100- ) English Literature
Daniel Defoe
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Defoe
wrote hundreds of nonfiction and journalistic accounts, but he was also a poet.
In the not-too-distant past it was more customary to refer to his “verses” than
to his poems—and to add such qualifiers as “execrable.” In recent years,
however, a few critics have begun to pay serious attention to the poems and to
discover artistry in them and a reflection of his quick and subtle mind. Defoe
is an author still being assessed critically. No complete edition of all of his
writings exists. It is not certain that he wrote the 566 works assigned to him
by John Robert Moore in the 1971 edition of his Checklist of the Writings of Daniel
Defoe. Critics are even in the precarious position of not knowing if Defoe is
merely a creature we have put together in our heads from works that may or may
not be by him. However, the poems discussed here are, for the most part, well
established in the canon. They display a sharp mind that is always preoccupied
with the social, religious, and political issues of the day.
Defoe
wrote some form of poetry all his life, but his great period of poetic
composition was from 1699 to 1707. Here and there, especially in the Review
(the periodical that he wrote singlehandedly from February 1704 to June 1713),
he left distichs, lampoons, pasquinades, fragments of songs, and ballads; he
also included verses in his novels. One can track the development of his thought
in the poems, his attachment to certain ideas, such as reform or morality, his
theoretical interests in the language and style of poetry, his habit of casting
poems into irony, and his skill in creating large poetic “fictions” that permit
him to draw together numerous “characters” in recognizable patterns. Within his
lifetime a few poems had considerable popularity, in, for example, the 1703
Poems on Affairs of State. “The Author of the True-Born Englishman” became a
common nom de plume on title pages, both for poems by Defoe and some poems not
by him. He was a favorite of the literary pirates; for example, Henry Hill’s
pieces (including Defoe’s) appeared in 1717 as A Collection of the Best English
Poetry. Giles Jacob, in The Poetical Register (1723), observed that two pieces
were “very much admir’d by some Persons”: The True-Born Englishman (1700) and
Jure Divino (1706). Robert Shiels in Theophilus Gibber’s Lives of the Poets of
Great Britain and Ireland (1753) found that “poetry was far from being the talent
of De Foe” and yet discussed four verse satires and listed Caledonia (1706) and
Jure Divino in the bibliography. George Chalmers (1785) and the later
biographers and critics treat the poems with widely different emphases but
generally with scorn or neglect. In the discussion that follows, certain prose
works, such as A Vindication of the Press (1718), are now controversial as the
work of Defoe and are omitted from consideration. The poems are taken up
chronologically, with a few exceptions; and some efforts are made to create
larger groupings of the poems, such as parliament poems, moral satires, and
Scottish poems. The best texts of the poems, with annotations and headnotes,
are to be found in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714,
volumes 6 and 7 (1970, 1975).
The
poems from The Meditations (written in 1681; first published in 1946) to
The Character of the Late Dr. Samuel Annesley (1697) are the products of young
Daniel Foe, ambitious and energetic, turning first from the ministry to the
merchant’s life, restlessly seeking a place in city politics, and trying out
his voice on national issues. The poems in The Meditations were written in
Defoe’s neat hand on twenty-three pages of manuscript (originally titled
“Meditations”) and consist of seven highly personal, contemplative pieces on
themes of unworthiness, conscience, and guilt-ridden flight. All except one are
signed D.F. There is some question as to whether the contents are biblical
exegeses or personal experiences, and whether they are in any way related to
similar incidents in Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) and Col. Jack (1722).
The
religion of The Meditations is strikingly different from that in any other
poem; it has a close affinity to that of the metaphysical poets. Defoe’s model
here seems to be George Herbert (“The Quip,” in The Temple, 1633). Like a
metaphysical poet, Defoe uses military images, as in “The Seige Raised” (part 7
of The Meditations). Most impressive in the light of relationships Defoe will
find in future poems between the poet and other artists is “Shall The Clay Say
Unto The Potter? &ca” (part 4), wherein “a Rustic Artist” complains that he
is “A Drudge” and the pile of clay is “a Dish of qualitye,” but the poet is now
calmed in his complaint by these observations. Never again in his poetic career
would Defoe handle religion with such dramatic immediacy. The Meditations
reflects the strong puritan education Defoe had received at James Fisher’s
boarding school at Dorking in Surrey (1672-1676) and the more humanistic
learning at Charles Morton’s Academy at Newington Green (1676-1679). The poems
mirror also the resolution of the conflict in favor of the secular life.
