Introductory Essay

David Fletcher

THIS PLAY was written to mark the 300th anniversary of the UK’s first great stock market crash—the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720.[1] When I started research for the play, it was not long before it became clear that the works of Daniel Defoe would provide the best source material. Defoe’s extensive writing about the South Sea Company, his dramatic writing style, and the brilliance of some of the characters in the journals provided a wealth of potential material.

The central theme of the play is the psychological effect of the mania that surrounded the Bubble and the crash. The imagery of the play is rooted in contagion, perhaps inevitably as the initial draft of the play was written at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Defoe’s extensive writing about plague provided many potent metaphors of disease, fever, infection, and corruption. I hope that this has given the play a disturbing relevance.

One important task in writing the play was the selection of extracts from primary sources for inclusion in the text. In this respect, there are three phases in the play. In the early scenes there are a number of extracts from Defoe’s 1719 pamphlet The Anatomy of Exchange Alley: or, A System of Stock-Jobbing. In this pamphlet, Defoe’s attacks on the “scandalous trade” include reference to “Sham Reports, False News, Foreign Letters, &c. are Things that have been often trumpt upon us”—a verb that was irresistible for a play written in 2020 (cover, 17). The central part of the play draws heavily on the journals that were edited by Defoe, but without entering into the debate about which pieces were written by Defoe himself. Most of the extracts from the journals were taken from editions published in 1720, during the period of the Bubble and the crash.[2] In the final scene of the play, Defoe is confronted by the corruption at the heart of the South Sea project. This scene uses extracts from a source that was not written by Defoe—The Several Reports of the Committee of Secrecy to the Honourable House of Commons, Relating to the late South Sea Directors &c.

About two-thirds of the play is based on these primary sources—the rest is my own invention. The sections of the play that are not drawn from sources are mostly the scenes between Defoe and his daughter Hannah. I wanted to introduce a personal dimension into the play and to create opportunities for us to hear what might have been Defoe’s private thoughts. It was clear that this would be more dramatically interesting if he had someone to talk to and the character of Hannah grew in importance during the gestation of the play. There may not be sources for everything I have invented, but I hope there is nothing that clashes with the sources. As Hilary Mantel said in her BBC Reith Lectures about historical fiction, “don’t lie. Don’t go against known facts …. You can select, elide, highlight, omit. Just don’t cheat.”

Audio-plays work best with a variety of sound worlds, so the selection of locations is crucial. Having decided to place the scenes between Defoe and Hannah in his private study, I needed to set other scenes in more public places. Some are set in the street, but the main “external” setting is Jonathan’s Coffeehouse, a specific location referenced by Defoe in The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (35). It is clear from Defoe’s works and other sources that the coffeehouses of the time would have been buzzing with South Sea talk.

Pragmatism influenced some of the choices I made when writing the play. There are so many possible lines to follow in dramatizing the story of the South Sea Bubble. It was necessary, for practical reasons, to keep the length of the play to about one hour, so it was not possible to follow all these potential pathways. Regrettably, the play contains only a brief section that recognises the involvement of the South Sea Company with the slave trade. There is also only a passing mention of the issue of the financial structure of the Company and the national debt. There was also not room to accommodate all of Defoe’s changing views about the South Sea Company, the Bubble, and its aftermath. Also, when casting the play, it became clear that I had a wealth of female actors to choose from, so I changed the gender of some of the characters. This was not without some basis in the historical record, as there were many female investors in the South Sea Company. Before settling on Defoe as the central character, I briefly considered using the story of Lady Betty Hastings and her half-sisters. Anne Laurence has examined the differing ways in which these women managed their finances in the context of the financial revolution of the early 18th century, and the South Sea Bubble in particular.

It was an enjoyable experience living with Defoe while writing this play. He was one of the most fascinating characters at a time when fascination was not in short supply. So much of his writing is truly engaging and witty. It is a shame that Defoe was something of an anti-theatrical, as I believe he would have made a fine playwright. As Hannah says in the opening monologue of the play, “there was always that twinkle in his eye. The wit that was in so much of his writing was fundamental to the man – it’s who Daniel Defoe was. His sense of mischief was infectious, and we loved him for it.”

University of Warwick

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Professor Mark Knights for inviting me to write a play about the South Sea Bubble, and for providing me with help and encouragement throughout the project. I would also like to thank Sue Moore, Alison Pollard, Michael Rolfe, Dr Edward Taylor, and Gordon Vallins for their valuable advice.

2. Most of these extracts were taken from Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings.

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley: Or, a System of Stock-Jobbing. London, 1719.

Laurence, Anne. “Lady Betty Hastings, Her Half‐Sisters, and the South Sea Bubble: Family Fortunes and Strategies.” Women’s History Review, vol. 15, pp. 533-40.

Lee, William. Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings: Extending from 1716 to 1729. London, 1869.

Mantel, Hilary, “Can These Bones Live?” BBC Radio 4, July 2017. https://medium.com/@bbcradiofour/can-these-bones-live-b015dc8397c6.

The Several Reports of the Committee of Secrecy to the Honourable House of Commons Relating to the Late South Sea Directors &c. London, 1721. https://archive.org/details/pp1312061-2001.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, vol. 1, “Early Manuscript Books,” edited by Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff; and vol. 2, “Later Collections, Print and Manuscript,” edited by Keith and Kairoff

Reviewed by Andrew Black

What if the early eighteenth century were the “Age of Finch”? For reasons that are fairly easily justified, it’s not. In her own time and immediately after, Finch was a modest poet with a minor reputation. She received praise from Delarivier Manley, Nicholas Rowe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope – for the last hundred years or so of eighteenth-century literary history, the latter two names could have followed the words “Age of” on a monograph. To wit, Pope’s poems occupy seventy-four pages of the most recent tenth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, while Swift’s prose and poems take up 206. Preceding both is Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie”; in volume nine, one could also find her caustic “The Introduction,” which has since been removed. Her biographical caption begins in the middle of page 252, after a similarly concise excerpt from Mary Astell, and “A Nocturnal Reverie” ends halfway through page 254, where Swift’s work, long enough to be its own book, begins. By contrast, I could scissor out the Finch entry and probably find a way to glue it to the front of a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper.

To some degree, the Norton realistically registers the lack of a footprint that Finch had in the later eighteenth century. Often Finch’s lack of presence is suggested as a product of that aforementioned modesty: perhaps a fear of criticism kept her poems “in the shade” (as per Volume C of the Norton [253]) and “might have made her shrink from exposing herself to the jeers that still, at the turn of the century, greeted any effort by a ‘scribbling lady.’” This and similar descriptions of Finch have become the reigning speculation that one finds when first confronting her work. This “shrink[ing]” feeling, the argument goes, led her to publish only one collection, the 1713 Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions “in spite of her skepticism about readers’ abilities to appreciate the quality of her (or her contemporaries’) compositions” (I:lviii). She was fifty-two at the time, and would die seven years later and leave behind manuscript volumes that were preserved, if not meant for publication.

Yet a fuller survey of Finch’s rich corpus reveals the tensions that are elided in that fairly convenient modesty narrative. In the 1680s, Finch and her husband Heneage were aspirants in the vexed Stuart court of James II, with Anne serving as maid to Mary of Modena. Following James’s “bloodless” ouster after the Glorious Revolution, the Finches lived out a tumultuous 1690s in Kent. The poems that emerge from this period, only a few of them published later in the Miscellany Poems, reflect her grief and uncertainty. In “Ardelia to Melancholy,” she tells the titular foe: “Thou, through my life, wilt with me goe, / And make the passage, sad and slow” (I:54.37-38). She also remained deeply attuned to, and cynical about, public affairs that became “discreet but persistent” topics (I: xlviii). The Finches would return to public life in 1702 with the ascension of the more tolerant Queen Anne, and Finch’s work would occasionally appear anonymously in miscellanies. The first printing of Miscellany Poems were attributed to “a Lady.”

That Finch has posterity at all may because of the surprising endurance of “A Nocturnal Reverie.” In the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the 1815 Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth celebrated “the nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea” alongside “a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope” as the rare exceptions of an Augustan poetic canon between Milton and Thomson that “does not contain a single new image of external nature” (73). It’s likely that Wordsworth’s endorsement of “Lady Winchelsea” led to her inclusion in the 1825 Specimens of British Poetesses, edited by literary historian Alexander Dyce. Wordsworth would send him a letter of praise, offering to suggest more poems by this female writer to whom he was “especially partial.” Five years later, he would write to Dyce:

Her style in rhyme is often admirable: chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture which reminds one, by its broad glare, its stiffness and heaviness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields. (qtd. in Lonsdale 6)

Thus the canonization of Wordsworth as a major poet who never went out of print led to the republishing of these tantalizing notices of a talented woman whose work had not been reprinted in full since the 1713 publication of her Miscellany Poems. Reading Wordsworth’s insistent praise of Finch is charming, sort of like your friend who keeps demanding you listen to some band you’ve never heard of. Yet there’s also something confoundingly frustrating about this dynamic in which Finch needed the assistance of a cultural heavyweight like Wordsworth to avoid her complete disappearance as a “specimen.”

How and why Finch resurfaces across the nineteenth century is difficult to track, but Wordsworth’s praise is almost always involved. In an essay from an 1847 collection, Leigh Hunt refers to her as “one of the numerous loves we possess among our grandmothers of old, or rather not numerous, but select and such as keep fresh with us forever” (107). He follows this up by mentioning Wordsworth’s praise, before excerpting “The Spleen,” one of the poems included in Dyce’s collection. It’s a brief summary, and Finch receives more praise than Aphra Behn (possessed of a “thoughtless good humor” [107]) or Anne Killegrew (who “reminds the reader of her great friend” John Dryden [103]). Finch is invoked in a work by the fiery Welsh poet Lady Jane Williams, who went by the wonderful bardic name of “Ysgafell.” Ysgafell registers her anger at the minimal place for women in the literary tradition, but she gives Finch a mixed review: “Nocturnal Reverie” is “wonderfully true to nature” but “The Spleen” is “very poor, and ill deserve[s] the praise lavished . . . by contemporary flatterers” (qtd. in Reynolds lxxxi). By the late nineteenth century, Finch found another male admirer who argued for her inclusion in a broader anthology. That man, the magnanimous literary historian Edmund Gosse, was convincing enough that Finch got six poems (along with Gosse’s critical introduction) placed in Thomas Humphrey Ward’s 1880 four-volume anthology The English Poets. In that introduction, Gosse longed for “those unpublished poems, to which reference has been made . . . still in the possession of her family,” adding, “it is highly desirable that they should be given to the world” (27). Gosse was able to hunt down from a catalog of obscure books Finch manuscript, or what he called “a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch” (lxxxvii). This opened the door for Myra Reynolds.

Myra Reynolds isn’t a name you find much referred to in contemporary scholarship outside of a footnote, but she’s an intriguing, prolific figure for the turn-of-the-century study of letters. She was one of the first four fellows at the (then-new) University of Chicago in 1892, where she earned her Ph.D., rose through the ranks, and even became an administrator. She wrote a critical work on Pope and Swift, as well as the insightful and progressive overview The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760. But it’s Reynolds’ editing of The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, published in 1903, that is perhaps still the reason we know Finch today as well as we do. The work includes a lengthy introduction that, more than any preceding work, clarifies Finch’s biography, contextualizes her in the period, and offers incisive close readings of her poems. Reynolds is not exactly a defiant feminist: like the speaker of “Ysgafell,” she’s often critical of Finch and the women she surveys in The Learned Lady in England. The availability of the Poems as a digital edition once it entered public domain has likely made the growing field of Finch studies possible. Yet Reynolds relied on print sources alone, and “because her edition lacks a textual apparatus, it necessarily effaces Finch’s different use of manuscript and print” (liv).

There were three editions between 1928 and 1987, all relying on Reynolds’ fading original. The 1990s saw important and illuminating monographs on Finch by two scholars, Charles Hinnant and Barbara McGovern, who jointly published a volume of poems from the so-called Wellesley Manuscript, containing occasional and religious poetry as well as verse epistles that did not appear in Reynolds’ edition. The edition is a valuable contribution, and was to that point the most exhaustive critical edition of Finch’s work. In a 1995 review of Charles Hinnant’s The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay of Interpretation, Kathleen Kincade appropriately notes that the book is hard to process because of the “unavailability of her works” that “most scholars have not had the opportunity to see” (428). This was a fair assessment of the difficulty of reading Finch’s work before digitization made Reynolds’ edition available.

