotton, Charles. Poems on Several Occasions. London, 1689.

Defoe, Daniel. Memoirs of a Cavalier: or a Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England; From the Year 1632, to the Year 1648. London, 1720.

——— More Reformation. A Satyr Upon Himself. London, 1703.

Gregg, Stephen. Defoe’s Writing and Manliness: Contrary Men. Ashgate, 2009.

Hailwood, Max. Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England. Boydell & Brewer, 2014.

Heath, Robert. Clarastella. London, 1650.

Klein, Lawrence. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge UP, 1994.

Lemon, Rebecca. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. U of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Markley, Robert. “‘Be Impudent, Be Saucy, Forward, Bold, Touzing, and Leud’: The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn’s Tory Comedies.” Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater. Edited by J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, U of Georgia Press, 1995, pp. 114-40.

Mayer, Robert. History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe. Cambridge UP, 1997.

McKendry, Andrew. “‘No Parallels from Hebrew Times’: Troubled Typologies and the Glorious Revolution in Daniel Defoe’s Williamite Poetry.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50.1, Fall 2016, pp. 81-99.

Miner, Earl Roy. The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton. Princeton UP, 1971.

Nocturnall Occurrances or, Deeds of Darknesse: Committed, By the Cavaleers in their Rendevous. London, 1642.

Rabb, Melinda. “Parting Shots: Eighteenth-Century Displacements of the Male Body at War.” ELH 78.1, Spring 2011, pp. 103-129.

von Ranke, Leopold. A History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. VI. Cambridge UP, 2010.

Seager, Nicholas. “‘A Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read’: History, Fiction, and Politics in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.4, 2008, pp. 479-505.

Strawn, Morgan. “‘Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship’: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25.2, Winter 2012–13, pp. 327-357.

Walkden, Andrea. “Parallel Lives and Literary Legacies: Crusoe’s Elder Brother and Defoe’s Cavalier.” ELH 77.4, 2010, pp. 1061-86.

Wright, James. Historica Histrionica. London, 1699.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuesta College

NOTES

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