Defoe
married Mary Tuffley in 1684, participated in Monmouth’s Rebellion, and
apparently fought at Sedgemoor in 1685; he was pardoned in 1687. As a hosier in
Freeman’s Yard, Cornhill, he disliked the excesses of James II and sided with
the new rulers, William and Mary. On 29 October 1689 he is described by John
Oldmixon, in The History of England (1735), as participating fully in a royal
regiment of horse made up of “the chief Citizens” who were for the most part
Dissenters. A New Discovery of an Old Intreague was Defoe’s first published
poem, appearing sometime before January 17, 1691. The poem is a long satire
(666 lines) taking the form of a history of fairly unimportant events in London
politics from 1682 to 1691. However, as a satire, it conveys feelings better
than facts. A New Discovery deals with the theme of the city’s freedom
gradually being given back by William III. The poem is concerned with events of
the 1680s in which tyrants Charles II and James II deprived the city of its
charter and silenced leaders such as Lord William Russell and Henry Cornish.
The narrative first takes the events up to the petition by the 117 members of
Common Council to parliament. The petition was rejected, but on the return of
King William from Ireland the rights were restored to the city. Evidence exists
in the poem that, secondly, there was the capture on December 31, 1690 of the
Jacobite Lord Preston (Richard Grahame) and John Ashton; they were brought to
trial and convicted (January 17-19, 1691). The news of this Jacobite threat was
a last-minute insertion into the poem.
A
New Discovery could have been a major poem eloquently espousing freedom as its
larger “fiction” and using its numerous “characters” to reinforce the theme and
give it substance. As it is, the poem gropes confusedly for the theme but never
grasps the universality requisite in a great satire. For its structure the poet
refuses to take “parallels from Hebrew times,” and will leave “the Jingling
Simily to speak” (92-93; hereafter references to lines of the text are given
within parentheses). Now and then Defoe hints at the larger structure of the Lord
Mayor’s pageant-the colorful procession of mayor, sheriffs, and livery
companies—but never reaches the brilliant symbolism of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad
(1728). Some of the characters are drawn with realistic details that point to
identification of the person: for instance, the fifth Golden Candlestick, in
real life Henry Compton, Bishop of London (250-265); Ralph Box (524-533); and
Drugestus (534-538), with whom Defoe’s focus is on the face and the details
drawn from Tom D’Urfey’s The Triennial Mayor (1691). His techniques for
developing characters here will appear again in later poems.
Defoe
would complain later in life, as he did in The Complete English Tradesman
(1725-1727), that it is most difficult to be both a wit and a tradesman. By
1692, as he moved toward his first bankruptcy, he found himself in the company
of Peter Anthony Motteux, Nahum Tate, Charles Richardson, and other wits
providing prefatory poems to Charles Gildon’s The History of the Athenian
Society (1692). “To the Athenian Society,” signed D. F., is written in a
mode popularized by Abraham Cowley, which would soon become one of Defoe’s
favorites, the panegyric. With some suggestion of strophe and antistrophe, the
poem celebrates the emergence of new knowledge and enlightenment.
A
more important early poem is The Character of the Late Dr. Samuel Annesley.
Annesley had been a well-educated and well-descended minister of St. Helen’s
Place in St. Giles, Cripplegate, one of the “ejected” (clergy evicted by the
Act of Uniformity, 1662, or by the Test Act, 1673). If anyone had been the
model of a minister for the young Defoe, it was undoubtedly Dr. Annesley. Among
the many funeral sermons and other tributes was Defoe’s elegy, filled with
echoes of John Milton‘s Lycidas (1638). Compared with the earlier poems The
Character is unusual in its depth of feeling and strong sense of structure. In
particular, the emotion over the death of Annesley, a close friend of the Foe
family, was centered in character and its relationship to actions. This theme,
the identity of the Christian and the gentleman, is woven throughout the poem
and gives it an artistic unity not always evident in the early poems. At the
high point the speaker (Defoe himself) makes explicit what had thus far been
implicit, the identification of style and action: “For Honesty and Honour are
the same” (110)—a line his character Roxana was to repeat in a similar context
more than a quarter of a century later (in The Fortunate Mistress, 1724). He
praises Annesley for a sincerity “which made his Actions and his Words agree”
(104). The speaker, in the fourth and final section of the poem, finds
consolation in the significance of Annesley’s death, divine love, again
expressed in a Herbert-like relationship to style: “Twou’d be concisely thus,
All Heaven is Love” (233).