* * *

The two-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch: Countess of Winchelsea allows us to imagine an alternative Age of Finch. The editors, Claudia Kairoff and Jennifer Keith, have completed with astonishing thoroughness, sensitivity, and seriousness one of the landmark pieces of eighteenth-century scholarship of this century. Given their prior work on her poems, they are not exactly looking through Finch with fresh eyes, but allow us to. They have consumed, synthesized, and responded to the scholarship that led up this moment, and the availability of this work will allow for more. Their critical framing has enhanced and complicated Finch’s modesty. Finch is a poet who “repeatedly explores the powers and limits of language” (xlix). She is a “critic of patriarchy” and “an innovator of poetic kinds and modes . . . along with the themes and value systems that accompany them” (xlviii). While her political views where clearly aligned with the deposed Stuart monarchy, she explored and even interrogated these through devotional poetry, fables, occasional verse, and of course the nature poems that Wordsworth publicized.

Volume I contains her earliest, unpublished manuscripts, mostly poems prior to 1704. This was a period when the Finches were mostly in exile from public life, and the work consists of devotional and love poetry, odes, songs, satires, fables, and occasional verse. Throughout, Finch “experimented with formal hybrids and complicated the associations of certain themes with particular kinds and forms” (lxxvii). Volume I also contains Finch’s two never-staged plays, The Triumph of Love and Innocence and Aristomenes or the Royal Shepherd, which both of the editors have insistently kept alive through earlier scholarship. As the editors explain, these works “pose special, intriguing problems in text and authorship” (cxiii). By necessity, the editors provide ranges of dates for composition, while offering possibilities that go far beyond speculation. These manuscripts, primarily transcribed by her husband Heneage, are “authorized” rather than “authorial,” and represent the work completed before 1702, much of which would be published in the 1713 Miscellany Poems (cxiii-cxv).[1] The editors’ description of the two manuscripts that make up this volume illuminates and brings to life early modern manuscript practices in ekphrastic detail regarding binding, gatherings, stamps, and ornamentation.

Tellingly, the title page of the later Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia includes an epigraph from Finch from Edmund Spenser: “I play to please myself, albeit ill” (I: 21). The poems of the first volume indeed attest to a deeply personal poetics, one that resists what Finch calls in a preface (never published) the “daring manifestation” and “confident producing” of publication. While some poems are certainly wracked with a despair that accompanied exile, others allow her wit to shine, particularly in the caustic political tone of fables that “amuse while exposing . . . Whig innovations such as the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, mercantile ventures, and a generally commercialized culture” (I:xcvi-xcvii). These works now have the generous attention they deserve.

Volume II presents the later collections, and particularly the remaining poems in the 1713 Miscellany Poems and what is known as the “Wellesley Manuscript,” which were unavailable to Myra Reynolds and difficult to find digitally. In their introduction, the editors explain the tensions that Finch felt in publishing her work, as well as the possibilities. Challenging Finch as a writer who hid behind modesty tropes, the authors point to the ailing health of Queen Anne and the succession crisis that she anticipated. The timing of the volume allowed it to “participat[e] in a vigorous campaign to persuade English readers of the respective merits of Stuart and Hanoverian rule” (lxii-lxiii). Finch is a “woman censuring – without apology – the moral and political ills of the past and present” (lxiii).

The editors’ critical attention clearly makes the argument for the vitality of Finch’s poems. For instance, one of her most frequently anthologized poems is “A Petition for an Absolute Retreat, Inscribed to the Right Honorable Catherine Countess of Thanet; Mention’d in the Poem, under the Name of Arminda,” usually with an abbreviated title. Noting that the edenic setting recalls Milton, the editors then turn our attention to the tradition of the Horatian “happy man” tradition and the politically potent “retreat poems of Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley (I: 650). However, Finch avoids “Marvell’s misogyny and Cowley’s preference only for a spouse,” while sharing Philips “intimation that her garden provides a retreat . . . in a specific time of political danger” (I: 651). The poem becomes a complex engagement not only with a century of Royalist verse, but also with a tradition of nature writing that associates the feminine with sport or frailty. In the editors’ glosses to the poem itself, a “lonely, stubborn Oak” is connected to Stuart iconography (I:653). The sobriquet for the Countess of Thanet, “Armida,” is linked to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (I:652). A “Cordial drop” is linked to a matching phrase in Rochester (I:653). Clarified here are references to Romans Silla and Sertorius, and the editors explain which competing translation of Plutarch Finch might have encountered. And, as with every poem, the editors carefully lay out variants, marks, and emendations.

In other glosses, we find exhaustive and exciting references that make legible the previously elusive nature of Finch’s encounters with literary tradition. In addition to linking her to poetic superstars like Marvell and Milton, the editors clarify the sweeping intertextuality of these poems, their references to minor, forgotten writers like Christopher Clobery. You find yourself nodding along as the editors explain that Finch’s image of “melting words . . . to catch the Soul, when drawn into the eye” recalls Philip Sidney’s Astrophil longing for Stella to receive his poems so that “reading might make her know” (I:464). To place Finch in a constellation with Sidney, even in a concise footnote, is to acknowledge her participation in a poetic tradition that she felt was denied to her.

In a playful but problematic poem called “Apollo Outwitted,” Jonathan Swift pestered Finch to be more public. The demure Ardelia consistently refuses the coercive sun god who has descended to “pick up sublunary ladies,” and must face the following curse:

Of modest poets be thou first

To silent shades repeat thy verse

Till Fame and Echo almost burst,

Yet hardly dare one line rehearse. (57-60)

Swift shifts Finch’s modesty from self-imposed to divinely enforced. There’s a critical insight here that Swift might not have intended: that the overseers of the same print marketplace that allowed him to thrive had different expectations and outcomes for a woman. Finch could not expect readers to have sensitivity and generosity, and worried about the adverse effects of fame. As she writes in “The Introduction,”

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. (I:33.9-13)

Against centuries of incomplete attention to Finch, Keith and Kairoff have “redeemed” her in a triumphant act of feminist intervention and recovery. Future generations of Finch readers, and there will be more, will no longer have to scour digitized sources to piece together her archive. The Cambridge Finch can join such noteworthy appellations as the Cambridge Swift, the Twickenham Pope, the Yale Johnson, and that level of prestige is overdue. The next necessary step is obviously an inexpensive teaching edition that draws upon this luminous edition.

Andrew Black
Murray State University

NOTES

1. One exception is intriguing: the later poem “Reflections . . . upon the Late Hurricane” was transcribed and added by Heneage in 1704.

WORKS CITED

Gosse, Edmund. “Lady Winchelsea” in The English Poets, edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward, vol. 3, 4 vols. Macmillan and Co., 1884, pp. 27-28.

Hunt, Leigh. Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs. Harper & Brothers, 1847.

Kincade, Kathleen. Review of The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation by Charles H. Hinnant. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. vol. 20-21 (1994/1995), pp. 428-429.

Lonsdale, Roger. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Reynolds, Myra. “Introduction” in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchelsea. Chicago UP, 1903, pp. xvii – cxxxiv.

Swift, Jonathan. “Apollo Outwitted: To the Honourable Mrs. Finch,” in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, edited by Harold Williams, vol. 1, 3 vols. Clarendon Press, 1958, pp. 119–21.

Wordsworth, William. “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 3, 3 vols. Oxford UP, 1974, pp. 62-107.

The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West, by Ning Ma

Reviewed by Jenny Mander

The Age of Silver is an important, timely, and potentially paradigm-shifting study that deserves widespread attention especially (but not only) from those with research interests in the novel and its modern history both before and after 1800. Indeed, although focusing essentially on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Ning Ma makes a compelling case for why modernists need to return to the early modern period in order to rethink their understanding of the past on which their notions of the history of the present are grounded. Ambitious in conception and boldly articulated, the five-chapter monograph should also earn a high-ranking place on university reading lists, both introductory and advanced, not least, it might be added, on account of the rich and “professionally-aware” bibliographical apparatus and the comprehensive digest that constitutes much of the opening chapter in which the author situates her thesis in relation to a series of salient concepts drawn from some of the most influential twentieth-century theories of the novel. To convey a sense of the theoretical self-awareness that shapes this project, suffice it to say that this opening survey ranges from Georg Lukács (“transcendental homelessness” and “reification”), Mikhail Bakhtin (“heteroglossia”), Benedict Anderson (“imagined communities”) and Fredric Jameson (“national allegories”), without, of course, omitting Ian Watt and Franco Moretti inter alia. In order to align her own project with what she sees as a “new ethics for world literature,” the author sets about “reinventing” and “reconfiguring” these major novelistic theories. She does so by drawing (a trifle less digestibly) on a yet wider set of more recent (largely postcolonial) theoretical concepts including Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity,” Edouard Glissant’s “creolity,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizomes,” Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory,” Homi Bhaba’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and Wai Chee Dimock’s discussion of world literature as a “lexical” form of “global civil society.”

At the theoretical core of nearly all the major theories of the novel that have shaped discussion over the past century, Ma identifies three common presuppositions. The first is that the genre of the novel is the quintessential embodiment of literary modernity; second, the modern novel is distinct from earlier heroic modes of narrative fiction by virtue of variously defined notions of “realism” or a tendency towards materiality; third, it is a Eurocentric genre. She concurs – perhaps a little too readily – with the first and second of these presuppositions. The transcultural category of the modern realist novel on which she builds her own argument does not, however, aim (or need) to depart from these perhaps overly narrow conventions for her particular purposes. The force and originality of her Ma’s thesis lies in her outright rejection of the third presupposition. The arresting and ultimately convincing primary argument of The Age of Silver is that the modern realist novel, as identifiable by conventional features, did not ‘rise’ uniquely in Western Europe, either in eighteenth-century England (as is the contention of Watt in his Rise of the Novel) or (as Hispanists have long insisted) in Golden Age Spain. The emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era are also to be found in late Ming Chinese society and that of Japan of the same period without any apparent or necessary ties of direct European literary influence.

To sustain her proposition, she devotes the second chapter to a historically-contextualised reading of a Chinese literary landmark, circulating towards the end of the sixteenth century, the anonymous Jin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase, hailed by Patrick Hanan as “the first true Chinese novel.” In chapter four, the focus is on the “floating world” narratives of the seventeenth-century Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku, who, we are told, became known at the end of the nineteenth century as “Japan’s realist.” Through these case studies – fascinating in themselves – Ma opens up a novelistic landscape that, she argues, is essentially continuous with the worlds of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe which are, respectively, the subject matter of chapters 3 and 5. The study concludes with a more speculative epigraph which develops further parallels between novels in both East and West during this period in their representation of the virtuous female heroine, building from an observation made by Goethe who had sensed a strong resemblance between Chinese novels and the works of Samuel Richardson.

Capturing a “forgotten” period where European readers had a greater awareness of Chinese fiction and felt a sense of kinship with its protagonists, Goethe’s comment (made to his young assistant, Johann Peter Eckermann, in January 1827) also serves as a clever and colourful benchmark in Ma’s overarching historiography. Over the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – the final tipping point being the First Opium War – the dynamics of the early modern global economy gave way to a new world system from which emerged a new world view that placed Europe at its centre. A quotation from The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is neatly invoked to capture this seismic shift and to spell out its consequences for the understanding of world literature, the European historical imagination and its “ideology” of modernity. Whereas Goethe, but twenty years previously had proclaimed the epoch of world literature to be at hand, anticipating “a great discourse” on an international scale between Europe, China, the East Indies and the United States (167), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could only conceive of the imminent birth of a Weltliteratur that would arise as a result of a world market created by the European bourgeoisie who are henceforth cast as the revolutionizing “subject” of history (16). Theorists of the novel, Ma argues, have for generations been straightjacketed and blinkered by this subsequent “diffusionist” model of “Euromodernity,” and this, she argues diplomatically, continues to inform more recent critical projects, including those (she hints) that are undertaken in a political spirit of decolonisation. The Age of Silver is thus conceived as a project in re-excavating the dynamics of an earlier world system the memory of which has subsequently been repressed by the “hegemonic constituents of nineteenth-century Euromodernity” (6). Through this excavation it aims to disrupt “routinized Eurocentric narratives of linear development” and clear the way for the reconstruction of a different genealogy of novelistic modernity and, by extension, modernity itself.

