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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queens College, City University of New York

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Liverpool / Université de Paris

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fordham University

 WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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