In
The Pacificator, published on February 15, 1700, Defoe came closest to
imagining the life and mind of a wit and litterateur. Nowhere else in his
poetry does he have such a concentrated focus on literature and criticism or
include so many names of poets, dramatists, and critics. In some ways it
reminds one of greater criticism in verse that lay ahead—Alexander Pope’s Essay
on Criticism (1711) or The Dunciad. As mock-heroic satire, The Pacificator
takes the art of innuendo deeply into style, as it imposes one layer of
literary reference upon another—for instance, when we are told that John Dryden
had some sense until he began to dote and “lately Deviate into Wit” (248),
neatly echoing “MacFlecknoe,” Dryden’s poem of 1682.
The
structure of the poem causes problems, though, and imposes obstacles to any
easy understanding. It is not surprising, therefore, that the poem fell
stillborn: not a single contemporary reference or allusion to it has been
found. Again, Defoe had avoided the indirection of allegory or biblical
parallel. Instead, like Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books (1704), he
creates in The Pacificator a “war” between the forces of sense and those of
wit. Appropriately, in the period of peace right after the Treaty of Ryswick (signed
in February 1697), he describes the “Civil Feuds, and Private Discontent” that
broke out. He wants to direct attention to certain recent domestic phenomena
that are literary. In the introduction he makes clear his mock-heroic
intention. He focuses the theme of sense versus wit on his principal character
Nokor, whom he identified as Sir Richard Blackmore in the single marginal note
added to the text of The Pacificator in his collected works. In the rest of the
poem he weaves together two main strands in the personality of Nokor/Blackmore,
conspicuously outspoken defender of morality or sense in his epics Prince
Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697), as well as in their abrasive prefaces—and
just “now,” as the poet declares, Nokor/Blackmore has rallied his troops in his
Satyr against Wit, published on November 23, 1699. Defoe seems to have some
hint of an “impending stroke,” which may be the Commendatory Verses (1700),
epigrams by Tom Brown and other wits attacking Blackmore. It is at this time of
the mock-heroic action that The Pacificator appears, with Defoe envisioning
himself as—a latter-day Lord Rochester or even a successor to the doting
Dryden—a litterateur wittily cognizant of the cultural scene. Throughout the
entire account of what we now call the Jeremy Collier controversy, Defoe aligns
the wit dramatists (Dryden, William Congreve, and John Hughes) and their
defenders against the attackers of the stage, principally Collier.
For
Defoe’s second strand, a subsidiary theme arising from the career of Blackmore
as prominent physician, he briefly introduces the somewhat distantly related
controversy of the doctors versus the apothecaries, in which Blackmore was
mainly opposed to Samuel Garth in a quarrel over the feeding of the poor.
Whatever Defoe’s posture and pretensions are in The Pacificator, he clearly
demonstrates that at this stage of his career his ambition is to be a poet and
wit, and the resolution he advances in this civil “war” is a truce, a
pacification through the combination of qualities from both sense and wit.
In
the third and final part Defoe turns from civil war to peace and makes
suggestions for repairing Britain’s losses. He seeks a compromise between the
opposing factions but first defines wit and sense in a brilliant passage of antitheses
(355-396). Wit, he declares, is “like a hasty Flood.” It is “a Flux, a
Looseness of the Brain.” “Sense-abstract” has too much pride, while
“Witunconcoct is the Extreme of Sloth.” Sense like water is “but Wit condense”;
and wit like air is “rarify’d from Sense .” Then, wittily, he joins together
something literary and something political: “Wit is a King without a
Parliament, / And Sense a Democratick Government.” The view of not just wit but
of poetry expressed here seems to be the true Defoe. He would say it again,
much more forcefully, in Caledonia; and it seems to be a deeply held belief. In
addition, when he later assigns each kind of writing to a single expert person
(419-424), he reserves lampoon for himself, “F[oe].” Aside from William Wycherley
being assigned to lyric, the pairings are accurate, that is, substantiated by
literary history as we now know it. Why Defoe assigned lampoon to himself is
not quite clear, except that he did frequently resort to personal satire, and
he did see his talent in such writing. Here he shows a keen sense of genres and
an understanding of poetic kinds that fall short of poetic theory only because
they are somewhat fragmentary.