Hence a second compelling and perhaps even more important argument advanced by The Age of Silver: a corollary of the main thesis is that the modernity of which the realist novel is understood to be an expression is not inherently tied to the forces of industrialisation, capitalism, colonialism or indeed to notions of Enlightenment science and subjectivities. With reference to the transcultural category of the realist novel, and foregrounding social mobility and critical consciousness as the quintessential hallmarks of modernity, Ma is able to illustrate that just as the modern novel did not arise alone or even first in Europe, so too the social and political transformations of modernity were not unique to the West. The chapters on The Plum and on Saikaku’s “floating world” fictions expound on these changes with reference to China and Japan, both through the analysis of the novels themselves and through contextualising discussion. They provide ample evidence to back up her assertion that: “The emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era – whose Eastern development has been theoretically ignored – can be broadly correlated with the social and political significances money and material objects rapidly assumed during the period” (7).

Such a statement may appear to be a self-evident truism and it would be if simply applied to the European novel. The traction of her thesis lies in her conceptualisation of the novelistic response to “cultural displacement” at local level to “transregional conditions” which she frames in terms of the global dynamics structuring Eurasian relations through the circulation of silver. The “borderless and transmuting motions” of this white metal “connected nations, peoples, and individuals in covert yet profound ways” (23) creating what the author describes as a new planetary environment or “anthropocene” to which she gives the label “Age of Silver,” hence her memorable book title. Drawing insights from Andre Gunder Frank, author of Re-Orient (University of California Press, 1998) and other East-West world-system analysts such as Kenneth Pomeranz, this focus on the global dynamics opens up the history of the novel to the insights of recent comparative history undertaken by historians and economists who have been working against the Orientalist foundations of Western social and historical thought. Within this undertheorized world-system, it is to China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via her exports of consumer goods that we need to look in order to understand the “crucial substructural conditions of coeval European and global developments” (52). The less informed reader is reminded of Japan’s historical role as a major silver exporter, responsible for perhaps one third of the global total output of silver during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which as much as 75% was traded with China. As regards the Spanish colonies in South America, which were, of course, the largest producer of mined silver in the period, the reader is again reminded that a substantial quantity of this also found its way to China, either directly via the Mania galleons, or indirectly, via Europe, through subsequent trade with the East. The point being stressed here is that during the early modern period, it was China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via her exports of consumer goods that created the “crucial substructural conditions of coeval European and global developments” (52). There is therefore no need at this point of the story to explain the rise of the modern novel with reference to European ideas or European industrialisation; furthermore, The Age of Silver displaces the centrality of European colonialism to the genealogy of the modern novel, or at least relocates it within less familiar global dynamics, the author gently noting: “In comparison to the more established transatlantic approach to early modernity and its focus on European colonial operations, the question of coeval Eurasian relations harbors a much less noted world-historical dynamic.”

Against a background in which differing methodologies and ideologies have, on occasion, brought the fields of world literature and postcolonial studies into conflict, we might glimpse here the potentially thorny nature of the path that Ma navigates so thoughtfully and at times cautiously in The Age of Silver and we might understand why, perhaps, she builds up such a tremendous theoretical armoury in the first chapter. On the subject of disciplinary “turf wars,” she maintains a dignified silence. This is a book which maintains the hope and ambition that it is not only possible but also ethically imperative to attend simultaneously to distinct yet interlocking systems of power relations and tease out their entanglements in and through the critical consciousness cultivated by modern fiction.

So, to conclude, what new perspectives does Ma bring for the study of Defoe and the later eighteenth-century English novel? In this context, Defoe is no longer positioned at the origins of the modern novel’s “rise” but construed as a belated response to the global dynamics of the “Age of Silver.” There are, of course, much earlier English examples of novelistic realism – Robert Greene’s cony-catching tales from the late sixteenth century might, for example, be said to present analogous features to those of The Plum in the Golden Vase. The point that is emphasized in this study, however, is that Defoe, at any rate, engages with this global order at a critical juncture and plays an instrumental role in the construction of later nineteenth-century Anglocentric narratives of homo economicus. Drawing especially on the work of Lydia Liu and Robert Markley, The Age of Silver reframes twentieth-century readings of Robinson Crusoe as allegories of British colonial conquest within the wider context of Eurasian trading relations. From this perspective, Defoe’s novel emerges as fantasy or “science fiction” written with the objective of disavowing the pre-eminence of China and the unfavourable state of the British economy about which he writes critically in The Complete English Tradesman and A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.

In order to read Robinson’s island sojourn in terms of repressed English-Chinese trading relations, Ma insists on the importance of the two sequels, above all the Farther Adventures, pointing out that these were typically included in eighteenth-century editions and only became divorced from Robinson Crusoe well into the nineteenth century. Connections between the texts are cleverly focused with reference to the hard “glazed” earthenware pot that Robinson successfully fires after numerous attempts – the subject of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. Whereas Woolf is drawn to the the symbolic and secular materiality of this pot, Ning Ma connects it to the fashion for Chinese porcelain that was flowing into Britain at the expense of national manufacturing. Thus understood, Robinson can be seen as achieving not only a form of colonial mastery over the island (as according to familiar readings); he also technically masters the manufacturing process of “China ware,” expressing a fantasy of an Anglo-centric global economy – a reading that Ma helpfully aligns with the trading strategies proposed in A New Voyage whereby silver would flow back to Britain. By refusing to name the pot anything other than “earthenware,” the author suggests that Defoe is refusing to give any place at all to China in his economic fantasy.

This is, however, an ambition that Defoe knows is at odds with contemporary reality and Ma suggests that what is repressed in Robinson Crusoe re-emerges in the sequel where the protagonist abandons his New World territory that has become unprofitable in favour of trade with the East Indies. The return of the repressed is illustrated with reference to two passages in particular. The first is the description of the “China house” that the protagonist stops to consider, putting him a good two hours behind schedule. The other is that of a statue of a Chinese idol which the protagonist finds incomprehensible from every angle, presenting a perplexing hybridity, conjoining a diversity of beings as interrelated equals with indistinguishable bonds. Seeing in both a monstrous reappearance of the earthenware pot, both passages are invoked as evidence of the sustained theme of Chinese negativity across the two sequels “reveal[ing] that one of their primary purposes is to de-Sinicize the early-eighteenth century global order, or, in other words, to attack a powerful civilizational Other that conflicts with Defoe’s ideology of an Anglocentric world system” (157). The sequels, she argues, reveal Defoe’s recognition that China was an unrivalled mercantile centre during this period beneath strategies of disavowal. Defoe’s objective, from her perspective, was to undo the threatening hybridity represented by the indistinguishable parts of the idol and by the infinite connectivity and self-similarity of the artificial porcelain tiles on the excessively extravagant “China house.” Robinson Crusoe, read in tandem with the sequels, thus emerges as a fantasy born from fear in the context of the “Age of Silver.” Once the fantasy became fact, the sequels became redundant and economic theorists referred simply to the founding myth of the island.

The Age of Silver thus offers a very clever reading of Defoe which sharpens colonial criticism. Defoe stands accused, so to speak, of not only colonising ambition but also Sinophobia. This is a larger story than the one with which many readers are familiar. But is it the whole story? Rhetorically speaking, the texts invite pause for further thought. It is not only the protagonist who stops for a long time to contemplate the China house. The ekphrastic description also invites the reader – past and present – to ponder the many entanglements of trade and travel during this period. The Age of Silver is an important and timely contribution to scholarship not least because it poses these questions anew.

Jenny Mander
Cambridge University

Defoe, Dorset and the Bloody Assizes

Sheldon Rogers

IN THIS ESSAY, I aim to demonstrate the significance of Dorset for Daniel Defoe in two sections. First, using Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), I establish how this county frames Defoe’s early trading life and suggest that Defoe was trading out of Lyme Regis due to his extensive knowledge of the people and customs of the area. Then I turn to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), with Dorset appearing allegorically as the location for two lifesaving events.

Among the various counties Defoe visited during his lifetime, Dorset appears to have had a special place in his heart and mind. It can be established from Defoe’s trade as a hosier that visits to the West-County during the early 1680s for woollen products were the probable reason for his intimate knowledge of the area (Defoe 45). Defoe was also acquainted with Lord Maitland, Earl of Dorset, whose possible patronage gave Defoe access to a small but exclusive English literature society during the same period. Defoe quotes and states the purpose of the society by using founding member Wentworth Dillon, Earl Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684):

For who did ever in French authors see

The comprehensive English energy?

The weighty bullion of one sterling line,

Drawn to French wire would through whole pages shine. (An Essay 138)

Defoe’s appraisal of Dorset was complimentary in A Tour. It is worth mentioning first a recent addition to Dorset, Christchurch (from 1974 formerly in Hampshire):

From hence there are but few towns on the sea coast west, nor are there any harbours, or sea ports of any note, except Pool. As for Christ Church, though it stands at the mouth of the Avon, which, as I have said, comes down from Salisbury, and receives also the Stour and Piddle, two Dorsetshire rivers, which bring with them all the waters of the north part of Dorsetshire; yet it is a very inconsiderable poor place, scarce worth seeing, and less worth mentioning in this account; only, that it sends two members to Parliament, which many poor towns in this part of England do, as well as that.

Defoe obviously did not spend much time in Christchurch, if any, and had he done so, Defoe would have discovered the rich history of this ancient town. Perhaps he rode through on horseback or drove through in a horse and carriage, neglecting to appreciate properly the “worth” of the place.

As Defoe ventures into Dorset, his views, however, changed. The next town he comments on is Wimborne, which unbeknown to the author, would prove an important depository for the manuscripts of his first discovered works, Meditations (1681) and Historical Collections (1682). These priceless items were kept safe after Defoe’s death (1731) by his spinster daughter Hannah in Wimborne, until her death on 28 April 1759. Hannah is interred in Wimborne Minster along with her sister, Henrietta, and brother-in-law John Boston. The plaque marking their place of burial has been removed, though through the writings of Nicholas Russell, it is possible to recover their final resting place. The plaque was in the early nineteenth century, “about the middle of the [North] Aile” (A Historical Account 27).

Ironically, Defoe quotes from a burial, in the same church during his visit, as well as providing the fact that Wimborne Minster had a spire:

The church, which is indeed a very great one, ancient and yet very well built, with a very firm strong square tower, considerably high; but was, with out doubt, much finer, when stood on top of it, stood a most exquisite spire, finer and taller, if fame lies not, than that at Salisbury and, by its situation, in a plainer, flatter country, visible, no question, much farther…..[F]or here are the monuments of several noble families; and in particular of one king, viz. King Ethelred, who was slain in battle by the Danes. He was prince famed for piety and religion, and, according to the zeal of these times, was esteemed as a martyr; because venturing his life against the Danes, who were heathens, he died fighting for his religion and his country. The inscription upon his grave is preserved, and has been carefully repaired, so as to be easily read, and is as follows

In hoc loco quiescit Corpus S. Etheldredi, Regis West Saxonum, Martyris, qui Anno Dom. DCCCLXXII. Xxiii. Aprillis per Manus Danorum Paganorum Occubuit.

In English thus:

Here rests the body of Holy Etheldred, King of the West Saxons, and martyr, who fell by the hands of the pagan Danes, in the year of our Lord 872, the 23d of April. (A Tour 206)

After Wimborne, Defoe turns his attentions to Poole; his interest here was the oysters trade, these oysters being, according to him, “the best” in the West-Country, and were pickled in barrels and taken up to London as well as sent to “the West Indies, and to Spain, and Italy, and other parts.” Pearls were often found in Poole’s oysters, and considered to be “larger than in any other oysters about England” (A Tour 207).

Another industry worthy of Defoe’s compliments was the stone quarries of the Isle of Purbeck. He notes:

This part of the country is eminent for vast quarries of stone, which is cut out flat, and used in London in great quantities for paving court-yards, alleys, avenues to houses, kitchens, footways on the sides of the high-street, and the like; and is very profitable to the place, as also in the number of shipping employed in bringing it to London. There are also several rocks of very good marble, only that the veins in the stone are not black and white, as the Italian, but grey, red, and other colours. (A Tour 207)

Defoe mentions Dorchester next, commenting on the liberal attitudes of the town dwellers and remarking that, “the people seemed less divided into factions and parties, than other places; for though here are divisions and the people are not of one mind, either as to religion, or politics, yet they did not seem to separate with so much animosity as in other places.” So much so, that he observed a Church of England clergyman and the Dissenting minister taking tea together. And of the town, he awards the honour that “a man that coveted a retreat in the world might as agreeably spend his time, and as well in Dorchester, as in any town I know in England” (A Tour 209).

