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

Ala Alryyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queens College, City University of New York

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-Humanizing Robinson

Christopher Borsing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trinity College, Dublin

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jessica Leeper

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

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

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

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

Edition Prefaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edition Advertisement Pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

Private Library Catalogues

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

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

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

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

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

Bookseller Catalogues

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

University of York

WORKS CITED

Primary Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondary Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice Monter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither of the said pamphlets have been written by the said earl, or with his knowledge, or by his direction or encouragement, but on the contrary he has reason to believe from several passages therein contained, that it was the intention of the author or authors to do him prejudice, and that the last of the said pamphlets is published at this juncture to that end.[3]

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

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

University of Liverpool / Université de Paris

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judith Stuchiner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fordham University

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Defoe

Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries

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