In
the 1690s trade as a means of livelihood was becoming less attractive to Defoe,
and politics through pamphlet-writing consumed most of his time and energy. His
diversity of interest—social, political, and economic-may be seen best in his
prose Essay upon Projects (1697). His brick and tile factory at West Tilbury,
Essex (Defoe had won government contracts in 1695 and 1696), no longer held his
full attention. Minor government posts were temporary and unfulfilling.
According to Frank Bastian (Defoe’s Early Life, 1981), in the winter of
1696-1697 he first showed a keen interest in parliamentary affairs. Defoe found
there the themes of the ballads An Encomium upon a Parliament (1703),
circulating as a manuscript in early May 1699; A New Satyr on the Parliament,
probably published in June 1701; England’s Late Jury, published on November 4,
1701; and The Address, most likely published in April 1704. All four poems have
a similar stanzaic form with radical or “mutinous” overtones, and all four deal
with parliamentary issues, at times with an insider’s knowledge. The speaker is
Legion or “our Legionite,” and he is definitely threatening. William III is
generally kept from blame but unexpectedly attacked in A New Satyr (216-220).
None of the ballads is in Defoe’s collected works. All four are reprinted as
Defoe’s in volume 6 of Poems on Affairs of State (1970) but with questions on
the authorship of England’s Late Jury and The Address.
The
True-Born Englishman, published on or
about December 2, 1700, shows advances in poetic technique and breadth of
subject over anything Defoe had previously attempted. As the xenophobia
increased during the second session of the fourth parliament and during the
months after John Tutchin’s venomous Foreigners appeared (published anonymously
in 1700), Defoe would rise out of relative obscurity and assume the role of “the
unofficial poet laureate” in his staunch defense of William III. Defoe himself
said that because of his True-Born Englishman King William sought to be
acquainted with the author. Defoe’s audience in the poem is now the entire
nation and even Europe. For with the instinct of the popular artist, he tried
to delineate the national character of the English people, the species itself,
and to illustrate it with individual characters who anticipate, to an extent,
the men and women of the novels he would write years later.
How
great the poem’s popularity was can only be guessed. In the preface to A Second
Volume of the Writings Of the Author Of The True-Born Englishman (1705), Defoe
claimed he had himself seen nine editions through the press, there were twelve
editions “by other Hands,” and eighty thousand pirated copies had been sold on
the streets. The poem was included in Poems on Affairs of State (1703), along
with Reformation of Manners (1702) and A Hymn to the Pillory (1703). William
Pittis, in The True-Born-Hugonot (1703), ridicules the large number of editions
(ten) of The True-Born Englishman.
The
poem, it seems, was being read by almost everyone. Completely unlike the pose
of a wit in The Pacificator, the speaker of The True-Born Englishman takes on a
voice very close to the people or folk, again called “Legion.” Most of the poem
consists of Satyr’s response to the speaker, and Satyr frequently makes use of
proverb-like language. Most important in the poem’s ability to reach the people
is its style of rough satire—the poetic theory of which Defoe clearly
understood, and now and then articulated in prefaces or the Review—and he
looked back to models such as Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, John Oldham, and
John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, as opposed to the style of “fine raillery” of
Dryden.