While information about his residence in Dorset is perhaps coincidental, Nathaniel Mist, the likely author of A General History of the Pyrates (1724, 1728) and an associate of Defoe’s, chose Dorset as a place to convalesce. It is also possible that Mist spent time writing in Dorset for seven months and almost certain that he went to Dorchester on Defoe’s recommendation (Nathaniel Mist 31).[1]

Defoe comments extensively on the surrounding areas. He was amazed at the number of sheep in the downs around the county town. He was advised that there were 600,000 sheep fed on the downs within six miles of the town. This at first he found to be unbelievable, but on closer consideration and inspection, he concludes “I confess I could not but incline to believe it. The grass, or herbage of these downs is full of the sweetest, and the most aromatic plants, such as nourish the sheep to a strange degree, and the sheep’s dung again nourishes that herbage to a strange degree” (Tour 209). Defoe’s visit to Dorchester appears to have been from 1705 when he wrote to Robert Harley, the then Secretary of State, during a fact-finding mission (The Letters 105).

After Dorchester, Defoe mentions the costal town of six miles distance, Weymouth. Of interest to him here was the trade between the port and France, Portugal, Spain, Newfoundland, and Virginia. Defoe recollects an incident that occurred when he was there some time before of a merchant vessel, homeward bound from Oporto to London, which took shelter from a storm in Portland Road after it lost an anchor and struck her topmast. Giving distress signals, the Weymouth men went to her rescue and worked out what to do:

Upon this, the Weymouth boats came back with such diligence, that in less than three hours, they were on board them again with an anchor and cable, which they immediately bent its place, and let go to assist the other, and thereby secured the ship. ‘Tis true, that they took a good price of the master for the help they gave him; for they made him draw a bill on his owners at London for 12l. [£] for the use of the anchor, cable and boat, besides some gratuities to the men. But they saved the ship and cargo by it, and in three or four days the weather was calm, and he proceeded on his voyage, returning the anchor and cable again; so that, upon the whole, it was not so extravagant as at first I thought it to be (A Tour 210-211).

Frank Bastian believes that this incident could well have been Defoe’s ship (probably the Pride of London) with him on board. The time of this incident, in the late 1680s, links in with the expanding of his trade to incorporate “wines and brandies.” P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens comment that Defoe was at this time “in correspondence with France, Spain, Portugal and America” (The True-Born viii).

Another similarity that points to Defoe’s participation in this incident appears in Robinson Crusoe (1719). As with the ship of the Weymouth storm, Crusoe’s ship was in a previous storm, after leaving from Hull on its way to London, with a second storm in Yarmouth Roads:

Towards Evening the Mate and Boat-Swain begg’d the Master of our Ship to let them cut away the Foremast, which he was very unwilling to: But the Boat-Swain protesting to him, that if he did not, the Ship would founder, he consented; and when they had cut away the Foremast, the Main-Mast stood so loose, and shook the Ship so much, they were obliged to cut her away also, and make a clear Deck. (12)

Another trip to Dorset and the West-Country is noted by Bastian as the basis of the information provided by Defoe in his Tour. It was in the early summer of 1700, according to his calculations, that Defoe made a trip with his brother-in-law Robert Davis, an inventor of a diving machine, to Cornwall’s Polpeor Cove at the Lizard, to look for rich pickings off shipwrecks.

They “rode in view of the sea” to Weymouth and then ferried across “with boat and a rope” to the Isle of Portland where, “tho’ seemingly miserable, and thinly inhabited, yet the inhabitants being almost all stone-cutters, we found there was no very poor people among them.” Passing the famous swannery at Abbotsbury, they continued along the coast towards Bridport, observing the fishermen seining for mackerel, which that year were so plentiful that the country folk came with carts to buy fish to manure their fields. (Early Life 222)

Portland is mentioned for its stone, being the place “our best and whitest free stone comes, with which the cathedral of St. Paul’s, the Monument, and all the public edifices in the city of London, are chiefly built.” It is in the following line that his purpose of travelling to a destination is revealed. “Tis wonderful,” Defoe exclaims, “and well worth the observation of a traveller to see the quarries in the rock, from whence they are cut out, what stones, and of what prodigious a size are cut out there” (A Tour 211).

Bridport, as mentioned above, was famous for its mackerel. Even so, Defoe relates a curious anecdote about the farmers who came to manure their fields with the fish and who were prevented from buying by “the justices and magistrates of the towns about.” After some enquiry, Defoe found out that it was “thought to be dangerous, as to infection.” So plentiful was the catch that year, that fish, which were fine and large, “were sold at the sea side a hundred for a penny.”

From Bridport, the next stop on the journey west was Lime, where he mentions the Duke of Monmouth briefly, and boasts about its the harbour, “’tis such a one as is not in all Britain besides, if there is such a one in any part of the world” (A Tour 212). Known as the Cobb, it was a

massy pile of building, consisting of high and thick walls of stone. The walls are raised in the main sea, at a good distance from the shore; it consists of one\ main and solid wall of stone, large enough for carts and carriages to pass on the top, and to admit houses and ware houses to be built on it; so that it is broad as a street; opposite to this, but farther into the sea, is another wall of the same workmanship, which crosses the end of the first wall, and comes about with a tail, parallel to the first wall. Between the point of the first or main wall, is the entrance into the port, and the second, or opposite wall, breaking the violence of the sea from the entrance, the ships go into the basin, as into a pier, or harbour, and ride there as secure as in a mill pond, or as in a wet dock. (A Tour 213)

It appears from his Tour that Defoe and his companion, stayed some time at Bridport. Though it is apparent that Defoe’s knowledge and connection with the local trade indicate a deeper connection than that of a mere traveller. So much so, that he has the time to explore the friendliness of the people as well as “observe the pleasant way of conversation, as it is managed among the gentlemen of this county, and their families, which are without reflection some of the most polite and well bred people in the isle of Britain.” Of the ladies, he was particularly admiring of the way they were treated when it came to marriage, “no Bury Fairs, where the women are scandalously said to carry themselves to market.” Defoe ascribes this treatment to the plain fact that “the Dorsetshire ladies are equal in beauty, and maybe superior in reputation. And yet the Dorsetshire ladies, I assure you, are not nuns, they do not go veiled about streets, or hide themselves when visited.” So well acquainted was he with the gentry of Dorset, that Defoe could make the statement that he met no equal “in all my observation, through the whole isle of Britain” (A Tour 213-14).

Evidence of Defoe’s early trading links includes his visits to Blandford and Stalbridge. Blandford is noted as having “the finest bonelace in England.” Stalbridge would appear to have been a well-known place as it used to make “the finest, best, and highest prized knit stockings in England; but that trade now is much decayed by the increase of the knitting-stocking engine, or frame which has destroyed the hand knitting-trade for fine stockings through the whole kingdom.”

Defoe was among the men who appeared on the side of the Duke of Monmouth after his landing at Lyme Regis, during the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.[2] Various explanations have been offered for his mentioning involvement; some attribute it to a total fiction, while others suggest he escaped back into London or to Europe.[3] But the most in depth and best researched is offered by Bastian, who states that Defoe was only with the Duke and his followers for a short period of time. He left the army and returned to London when the Duke’s tactics proved indecisive (Early Life 114). However, it is more likely that Defoe fled abroad and gained his pardon via requests from his wife.

As soon as the news had reached London of the Duke’s arrival, the city was sealed off to stop Protestants leaving and joining Monmouth. According to Elizabeth D’ Oyley, Defoe “was on the road, a young man of twenty five,” when Monmouth landed (The Duke 281). In his Review, Defoe reflected that “I remember how boldly abundance of men talked for the Duke of Monmouth, when he first landed; but if half of them had as boldly joined him sword in hand, he had never been routed at Kings-sedg-moor” (Review 154).

As for the pardon, that came some years later (my italics):

1687 May 31. Windsor.

Warrant to the Justices of Assize and Gaol Delivery for the Western Circuit and all other whom it may concern – after reciting that the King had extended his grace and mercy to Thomas Pluse of Edington, Henry Pitman of Yeovell, Wm. Pitman of Sandford Oreas, Daniel Pomroy of Taunton, John Edward of Trull, Azarians Pinny of Axminster, George Mullins, sen., of Taunton, John Collins of Chard. George Pickard of Rhode, Joseph Gayland late of Exeter, Wm. Savage of Taunton, Edward Babke late of Tull, John Oram of Warminster , Thomas Pumphrey late of Worcester, William Horsley late of St. Martin in the Fields, Nicholas Scading of Bhgon Green, James Canyer of Ilminster, John Bovett of Taunton, William Way of Combe St. Nicholas, Robert Hucker of Taunton, woolcomber, William Gaunt of Wapping, Richard Lucus of Dulverton, John Marther alias Marder of Crewkerne, George Puvior of Longport, Benjamin Alsopp late of London, Christopher Eason of Chard, Brian Connory, John Woolters, Andrew Speed, Daniel Foe, John Harper, George Richmond, and Martin Goddard who, were engaged in the late rebellion – for causing the said persons to be inserted in the General Pardon, without any condition of transportation. (State Papers 440; my italics)

The fact that Defoe was pardoned in this list among non-combatants indicates that he was in the area as a tradesman, caught up in the mêlée of preparations and the need for transport for battle. A hosier with cart transport would have likely been pressed into service to assist by transporting goods to and wounded from the battlefield.

Defoe mentions the Battle of Sedgemoor later in his life, in A Tour:

Had he [Duke of Monmouth] not, either by the treachery, or mistake of his guides, been brought to an unpassable ditch, where he could not get over, in the interval of which, the king’s troops took the alarm, by the firing a pistol among the duke’s men, whether, also, by accident, and his own fate, conspired to his defeat, he had certainly cut the Lord Ferersham’s army (for he commanded them) all to pieces; but by these circumstances, he was brought to a battle on unequal terms, and defeated: the rest I need not mention (A Tour 354).

Among the executed men were three former members of Rev. Charles Morton’s Dissenter Academy in Surrey, which Defoe attended. Defoe refers to them in 1712, as the members of the ‘West Country Martyres . . . Kitt. Battersby, Young Jenkins, Hewlin’ (The Present State 319). As Bastian points out, Battersby, was Christopher Battiscombe, son and heir to a Dorset country estate. The other two were executed at Taunton on 30 September 1685, which could have been Defoe’s twenty-sixth birthday.

In Robinson Crusoe (1719), considered by many and mentioned by Defoe as an allegory, he has his character saved in “a strange Concurrence of Days, in the various Providences which befell me,” for “The same Day of the Year I was born on, (viz.) the 30^th September, that same Day I had my Life so miraculously saved 26 Years after” (Crusoe 113). In the preface to The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Defoe states: “I Robinson Crusoe being at this Time in perfect and sound Mind and Memory . . . that the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical; and is the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexplained Misfortunes.” This of course would make the year of Defoe’s birth 1659, and not 1660 which is often stated. His birth is not registered in any Parish Records that have been consulted to date, and most probably it has not been recorded in any.

This note has endeavoured to articulate the importance to Defoe of the county of Dorset. A large proportion of Defoe’s early trading life can be framed in the towns of Stalbridge and Blandford. These two places, with Lyme Regis servings as a trading port, would have offered the answer to one of the great mysteries of Defoe’s life. How did he manage to evade capture after the unsuccessful Monmouth Rebellion? If Defoe was trading at Lyme during the landing of Monmouth, then his escape from James II’s army was by sea. Defoe, by his own claims, knew the way of life of the gentry very well, even the details of women’s marriage arrangements. It can be safe to argue, that Defoe’s escape from the Bloody Assizes was from Lyme Regis, probably to Holland where Monmouth’s army originated. Two incidences that appear in the early part of Robinson Crusoe stem from this county. With one of Defoe’s daughters marrying a Dorset Customs Officer and two daughters’ burials in Wimborne Minster, this provides a lasting testimony to Defoe’s connection to and fondness for Dorset.

University of Exeter

NOTES

1. For reports of Mist’s stay in Dorset see Daily Journal.

2. Monmouth and his men landed on the coast of Dorset at Lyme Regis in the afternoon of 11 June 1685. For more information on this invasion, see Earle.

3. Paula Backscheider, for example, believes that Defoe had taken part in the decisive Battle of Sedgmoor and possessed “the kind of pass that merchants got from lord major or the secretary of state. Certainly he had travelled enough on his business to be a more credible traveller than most” (39).

WORKS CITED

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

Bastian, Frank. Defoe’s Early Life. Macmillan, 1981.

Bialuschewski, Arne. “Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 98., no. 1, 2004, pp.21-38.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. James II, Volume II, January 1686 – May 1687. HMSO 1964.

Daily Journal, 25 April 1722, The Weekly Journal; Or, British Gazetteer, 28 April 1722.

Defoe, Daniel. An Essay Upon Projects (1697). Cassell & Company Limited, 1887.

———. Review, Vol IX. Columbia UP, 1938.

———. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings (1701, edited by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Penguin Books, 1997.

———. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, edited by George H. Healy, Oxford UP, 1955.

———. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, edited by Pat Rogers, Penguin, 1971.

———. The Present State of Parties in Great Britain (1712). Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale.

———. Robinson Crusoe, edited by Thomas Keymer and annotated by Keymer and James Kelly, Oxford UP, 2007.

D’Oyley, Elizabeth. The Duke of Monmouth. Geoffrey Bles, 1938.

Earle, Peter. Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor, 1685. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977.

Russell, Nicholas. A Historical Account of the Antiquity, Ancient Funeral Monuments and Endowments, of the Colligiate Church of Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset; and Chapel of St. Margaret. John Nichols and Son, Red Lion Passage, Fleet Street 1803.

Sutherland, James. Defoe. Methuen, 1937.

Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century: Pirates, Merchants and British Imperial Authority in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, by David Wilson

Reviewed by Manushag Powell

There is no shortage of books on British piracy, but David Wilson’s evidence-driven examination of the final phase of the Golden Age phenomenon is, if the reader will forgive me, a welcome piece of new scholarship in which there is much to be treasured. Focusing on the period 1716-1726, which witnessed a shocking resurgence and proportional diminution of maritime piracy in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Wilson’s book, which “contains pirates” but is “not a book primarily about pirates” (xi), engages a vast and complicated maritime network of imperial merchants, colonial settlers, and naval forces touched by and touching piracy. Well-paced and clearly written, Suppressing Piracy mounts a persuasive challenge to the broadly accepted narrative of the late Golden Age “War on Piracy,” arguing instead that the isolation and eventual collapse of large-scale European-captained Atlantic piracy was the result of trade pressures and colonial allegiances, and not the straightforward result of a decision that the British navy should at last get tough with respect to the plague of the hostis humani generis.

Wilson’s book opens by painting an image, to which it will periodically return, of the just-hanged bodies of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew, in one of the most famous anti-pirate victories of the eighteenth century. In Wilson’s framing, though, Ogle’s triumph over Roberts is the exception that proves the rule: this was a famous victory in part because it had little company. Historians have conceded that the British lacked the naval capacity simply to suppress pirates in the 1670s through early eighteenth century. They did not miraculously develop this capacity in 1722 (the date of Roberts’ defeat).

Instead, posits Wilson, effective anti-piracy efforts were localized, which meant allying with various colonial and mercantile stakeholders to bolster Parliamentary and Admiralty campaigns. Even so, Wilson is not precisely arguing that the British presence was weaker than we have been led to believe; the overall direction of the piracy suppression efforts amount to a solidifying of British imperial reach and ambitions. Wilson’s interest is in the understudied mechanisms of how that solidification happened, which he attains by turning to the accounts of merchants and captains trying to effect local change in the service of imperial stability. There is something faintly reminiscent of Tolstoy in the way Wilson lays out his careful analyses, always cautious of assigning too much agency, blame, or achievement to single actors – though he might not appreciate the comparison I’m making here, for there was, Wilson insists, no war against the pirates (nor was there really much of a pirate peace). There were only sporadic reactive measures to soothe the ruffled feathers of aggrieved mercantile interest groups.

The tides of piratical fortunes in peacetime ebbed and flowed largely at the behest of “legitimate” imperial and transatlantic trade. Wilson makes the crucial distinction that, hostis discourse aside, the English government saw pirates less “as a threat to imperial authority” than as an irritant to important mercantile interests who could be appeased (it was hoped) by measures well short of an expensive and difficult project like eradication (74). Whether a colony or trade route received meaningful protection from the Royal Navy was a function of whether the area was already a well-established trade hub with lobbyists in England. Private colonies, like the Carolinas or the Bahamas, were considerably under resourced compared to Crown colonies like New York and Virginia. The governments of private colonies only organized effective resistance to piracy when their own local people and merchants found it more profitable to do so than to tolerate the pirates.

Essentially, no concerted effort would be made against pirates until enough of the Atlantic was profitable enough to European investors to make it worthwhile, which meant that through much of the end of the Golden Age, the Navy was instructed to, for example, protect Massachusetts but not Rhode Island. While the Navigation Acts attempted to draw a bright line between piracy and legal action, actual suppression of piracy was not consistently attempted until colonial-domestic trading ties made it desirable; only once the London merchants had reason to advocate for the interest of colonial ones – and specifically, the tobacco, sugar, and, pulling all together, the enslaving trades – did suppression efforts begin to grow teeth.

Wilson gives more attention than most to the important question of what becomes of pirate spoils: if a pirate accepts a pardon, what becomes of his booty? What redress was possible for merchants who claimed their belongings had been stolen? Most pirate treasure was not metal specie but rather fungible goods, and often, as Wilson often highlights, this included human prisoners, for whom the capture of a pirate usually meant only further captivity as they were enslaved or re-enslaved “legally.” Wilson traces, for example, as far as he is able, the fate of the skilled diver named Ned Grant, hired out by a white enslaver named Catherine Tookerman, captured by pirates twice – and then sold by a vengeful Tookerman who needed to pay a share of his price to the pirate hunter who’d declared him salvage.

The Venn diagram of enslavers and pirates shows much overlap. It is generally understood that it was their damage to the post-Asiento transatlantic trade in African prisoners that finally made pirates too annoying to European authority to be tolerated; still, for far too long, popular histories, wanting to celebrate pirates as anticapitalist freedom fighters, have nonetheless tended to give piracy credit for antislavery impulses that were never manifested on any significant level. While enslaved people appear throughout Wilson’s text, Chapter 5 specifically addresses the interactions of piracy and the slave trading lobby, and brings Wilson’s characteristic nuance to the fore. The pro-slavery lobby was not unified, but comprised of different factions: the so-called anti-monopoly separate traders (such as those encountered by Defoe’s Captain Singleton), and the Royal African Company, who regarded the separate traders as akin to the pirates (they not infrequently had been, but they also not infrequently were attacked by current pirates). Indeed, for a period the depredations of pirates elsewhere near the West African coastline were advantageous to the RAC traders who stuck to the Gold Coast, argues Wilson. It was innovative collaborations between the Royal Navy and the enslavers that eventually deterred pirates from the worst of their West African predations.

Meanwhile, as Chapter 6 details, the far more powerful East India Company lobby was able to secure a significant naval patrol for the Indian Ocean despite far less evidence of pirate problems than those faced by those in West African waters – setting aside their self-serving contention that Kanhoji Angria, leader of the Marathon navy, was piratical. Pirates and separate traders based in Madagascar were, however, a real impediment to the BEIC’s fledgling efforts to establish their own transatlantic Malagasy trading and enslavement faction.

After 1722, piracy within the bounds of the expanding British Empire became less profitable and more difficult, leading to a marked decline in piratical reports. The trading functions that had enabled pirates to recruit and find safe harbor had been superseded by determined imperial and colonial networks of sugar and enslaving merchants. The pirates were pushed out, one among many casualties – albeit perhaps among the least sympathetic ones – of imperial mercantilist or nascent capitalist development. This is less evidence of the omnipresence of British naval power than of its limitations in the face of a far more complex cultural shift, and of the importance of colonial maritime forces. Moreover, concludes Wilson, “It was legitimized maritime predation, rather than outright piracy, that proved the more prevalent threat to British commercial interests in the western Atlantic after 1722” (233).

In other words, belief in the decline in piracy depends a great deal upon how one defines piracy. Thus it ever has been. But Wilson’s corrective contribution to this old tale amasses evidence form under-used sources, adding voices and challenging pirate historians to revisit received wisdoms in the face of his evidence that piratical matters were overwhelmingly local and transient. This should be required reading in Pirate Studies.

Manushag N. Powell
Purdue University

Reflections on Recovery

Stephanie Insley Hershinow

When our plague years began, I thought less of H.F.—or even of Crusoe—than of Moll Flanders. Every time I’ve taught Moll Flanders, my students have asked, But where are her children? It’s a fair question, even if it tends toward moralizing. Where are Moll’s children? The Shakespeareans launched a whole literary theoretical subfield when they asked “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” and then debated whether this was even a question worth asking. For readers of Defoe, the question may be even more complex for the ways that the demands of child-rearing serve as the implicit inverse of Moll’s life as flâneuse. As is to be expected from the author of The Family Instructor and Conjugal Lewdness, Defoe is less content to allow the question of Moll’s children to remain abstract. Unlike Lady Macbeth’s, Moll’s children flit in and out of the narrative in ways that give the question more urgency. Then, in Roxana, we see a continuation of this concern: Roxana’s plot reaches its climax in the return and demise of her daughter, Susan. Roxana is forced to reckon with the presence of her daughter in her life, suggesting that her children (and perhaps Moll’s as well) have been more assertive in their impingement on the narrative even in their absence than we may have thought.

I kept thinking of Moll not only because I happened to be writing about her, but because, unlike Moll, I knew exactly where my children were in those days. One was a constant companion (his daycare closed from mid-March 2020), the other kept even closer, as I entered my third trimester with what would soon be called my “pandemic baby.” My classes, my deadlines, my committee meetings didn’t really accommodate the fact that my children were home; they kept chugging along their various tracks. On social media, some observers (as is their wont) criticized parents for their complaints. “If you don’t like being around your children,” they asked, “then why did you have them?” As one Twitter Cassandra pointed out, parents should have taken the possibility of a global pandemic into account when planning their families. For so many parents, and disproportionately for mothers, the pandemic revealed the fragility of our various compartmentalizations, our attempts to do…well, anything while secure in the knowledge that our children were safe and accounted for. The insistent domesticity of the first few months of the pandemic has now lessened—my classes meet in person, my children spend their days in school and not in my lap—but I still keep thinking about Defoe’s ambiguous provocation.

As I started editing this collection of essays, my children (inevitably, it seems from this vantage) caught Covid. They were and are fine. And now, as I send this collection to be posted, news of the Omicron variant has renewed concerns that grow familiar, if still urgent. Which is to say that the editors of Digital Defoe know that our issue’s theme of “recovery,” however qualified, was premature. Still, we have gathered with these reflections a snapshot of meditations on pandemic life as filtered through the prism of Defoe’s works. The writers gathered here shared their reflections on the pandemic in mid-summer 2021, some have chosen to update their thoughts to reflect the changes of the past few months. These brief, informal essays capture something of the flux Defoe also seemed drawn to—the way that extreme circumstances (plague, shipwreck, poverty) can sharpen psychological response. “A little recovered”? Maybe just a little. Let’s check back in again next year.

Baruch College, CUNY

After the Plague Year?

Travis Chi Wing Lau

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

—Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004)

In the thick of quarantine over the past eighteenth months, I never thought I would share the desires H.F. confesses with such conviction in A Journal of the Plague Year: “my own Curiosity…was sufficient to justify my running that Hazard” (54). Defoe emphasizes the affective force of this desire—an undeniable compulsion to witness for himself London’s devastation, here embodied in the burial pits filled with the dead. To refuse a “strict Order” in pursuit of the freedom of mobility even at great risk—that was how much of the pandemic felt to me. That is, aside from a crushing banality of days melting into one another much like the meandering, recursive form of the Journal (53). But most striking to me now is how Defoe’s novel holds space for what feels like an illicit desire in the face of epidemic crisis. As Christopher Loar has brilliantly argued, “Defoe’s texts identify this insular approach to the epidemic constitution as inadequate. Instead, they seek to supplement it with a different ecology: a vision of vulnerability, a perspective that underscores the dependence of human bodies and lifeways on their environments—indeed, their embeddedness in them” (44). Rather than an irrational, contradictory behavior and characterological flaw, H.F.’s persistent refusal to remain quarantined reflects an intimacy with risk that recognizes the futility of absolute security (from the Latin sēcūrĭtās, to be untroubled or free from cares), a fantasy that Defoe himself acknowledged was impossible to achieve beyond a measured preparedness for the inevitable return of crisis.[1]

As a Chinese American, I also experienced first-hand the unique stigma of those H.F. observes being “shut up” in their houses: those deemed infected or even possibly infected were sealed into their homes painted with red crosses and policed by city militia. While I do not claim to share the same experience of medical neglect and state cruelty, the feeling of being marked out as infectious and even deserving of debilitating illness or death feels all too familiar. To have my body presumed viral after being identified by the nation as a threat even despite my citizenship is not novelty but refrain: the same yellow peril bleeding red again as friends, family, and community became targets for blame, for violent containment. My racialized body itself became what H.F. repeatedly calls “tokens” of the plague—legible signs of risk in need of mitigation or violent expulsion from the nation’s white, healthy body before it was too late. What underpins the proclamation “that the city was healthy,” that our nation be “yet alive!” in the face of a global pandemic that has (and continues to) “swept an Hundred Thousand Souls / Away?” (Defoe 9, 193). Almost two years into this pandemic, when can we ethically claim to be “after” COVID-19? And if we make such a claim, at whose continued expense does this “after” become possible, especially given the ongoing forms of anti-Asian racism and the necropolitical refusal to enable global access to vaccines?