Defoe’s
motives in writing The True-Born Englishman were primarily propagandistic. He
was probably both sincere and honest in his autobiographical Appeal to Honour
and Justice (1715) when he included in the origins of The True-Born Englishman
“a kind of Rage” at the Foreigners. Making use of biblical allegory, this “vile
abhor’d Pamphlet” scurrilously attacked the Dutch, and lampooned the King’s
Dutch favorites, viciously attacked William III, and urged his dethronement (as
the anonymous author of the pamphlet The Examination, Tryall, and Condemnation
of Rebellion O[bservato]r would say in 1703). When The True-Born Englishman
first came out the evidence of its origin was clearly there, mainly in the
satiric character Shamwhig (624-649), obviously John Tutchin. In the following
January (1701) Defoe drastically revised the poem, omitting the Shamwhig
character and universalizing the satire of Sir Charles Duncombe by eliminating
any identification by name. Aware of the relationship between characters that
are individual and characters that are general, he clearly moved in the
direction of the latter. His interests in character are deep and integral to
his artistic purpose.
The
main thrust of Defoe’s propaganda is not merely to oppose the king’s enemies
who hated foreigners but to devastate them in such a way that his readers would
become advocates of the king. His techniques at times are extremely subtle. The
Latin quotation on the title page, “Charta Regis Willielmi Conquisitoris de Pacis
Publica...(The Charter of King William the Conqueror for the Public Peace...),
starts the parallel between William the Conqueror and William III, which
becomes clearer as Satyr develops the distinction between a de facto and a de
jure basis for kingship. Defoe makes the strongest case possible for William’s
claim to the throne by opposing the de facto argument that would make him a
usurper and insists upon William’s right to the throne out of the English
people’s gratitude for a king who saved them from tyranny. The idea of
gratitude/ingratitude is central to the poem and becomes its theme. The
propaganda here is at times radical, as Pittis pointed out in The True-Born
Englishman: A Satyr, Answer’d, Paragraph by Paragraph (1701) when he called
Defoe “a Leveller.” The poem’s speaker identifies himself with Legion and gives
the poem a sharp edge (771-778). But beyond propaganda, the poem generates a
grand conception that is Gilbert-and-Sullivan comedy in its vast exaggeration,
namely, that all Englishmen who are so proud of title, family, ancestry, and
wealth are themselves “Europe’s Sink, the Jakes,” bastards, and so forth
(249-250).
As
an artistic entity, The True-Born Englishman has a structure that reinforces
the propaganda. In part I Satyr gives a long cosmography of countries and their
dominant vices (pride, lust, drunkenness...) culminating with England and its
own “Devil”: Ingratitude. At this point emerges the grand conception mentioned
above. Next, in part 2, Defoe turns from the true-born Englishman as a species
to individuals—characters, including Shamwhig, who (in spite of preachy
writings) betray their benefactors. In stark contrast to the loyal Portland and
Schonberg, the speaker introduces “a Modern Magistrate of Famous Note,” the
longest and best developed character, Sir Charles Duncombe (1045-1063), giving
“his own History by Rote and his fine speech” (1064-1190). Defoe’s decision in
a later edition to depersonalize the fine speech was probably an artistic
mistake. The character sketch had been circulating in manuscript in 1699 and
was the genesis of the entire poem. Duncombe, in his fine speech, moralizes on
ingratitude as the unpardonable sin and rehearses the betrayal of his master
Edward Backwell, Charles II, James II, and William III—with the straight face
of self-praise. He acknowledges that he surpasses Judas and proudly mentions
his old friend the Devil. At the height of revealing his moral misconduct
Duncombe bursts out with the question “A’n’t I a Magistrate for Reformation?”
(1182). All the actions Duncombe mentions have real-life counterparts, and they
all demonstrate the dominant English vice of ingratitude.
The
true-born Englishmen become “the mock mourners” in the poem bearing that title,
published on May 12, 1702. King William died on 8 March, and the poems that
shortly appeared mourned for the king sincerely, or they turned mourning into
severe satire. Defoe’s Mock-Mourners is a deliberate mixture of genre,
presenting both elegy and satire. Defoe says repeatedly in the poem that all
praise of William becomes a devastating satire of the praisers because their
actions and values were the opposite of his. Still another explanation may be
given in that the mixing of genres reflects a highly idiosyncratic way of
thinking that we associate with Defoe. The poem, in short, is much more than
history.