To consider the stakes of these questions, I return to where my 2016 essay began: the Royal Experiment of 1721 that would, as part of the collective efforts of Hans Sloane, Charles Maitland, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Caroline of Ansbach, help to popularize smallpox inoculation—variolation—throughout Britain. Seven Newgate prisoners—John Alcock, John Cawthery, Richard Evans, Elizabeth Harrison, Ruth Jones, Mary North, and Anne Tompion—condemned to death were selected as experimental subjects and in exchange granted pardons in the form of transportation to the Americas. While at the time of my first essay I had not fully learned the already limited history about these seven prisoners, I am struck now by the state’s dependency on criminalized bodies to legitimize a medical practice for the aristocracy and ultimately for the general British public. To put this in Spencer Weinreich’s assessment, the prisoners were “both the experimental subject and the royal subject, for the human experimental subject is always also the political subject” (38). Because these experiments were done in the carceral space of Newgate where the subjects were also in the care of these physicians, we can see the ways in which preventative medicine has always depended upon (and subsequently disavowed) the disenfranchised to produce immunity and health security for the nation. Political benefit was also expected, as “inoculation’s success, assuming it materialized, would bolster the Hanoverians’ reputation as enlightened monarchs” (34). These prisoners would not enjoy the protected life their bodies were making possible for others. The all-too-convenient “yet” of H.F.’s concluding lines underscores the privilege of immunity made possible by the Royal Experiment held the very same year that Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year.

In the current moment of mounting vaccine resistance and robust anti-vaccination and anti-masking campaigns, I have been meditating on what Kathryn Olivarius has aptly called “immunoprivilege”[2] and what Martha Lincoln has termed “immunosupremacy.”[3] Both of these terms signal the ways in which immunity has come to be touted by many countries in the Global North as a moral virtue and civic expectation critical for a “return to normal”: many businesses, for example, have begun mandating complete vaccination for employment. Yet the racial and geographic disparities surrounding access to COVID-19 vaccination and testing reveal the unacknowledged immunoprivilege of predominantly wealthy, white communities in the U.S. and Europe who were able to self-isolate comfortably and have the luxury of choosing whether or not be vaccinated at all. These countries also continue to manufacture and stockpile the largest supply and most effective forms of COVID-19 vaccine. Thus, the dismissive choice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director, Rochelle Walensky, to refer to the current rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” bypasses fraught histories like that of the Newgate Experiment and of medical racism in Britain and America that continue to animate legitimate skepticism and suspicion of medicine, especially among Black communities.[4] To be clear, I am not endorsing an anti-vaccination view, but rather calling attention to how Western public health’s uncritical valorization of vaccination as a panacea must necessarily confront the historical inequities in which it remains complicit and the markedly disparate ways the pandemic is being lived (or not lived) out globally. Whose health gets to matter and thus merits protection? Whose health must necessarily be sacrificed for the wellbeing of others and then subsequently blamed for their failure to uphold wellbeing that is not their own?

Kenyon College

NOTES

1. See “What Preparations Are Due?” (Lapham’s Quarterly, 2020), where I discuss Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague, a plague treatise that was published but one month before A Journal of the Plague Year, and its pre-epidemiological vision for national preparedness.

2. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege.” The New York Times, 13 April 2020. See also “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.”

3. “Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19.”

4. See “C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” The New York Times, July 16, 2021.

WORKS CITED

Anthes, Emily and Petri, Alexandra. “C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” The New York Times, 16 July 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/health/covid-delta-cdc-walensky.html.

Lau, Travis Chi Wing. “Defoe Before Immunity: A Prophylactic Journal of the Plague Year.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries. 8.1 (2016): 23-39, https://digitaldefoe.org/2016/10/19/defoe-before-immunity-a-prophylactic-journal-of-the-plague-year.

—. “What Preparations Are Due?” Lapham’s Quarterly. XIII.3 (2020): 209-217.

Olivarius, Kathryn. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege.” The New York Times, 13 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/opinion/coronavirus-immunity-passports.html.

—. “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.” American Historical Review. 124.2 (2019): 425-455.

Lincoln, Martha. “Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19.” Open Anthropological Research 1.1: 46–59.

Loar, Christopher. “Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitution.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32.1 (2019): 31-53.

Weinreich, Spencer J. “Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721).” History Workshop Journal 89 (2019): 22-44.

The Daily Ledger

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

And now being to enter into a melancholy relation of a scene of silent life, such perhaps as was never heard of in the world before, I shall take it from its beginning, and continue in its order.

—Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

In March of 2020, the early days of the pandemic in the US, when the college where I was then teaching made the decision to move all classes online for the remainder of the semester and shipped us all home, or at least, elsewhere, I sent all of my students an email to see how they were doing, and to offer them a piece of advice. “Consider keeping a journal—this is a unique experience!” I wrote, chirpily. “Someday people might be asking you what it was like! You will be glad to have a record of your thoughts and impressions. As well, writing is a really good way to work through fears and trauma. Writing out your feelings—without judging or criticizing yourself!—can be a great way to check in on yourself; to identify things that are scaring you; to examine things from various perspectives; etc.”

This last bit is drawn from Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis, a pop psychology text that had been assigned in the college’s first-year course for a few years, and would therefore (hopefully) ring a bell for some of my readers. In Chapter 7 of the book, Haidt considers the questions of whether adversity sets us back, or spurs us to growth—whether what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Reviewing the evidence from various psychological studies, he finds mixed results, but something that is quite clear from the research is that one of the most tried-and-true ways to recover from tragedies—not just to survive, but to grow and develop resilience—is to write about them. By writing, he says, we actively process our feelings and find ways of making meaning, and this turns out to be crucial to our ability to flourish in the wake of disaster.

At a moment when so many people felt isolated, cut off from others, confronted with a new reality, it seemed wise to counsel my students to write, both for themselves, and for posterity. But, I must confess, I did a rather middling job of following my own advice.

Rather than writing about my thoughts or feelings, I mostly made check-lists of all the things I wanted to get done that day—both to organize myself, and for the small thrill of mastery when I could cross things off the list: chaos tamed, accomplishment in spite of everything. I kept a log of case numbers in my county, and a record of what my partner and I had for dinner (very useful, it turns out, if you’re wondering how old those leftovers are), and noted what variety of tea I’d made that day (mostly because my partner suspected that I wasn’t really drinking all those different teas I kept buying). This seemed different from the drive to quantify one’s life with a FitBit or music scrobbler: I wasn’t interested in aggregating the data, or discovering patterns. Just in making some kind of mark that left a trace of the day, of what was happening when it felt like so much was happening, but also, nothing.

Note: White Trash Bash was not an event I attended, but one that took place nearby (yes, really) and was noted so as to see if it produced a spike in cases.

I thought that I would spend my quarantine year writing, but instead, I mostly spent it…buying books. And teas. And t-shirts supporting various restaurants and small businesses that I was desperate to help in the only way that I could. And above all, I kept those various logs of things I was eating, drinking, doing (mostly on Zoom). It turned out, as my friend Stephanie put it, the basic mode of being in pandemic is not production, but consumption. Rather than writing a diary of my own, I read diaries and letters written by other people: Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, Zygmunt Bauman. I was surprised to find that what I really enjoyed in those texts, during that anxious Spring and weary Summer, was not the profound reflections and record of emotional lives so much as the very minor details, the little minutia of everyday life that snuck in. What they had for dinner. Gossip about a friend. A plan to go skating tomorrow. My own checklists suddenly began to seem more interesting. I went back to an old diary I’d half-heartedly kept years earlier and discovered that there too, it was not the accounts of thoughts and feelings that surprised or interested me, but the references to minor detail, the scrawled to-do lists—still trying to finish writing this chapter, need to read this thing, schedule this appointment.

Perhaps the work of a diary is not, as Haidt suggests, to process feelings and build a narrative—or rather, perhaps that process emerges from those trivial details that seem so forgettable later. It is only now, a year and a half later, that I am beginning to do the kind of reflective writing that I thought I would spend my time in quarantine producing. For that first year, all I could really muster was a running tally of mundanity.

But in this, I find, I am not so different from that notable predecessor of the human in extremis, for the portrait of life in isolation that is Robinson Crusoe is also, for the most part, a product of emotion recollected in tranquility. Crusoe does recover paper, pen, and ink from the shipwreck, but he does not use them to write the memoir that we read. That supply, it turns out, is used up for somewhat less memorable documents.

The first text he produces is a preliminary effort to get a grasp of his situation, a comically literal reckoning of the evil and good of his situation. The effort to do some accounting of the pros and cons is strangely touching in its determination to produce a balanced ledger. To paraphrase:

Con: I am cast upon a horrible desolate island, void of all hope of recovery.

Pro: But I am alive!

Con: I have not clothes to cover me.

Pro: Who needs clothes, in this heat?

This is the sort of reflection that is clearly the product of a sense of obligation: what one ought to write, in order to begin grappling with the conditions one faces. It is a touchingly laughable document, and one that does not provide much insight into the emotional realities of Crusoe’s astonishing experience.

Then he begins to write a journal. It is only once he has gotten his living quarters situated, he says, and some time has passed, that he is able to begin writing, for, “at first I was in too much of a hurry, and not only hurry as to labour, but in too much discomposure of mind.” If he had started writing immediately, he says, “my journal would ha’ been full of many dull things.” He provides an example of what such a dull entry might be, a fake entry for Sept 30^th, one that is in many ways quite similar to the entry he actually provides for Sept 30^th…which is itself a fake, because we know he only began the journal later. Both are notably different from the more extended account that we first get of the same day, provided in narrative form. But after this preliminary entry, once the space as been cleared, as it were, the journal becomes something that now seems much more familiar to me: a combination of checklists and logs. “November 1. I set up a tent under a rock, and lay there for the first night, making it as large as I could with stakes driven in to swing my hammock upon.” “November 3. I went out with my gun, and kill’d two fowls like ducks, which were very good food. In the afternoon went to work to make me a table.”

I suspect that many readers of Robinson Crusoe have forgotten this portion of the text entirely. Crusoe himself seems largely uninterested in it, freely jumping in to offer longer elaborations that seem like later additions. The text ends abruptly—he quits writing, he says because he runs out of ink—and the regular flow of the retrospective narrative resumes without significant comment. But I have a new appreciation for this section now, after my time as a castaway on the shores of my own apartment. Those brief entries turn out to be a far more compelling representation of the experience of being cut off from a larger social world than I could ever have imagined: the realism of a new kind of reality.

Ithaca College

“Living this novel”: (Accidentally) Pairing Plague with Plague

Christopher Charles Douglas

And here I may be able to make an Observation or two of my own, which may be of use hereafter to those, into whose Hands this may come, if they should ever see the like dreadful Visitation.

Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

For the Spring 2020 semester, I put Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) on my eighteenth-century novel syllabus seemingly on a whim. The subject matter—an outbreak of the bubonic plague in London in 1665—was distant from life at a rural state university, but felt likely to generate interest. Who doesn’t love a medical disaster narrative?

We read the text early in the semester and were done by the first week in February. We debated its non-linear structure and its use of statistics and primary sources before moving on. Defoe’s attempt to cash in on a plague scare in the 1720s receded in my own mind. This was until the last few weeks of the semester. My institution closed its doors to in-person classes on Friday, March 13, 2020. I kept the class mostly on schedule, and we continued our new readings. Defoe’s Journal, however, started to creep back into the sorts of things I found myself talking and thinking about. Our class discussions, which took place on asynchronous video uploads, had the same sort of broken-up feeling that Defoe’s Journal has, and that feeling of taking in the lists of the dead and dying in Defoe’s novel felt like the lists and numbers I saw reflected in my own online newsfeeds.

There is a strange divide between reading A Journal of the Plague Year before a pandemic and during it. The somewhat jumbled structure—where the narrator H.F. picks up ideas, is interrupted by something, and comes back to them dozens of pages later—suddenly makes sense. My social media is filled with people joking about how time does not exist in the same way anymore. The text’s repetitions also rings true, as the same arguments, the same sorts of reports, and the same actions repeat themselves in my own life. Defoe’s “Repetition of Circumstances” in the text has gained significance for me (163).

More so than this, though, I spent the last few weeks of the spring 2020 semester in reflecting on all of those little moments from the text that made up the bulk of the Journal—the reports of the dead, the anecdotes, and the observations by H.F. Many of the orders Defoe reprints from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London in 1665 now feel strangely prescient: accurate death records must be kept and published, the ability to properly diagnose the disease must increase in every parish, persons confirmed to have the disease must go under home quarantine, funerals are to take place without family members or friends, public entertainments and feasts are to be canceled, and taverns and coffee shops are to close early to prevent socializing and drunkenness (34-41). Each of these now carry a new weight, as I reread passages and think to myself, “Yes, self-quarantine. Yes, work on social distancing. Yes, increase testing. Yes, stay at home and don’t congregate in restaurants and bars.”

It is odd watching history, if not repeat itself, at least slip into an old groove for a moment. Our “asymptomatic carriers” are Defoe’s “THE WELL” who had “received the Contagion… yet did not shew the Consequences of it in their Countenances” (164) and our “we’re going to appreciate life when this is over” is Defoe’s “scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing Eyes” (151). That this text, written in 1722 to try to take advantage of a plague scare, is relevant again during COVID-19 is a strange rebirth; when Defoe wrote the text, he was already too late to cash in on the anxiety, and it didn’t see a second edition for more than two decades after his death. In April of 2020, it had become the inescapable novel on my syllabus. I asked my students to give a reflection back on the course as a whole as their final video assignment. One of my students called A Journal of the Plague Year “a transcendent constructing of an eighteenth-century Center for Disease Control” and another stated that “little did we know we would be living this novel.” More than any other text on the syllabus, Defoe’s work connected with my students.

While my students’ reactions to the novel formed a sympathetic connection back to this nearly three-hundred-year-old text, the negative connections were likewise inescapable. H.F. rails against “Doctors Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows; quacking and tampering in Physick” made by persons who used the fear of the plague as a way to make fast money from desperate people (27)—the colloidal silver and hydroxychloroquine of the seventeenth century. In a world where cellphone towers were being burned down in England in April of 2020, the easy explanation of “those were simpler people who believed in superstitions” becomes impossible to believe (Rachel Schraer & Elanor Lawrie). One of my students who initially did not like the book admitted at the end of the semester that the ways that Defoe pressed on “what is truth” and “can we distinguish between fact and fiction?” made him reevaluate the novel’s value, in the context of being confronted with just that dilemma in the world around him. Defoe’s claim that “no Body can account for the Possession of Fear when it takes hold of the Mind” is as true for us as it was for his original audience (207).

Defoe likewise has his narrator call the working poor “the most Venturous and Fearless of it [who] went about their Employment, with a Sort of brutal Courage,” memorializing the people who were the essential workers of his day who kept London going by “tending the Sick, watching Houses shut up, carrying infected Persons to the Pest-House, and which was still worse, carrying the Dead away to their Graves” (78), while also morbidly admitting that their deaths from these tasks were inevitable. Stories about essential workers and minorities dying at disproportionate rates show the same inequality in our society as existed during H.F.’s imagined day.

Reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year in the year of the COVID-19 pandemic became a learning experience for me. It brought the text I taught out of my lessons and into my own life in unexpected ways. It left me with two opposing feelings: hope for the future and worry over the shape that it will take. The Plague of 1665 ended. After about a quarter of London’s population died (a far larger percentage than any estimate of COVID-19), the people who were left were able to pick up, rebuild, and carry on. Yet, for the many who died, this would not be a world that they would shape or be a part of. And, so it seems, the world we inhabit today continues to expect the most out of those who can least afford it. Journal leaves me with no easy answers, at least not now. But, for the moment, I think it’s replaced Robinson Crusoe and Roxana on my syllabus. I think my students will have a lot to say about it. I’ll be ready to listen.

Jacksonville State University

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Edited by Louis Landa. Oxford UP, 2010.

Schraer, Rachel and Eleanor Lawrie. “Coronavirus: Scientists brand 5G claims ‘complete rubbish’,” BBC News, 15 April 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/52168096.

Privacy in the Plague Year

Caitlin Kelly

In A Journal of the Plague Year, H.F. tells his readers, “What I wrote of my private Meditations I reserve for private Use, and desire it may not be made Publick on any Account whatever” (65-66). I’ve always found that claim puzzling. What are those “private meditations”? What makes them different from the rest of the journal? Why is it so important that they be kept from us? Why not share them?

Even before the pandemic, I was skeptical about H.F.’s ability to compartmentalize, but now I find it even more perplexing. To H.F.’s mind, the things he observed and heard as he walked around London, and that he then recorded in his journal, were distinct from his “private Meditations.” The Journal seems to suggest that he found those private reflections and ruminations inadequate or inappropriate for the public record he was aiming to create.

In the wake of the past two years, however, I find myself doubting that it is possible to make distinctions between private and public records amidst a community crisis of the magnitude of a pandemic. Now I find myself re-reading A Journal of the Plague Year and asking: what if the existence of “private meditations” as distinct from public ones is a fiction itself?

As I have argued elsewhere, the first-person narrative that Defoe gives us in the Journal is actually a blending of multiple first-person narratives: much of the content of the Journal comes from H.F.’s observations as he walks around London, and so, while the Journal is H.F.’s, it tells the stories of the people he interacts with, such as the stories of a man at a mass gravesite (54-55) and three travelers he comes across in his own wanderings (100-102). In other words, these people’s experiences of the pandemic become part of H.F.’s own experience, and their stories are absorbed into his Journal.

Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, I found my inner narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic being shaped in the same way as H.F.’s seems to have been. Living in isolation, my experience of the world was reduced to the bits and pieces I could gather through phone and video chats, texts, faculty meetings and classes on Zoom, and the occasional backyard meetup of friends. It was as if I had gone from being the protagonist in a first-person novel to a reader of someone else’s story narrated in third person. No longer going from building to building and conversation to conversation on campus, meeting up with friends at happy hour, and slipping away to the art museum for lunch and a quiet moment in the galleries, I suddenly had no story of my own to tell when I did call or visit family or friends.

In my experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, other people’s experiences were not just part of my own narrative: they were the totality of it. With my daily activities and interactions so drastically reduced, I had nothing to recount and nothing to worry over with friends and loved ones. This seems like it would be liberating, but it wasn’t. The mental space that isolation freed up just filled with generalized anxiety and panic. There was no room for the peaceful contemplation and “sitting with my anxiety” that emails from my employer suggested. In the absence of inner peace, my private meditations became nothing more than anxious ruminations on the things I saw—empty grocery store shelves and shuttered businesses—and the things related to me by others—the Governor’s daily briefings, texts from friends reporting where they found Clorox wipes or good toilet paper in stock. There just wasn’t much more than observation to record of those months alone in my small apartment, and that’s what made me think about H.F. and his “private meditations.”

I think a lot about the terms we’ve used to describe our isolation, and the differences between “social distancing” and “physical distancing.” Even though “social distancing” is the term that has been used most widely, it isn’t at all accurate. As Paula Backscheider notes in her preface to the Norton Critical Edition of the Journal, a plague “allows no individuals” and “emphasizes human relationships” (ix). This, unlike H.F.’s claims about his private meditations, makes sense to me. As the crisis developed, I could see the boundaries between private and public eroding as our interdependency was laid bare in discussions first of closures, then masking, and then vaccinations. Thanks to my institution’s mask mandate and rigorous quarantining protocols, I was able to safely return to the classroom in the fall of 2020. Yet, now at a different institution that does not require masks or vaccinations, my colleagues and I can only hope that our students choose to vaccinate, mask, and test. The reality of a pandemic, it turns out, is that you don’t lose connection to people—you lose the agency to determine what those connections look like.

As private and public experience blend together, the inequities we already know exist have become impossible to ignore. In A Journal of the Plague Year, we see who has economic and political power through who is able to flee for the countryside and who is forced to stay in the city, who still has the means to make a living and who does not. We’ve seen the same in our own time as the wealthy fled to vacation homes, while others were deemed “essential” with little choice but to expose themselves to the virus, and still others lost their jobs. Even for those of us lucky enough to be able to work remotely, inequities became more starkly visible. Working from home via videoconferencing software completely collapsed the boundaries between private and public life for so many of us. I watched as tenured faculty and administrators joined meetings from houses they owned, with dedicated office spaces and, on nice days, patios to sit on while they worked. Meanwhile, many graduate students and contingent faculty joined from cramped apartments. Students joined classes from their childhood bedrooms and kitchen tables where they could no longer conceal from their peers and professors their material living conditions and familial dynamics.

Then as now, we see that even as a plague isolates us physically, it always seems to find ways to intertwine our lives even more than before. It no longer becomes possible for us to neatly separate our private and public lives and experiences, and, in making the power disparities among us so transparent, pandemics disrupt our relationships to one another. In turn, our individual reflections are never really, fully our own. Like those collected in this issue of Digital Defoe, they become part of a public record and a community history.

Georgia Institute of Technology

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. Norton, 1992.

Kelly, Caitlin L. “Private Meditations and Public History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Explicator, vol. 71, no.1, 2013, pp. 52-55.

How to Cure the Plague of Solitary Woe by Reading and Writing like Defoe

Eileen M. Hunt

As the coronavirus pandemic escalated in the winter of 2020, I found myself reflecting on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) as a classic of epidemic literature in the tradition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Prior to the pandemic, I had thought of her second great work of “political science fiction” after Frankenstein (1818) in other terms. Her novel about a global plague that triggers a near-extinction event for humanity then seemed to me to be Shelley’s unwieldy metaphor for all forms of artificially-made disaster, not a realistic literary depiction of the spread of a lethal contagion across national borders to overwhelm the whole world.

By mid-March 2020, I learned to read Shelley’s “PLAGUE” on two levels at once: metaphorical and realistic (vol. 4, 139). Like A Journal of the Plague Year, on which it was partly based, The Last Man told a grimly realistic political story about how human beings catch and transmit infectious diseases as a result of the drama of their interpersonal and international conflicts. As I prepared to teach Defoe’s novel as a source for Shelley’s poliscifi, I also began to appreciate the metaphorical layers of meaning in his fictional re-working of his uncle’s journal of survival of the Great Plague of London of 1665-66.

A fictional version of his uncle Henry Foe, Defoe’s narrator H.F. offers a poetic definition of plague near the end of his tale: “A Plague is a formidable Enemy, and is arm’d with Terrors, that every Man is not sufficiently fortified to resist, or prepar’d to stand the Shock against” (271). Plague, in this sense, is not so much a pathogen or a disease as it is a psychological test of the individual to face the worst and deepest of their fears. With this metaphor, Defoe returned to Biblical conceptions of plague, as found in Job and Exodus. In those ancient texts, plague is a metaphor for being beset by hardship, feeling the blows of fate, or suffering tragedy beyond one’s control. The ten plagues of Egypt were not solely infectious diseases, but rather a range of terrifying and life-endangering hardships inflicted by the Hebrew God upon the Egyptian people to compel them to free the Israelites from slavery.

While it can be read on both levels—historical and literary—A Journal of the Plague Year is ultimately a novel like Defoe’s earlier classic, Robinson Crusoe (1719). H.F., like the shipwrecked sailor Crusoe striving to escape from the cannibal island with the aid of purchased servants, endures the plague of solitary woe, but never faces up to the limits of his solidarity with other human sufferers. H.F. ended his months-long quarantine with the verse, “A dreadful plague in London was/ In the year sixty-five,/Which swept a hundred thousand souls/ Away; yet I alive!” (287). With this concluding quatrain, H.F. does not dwell so much on the immensity of the loss of life as he does the good luck of his own survival.

When Shelley read Defoe’s Plague Year in 1817, she may have found in its closing poem the narrative kernel for The Last Man. The ostensible sole survivor of her fictional global plague is Lionel Verney, who is an avatar for the author herself in this roman à clef. Like the young Shelley mourning the death of her husband Percy and three of their children, Verney suffers solitary woe in the extreme as do H.F. and Crusoe. But Verney survives the global plague to develop a truly solidaristic vision of his relationship with the whole planet and all of its life forms: he summons the hope that a new Adam and Eve might be out there, somewhere, already with child, and looking for others with whom to rebuild human society in a way that is humane.

While the solitary woe of Crusoe led him to escape from the cannibal island, and the solitary woe of H.F. pushed him to survive the plague intact, the solitary woe of Verney inspired him to set sail upon the sea: not only in search of other survivors, but also on a quest to discover a whole new way of life that might sustain the best in humanity while leaving the worst of its conflicts and other social diseases behind.

It is this global vision of solidarity with life itself that inspired me to ask my students at Notre Dame to emulate Defoe and Shelley during our plague year of 2020 to 2021. As part of my undergraduate and graduate seminars on political thought and plague literature, they wrote a series of 1000-word “pandemoirs” (pandemic memoirs) that wove together their difficult and sometimes even harrowing experiences of infection, quarantine, contact tracing, social distancing, vaccination, isolation, depression, loss, and mourning, alongside their readings of classics of plague literature from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2003-2013) and Handmaid’s Tale (1985-2019) series.

In a poignant moment of communal reflection, my first-year students and I looked back on our plague year of Zoom seminars by sitting down for an international Zoom call with anthropologist Eben Kirksey. In early May, he taped the deeply personal interview with the students for public viewing on YouTube as part of his “Multispecies Coronavirus Reading Group” series. The hour-long session provides a deep-dive into the psyches of the students, who had only recently been vaccinated in a mass campus drive, as they shared the real-life stories of resilience behind the personal and creative essays they wrote for our year-long humanities seminar. Though the technology had changed since Defoe and Shelley composed their plague memoirs with pen and paper, the purpose of our digitally-preserved pandemoirs was the same: to cure the plague of solitary woe with the incisive power of words to tie humanity together through time, space, and the depths of sorrow.

University of Notre Dame

WORKS CITED

Botting, Eileen Hunt. Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2020.

—. “Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein—And Then a Pandemic.” The New York Times. 13 March 2020.

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations Or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Publick as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. London: E. Nutt, 1722.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man, in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook. London: Pickering & Chatto, (1996) 2001.

That Uncertain Feeling: Plaguetime and Judgment, Medieval to Modern

Karl Steel

The Tiber overflowed in the last decade of the sixth century, flooding granaries, uprooting houses, and heaping up carcasses on its banks, even into Rome itself. Soon thereafter followed new catastrophe, when the Justinian Plague made its way West from death-struck Byzantium. When they met it, the Romans called it an inguinarium, after the telltale swelling of the inguen, the groin. The Byzantine Emperor survived his encounter with it; the bishop of Rome did not. Gregory, later honored as “the Great,” stepped in reluctantly after the death of Pope Pelagius II to lead a penitential procession in hopes that such a demonstration of sorrow might prove the salvation of his city.

More keenly, though, Pope Gregory I hoped to save souls. What chiefly worried him was not disease but damnation. Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century biography of the Pope has him explain that “each one is snatched from life before he can turn to thoughts of penitence. Think, therefore, how he arrives in the presence of the severe judge when he has no time to atone for what he has done.” Gregory and Rome with him hope the plague will stop, but in the meantime, the procession aims primarily to save the Romans from dying unprepared. Every Roman, like everyone, is a sinner, and mostly what can be done is “to take refuge in tears of penance when there is time to weep and before we are struck down.” Death will take us, now or later, but we might still avoid unending torment.

What is absent, in other words, is any particular blame. Plague follows the Tiber’s flooding, and its end occurs sometime after the procession, though not during it: as they wend their way through Rome, in the very midst of their piety, eighty penitents drop dead. But from there, they and those who watched them die expect them to go on to eternal felicity. As all must die, they must die too, but perhaps not hopelessly.

That universal concern for our general mortal condition is nowhere near as present in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The work is remembered for its formal peculiarities—its tabulations and calculations and its episodic attention to an ever-shifting set of victims and grifters—but no one can emerge from it, either, without feeling at least slightly uneasy about their neighbor’s behavior or even about their own. Though the Lord Mayor’s orders of late June 1665 seem, usefully enough, to target crowds (“loose persons and assemblies,” “public feasting,” “disorderly tippling in taverns, alehouses, coffee-houses, and cellars”), its chief targets are, obviously, any pleasure or activity or person, like the “swarms” of beggars, undevoted to the prevailing commonweal. It leaves unmolested any meeting for respectable commerce, for parliament, for hearing out the importunities of London’s citizens, or for study or experiment or dignified edification.

As dire as it was, the plague generated no reevaluation of values. There is no new form of care but only a crescendo of old condemnations from an office held by “a very solemn and religious gentleman”—historically speaking, John Lawrence, a businessman already inclined, one imagines, to wish to clean away the city’s beggars, alehouses, ballad-singing, and the like. Our narrator joins in this show of sobriety, complaining about an encounter with those “not afraid to blaspheme God and talk atheistically,” and praising, at length, a poor waterman whose faith is only increased by the likely mortal peril of his family, locked away from him in a house shut fast by plague. Piety, though, is not necessarily the right way either. For H.F. comes at last to condemn even those who abandon themselves too much to God: although God is reasonable insofar as he has “formed the whole scheme of nature and maintained nature in its course,” and majestic insofar as he might execute through means either natural or supernatural either “mercy or justice” (note the terrifying brevity of that two-item list!), anyone who decides that God’s overwhelming power means nothing needs to be done – that, our narrator insists, is nothing but “a kind of Turkish predestinarianism.”

We remain in this time of blame. Many of us are certain that bad actors, indifferent to the general good, are keeping our present plague going. But we also have something else: we moralize, some of us, and we thereby lift ourselves up, transfiguring our discomfort and inconvenience into sacrifice and semi-secularized penance. We grouse, some of us, at watching others whom we know to be tedious or otherwise burdened with a host of venial social faults apotheosize themselves by the simple expedient of donning a mask or by getting the jab expeditiously. Anyone reading this is likely already vaccinated: we did it to help others, to help ourselves, to save our families, to save what remains, to help ourselves by finally being able to lounge poolside someplace just warm enough. We did it for whatever reason. The others too have their own reasons, not all of them reducible to antisocial cussedness. What each side possesses, though, is, mostly, the ease of certainty.

Certainty is not what Gregory’s procession offers, nor, finally, does Defoe offer it either. The Journal of the Plague Year, of course, particularizes blame in a way Gregory’s Rome does not, but that particularization wanders, as H.F. does, always landing somewhere not quite foreseen. The Journal leaves us uncertain precisely about what we ought to do in the face of God’s majesty or the implacable plague. A posture of sobriety is necessary, but that would be necessary anyway for anyone with a streak of mercantile respectability.

It’s easy to hit an easy target. I’m not sure when you’re reading this but, as hard as this might be to believe, in late Summer 2021, a host of Americans were poisoning themselves with a multipurpose ointment, as helpless against Covid as it is effective against equine worms. Most of them, we have to assume, took it because they didn’t want to die. People are scared. Nothing could be simpler than mockery, nothing simpler than acquiring the congratulations the mocker gives themselves by jeering.

Gregory’s procession, a universal attempt to set ourselves right amid an inevitable mortality, at least targets those puffed up and convinced of their own perfect health: that condition, as always, is temporary, and more temporary now than usual. We cannot help but blame others, but Defoe’s blame, swirled as it is in uncertainty, without being inclined to elevate the observer H.F. into a hero, might be the best model the rest of us can imitate, while we too await mercy, or justice.

Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

The Fire the Next Year

Carly Yingst

The Violence of the Distemper, when it came to its Extremity, was like the Fire the next Year; The Fire, which consumed what the Plague could not touch, defied all the Application of Remedies; the Fire Engines were broken, the Buckets thrown away, and the Power of Man was baffled and brought to an End.

—Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

Looking back at 1665 from 1722, the “Fire the next Year”—the fire of 1666—appears as a strange kind of afterthought in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (35). Although the journal’s narrator, H.F., clearly marks it as a disaster, one comparable to the plague his Journal narrates, Defoe nevertheless uses it primarily as that: a means of comparison. In just a few words, he invokes the suffering and destruction of the next year’s crisis, but he ultimately does so not to describe that catastrophe, but to make the distress of the plague more palpable. One might pause to wonder whether H.F.—likely a survivor of the fire as well as of the plague—has stories to tell of the conflagration as he as of the pestilence. But one crisis, it seems, at a time.

That Defoe’s concern when he began writing was with the plague, not the fire, is understandable. Writing in the immediate wake of the 1720 outbreak of the plague in Marseilles, Defoe turns back to the last great plague in London in a way not unlike the many who, two hundred years later, have turned to Defoe’s novel in the face of the spread of Covid-19. It was the plague that Defoe had reason to recall to mind. Yet, over a year following that renewal of public interest in Defoe’s narrative—hailed as a “guide book” with “startling parallels” to our own moment—one might query how Defoe relegates the last great fire to the margins of the last great plague, as news of Covid-19 shares more and more space with news of wildfires that, in the summer and fall of 2021 alone, have devastated entire towns from California to British Columbia, burnt through tens of thousands of acres of sequoia groves, and engulfed the Mediterranean and Siberia.

I started thinking about the Journal’s brief mentions of the fire in mid-June, amid news of the heat dome descending over parts of Canada and the United States and the heatwave in the Middle East, with temperatures hitting 50 degrees Celsius—but before the U.S. surge of the Delta coronavirus variant began in July. When I started thinking about this moment in relation to pandemic life and recovery, that is, it was possible to believe we were in fact recovering, at least from Covid-19. I wanted, then, to raise a series of questions about how Defoe’s two crises might help us think about the ways we have been pivoting between disasters, with the recovery from one seeming to mark the intensification of another. The pandemic lockdowns, as many observed, sent carbon emissions plunging as the economy ground to a halt, offering a flicker of hope that, in the internet’s terms, nature might be healing, returning like it does in Defoe’s plague-stricken London, where, with its bustling commerce suspended, “the great streets…and even the Exchange itself, had grass growing in them” (87). For those in the future—for those writing from the same distance from Covid-19 as Defoe wrote from the 1665 plague—I wanted to ask what the crisis of the past year might look like in retrospect. How would the pandemic of the past year be understood in relation to the fires of the next year? Would it become a footnote in relation to the greater, more immediate threats of climate instability? Would we return to treating the idea of plague as a disastrous metaphor, in the way one New York Times writer was able to in 2019, when she wrote that “Climate change might be our successor to the Black Death”? How might we understand the way that pandemic recovery—at least economic recovery—was not only met with news of climate disaster, but also, perhaps, drove that disaster further, with emissions levels ultimately recovering with the economy itself?

But that surge of the Delta variant has changed things. There is, now, no plague of this year and fire of next year, no clear narrative sequence that moves from one crisis to another, with one emerging while the other ends, as it was possible to imagine for a few months following the release of the vaccine. Those broader narrative forms, like Defoe’s, that would have us attend to one crisis at a time seem to be cracking under the pressure of this simultaneous rise of global temperatures and Covid-19 cases, failing against the backdrop of a wider challenge to structures for comprehending catastrophe. What we still call once-in-a-century storms and floods, for instance, are predicted soon to become annual occurrences, unsettling the sense of disaster as occurring at distant, periodic intervals. As the formerly slow rhythms of crisis rapidly accelerate, then, we are faced with a challenge similar to that posed by the overlap of pandemic and wildfire: how to both imagine and respond to a tangle of multiple, ongoing crises, related yet distinct.

From an imagined retrospective position, looking back on the present from a distance of sixty years, perhaps the particular tangle of climate crisis and pandemic will still be unraveled into a clearer narrative. Perhaps 2020’s catastrophe will ultimately be a brief note relative to the more pressing history of how, to use Defoe’s words, the “power of man was baffled and brought to an end”—a history that might find its turning point not in 2020 but in 2021, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report sounded a “code red for humanity,” or when youth activists filed a petition with the United Nations to demand real climate mitigation measures following another round of apparently empty pledges from COP26 representatives. For now though, as we live through overlapping surges of plague and fire, reading news of both side by side, it remains difficult to imagine one becoming a footnote or metaphor for the other—almost as difficult as it is to try holding both crises in mind at once. Perhaps the question to ask of Defoe’s Journal now, then, is not how our twin crises fall into the retrospective model Defoe sketches, but whether that model can still be a guide for 2021 as it was for many in 2020. Perhaps the question to ask now is how we read the novel’s closing line, taken, as H.F. tells us, from the end of his “ordinary memorandums the same year they were written”: “Yet I alive!” (212). Can we still read that note of optimistic survival without imagining how H.F.’s own journal of disaster might have gone on, to tell of the fire, after these concluding words of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague? Can we still imagine a narrative of crisis with such a clear end?

Harvard University

WORKS CITED

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

Bubble Fever: A New Audio Play, Based on the Works of Daniel Defoe and Other Sources

David Fletcher, Writer and Director; Jonathan Fletcher, Producer and Composer; Loft Theatre Company, Performers

Pictured: Laura Hayward (as Hannah Defoe) and Robert Lowe (as Daniel Defoe).
Photo Credit: David Fletcher

Written and directed by David Fletcher

Performed by the Loft Theatre Company, in association with the History Department of the University of Warwick

Recording produced and music composed by Jonathan Fletcher