Defoe
says in The Mock-Mourners : “So Mad-Men sing in Nakedness and Chains, /
For when the Sense is gone, the Song remains” (272-273). If one thinks of the
“song” as the poem itself, the lines bear directly on the relationship of
panegyric to satire, on Defoe’s conception of a difficult time for himself, and
on his own role for that occasion. More important, as the poem states
explicitly, Defoe’s purpose is to “read” the “Modern Character” of King William
(346). He asks how “future Ages [will] read his Character?” Again he addresses
Satyr and asks that he “Embalm [the King’s] Name with Characters of Praise”
(520-522). In the future anyone who would be great simply imitates the king. He
is the “Example,” and youth need only attend to his history. Not until the
conclusion of The Mock-Mourners does the new reading of King William’s
character come into focus. The poet responds to the question that Posterity
will ask, “What Giant’s that?” by turning to “romance” and “legend” (488-519).
So important is this passage that Defoe repeated it in the Review for March 27,
1707. The poet, at the very end, urges that a substitute be found for Queen
Anne among her nobles to provide the military prowess of William III in order
to complete the transition of power.
The
Mock-Mourners was both the last of the King William poems and the first of the
Queen Anne poems. Boldly, as in The True-Born Englishman, Defoe marked out his
own role of poetic spokesman for the regime. He would continue to write
celebratory poems in the general class of occasional poems—public statements,
generally in iambic pentameter, of what he would like to be official positions
on events. The Spanish Descent, probably published in December 1702, is a good
early example of such poems. It celebrates the military victory regarded at the
time as the most momentous in over a hundred years: Sir George Rooke’s capture
of the entire Spanish fleet at Vigo. The providential success at Vigo is in
sharp contrast to the English failure at Cadiz during the earlier war,
1689-1697. Thus The Spanish Descent is history, a poem on state affairs, but
because of the ambiguities and ironies inherent in any major historical event
and the figurative language of the poem, The Spanish Descent is also more than
history.
Four
poems—Reformation of Manners, More Reformation (1703), A Hymn to the Pillory
and An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born-English-Man (1704)—are moral
satires leading up to and centered on Defoe’s imprisonment in Newgate and his
standing in the pillory on three successive days, July 29-31, 1703, at the
Royal Exchange in Cornhill, Cheapside, and Temple Bar, all places where he was
well known. The High Church and Tory prosecutors had expected the pillorying to
be harmful to him and perhaps even fatal; it turned out to be triumphant. (In
Stefan Heym’s fictionalization of the incident—in The Queen Against Defoe and
Other Stories, 1974—a young man perched high upon a lantern post recites A Hymn
to the Pillory while a modern-day Defoe stands triumphant, the writer against
the East German Commissars.) From Defoe’s writings it is known that A Hymn to
the Pillory was published on July 29, 1703, and the experience of the
pillory—including his pursuit, the harassment of his family, his feelings of
guilt and isolation, imprisonment, and trial—was central to his own personal
and professional development as a writer.
Reformation
of Manners, probably published in August 1702, arose out of a
powerful emotion, a Juvenalian indignation directed at the hypocrites of his
time, an upper-class group made up of magistrates, statesmen, clergy, and
military leaders—persons who cannot reform the lower classes because they
commit the very crimes they rail at. As in his earlier poems Defoe creates a
large conception, this two-tiered society, and develops a kind of social
symbolism that will recur in his novels. To a certain extent it is this theme
of Reformation of Manners, with its vast gallery of some thirty-nine
characters, that got him into trouble and led to the writing of More
Reformation—even while he was being pursued by the authorities—and its
publication on July 16, 1703. The emotion of this latter poem is much more
autobiographical, including more self-discovery, which continues even more
powerfully in A Hymn to the Pillory and in An Elegy on the Author of the
True-Born-English-Man, published sometime before July 25, 1704.
Reformation
of Manners, containing 1280 lines, is a unique literary phenomenon of its time.
The closest counterpart of its rough iambic pentameter may be found in the
popular Poems on Affairs of State volumes (1703), where it was also included.
Defoe’s lambasting of highly placed persons is unrelenting and at times
vicious. In a long commentary (1120-1181) he interrupts the flow of his
narrative to discuss poetry and the role of the poet in a time of reformation;
he has clearly gone far beyond the wit/sense debate of The Pacificator. Now,
says Defoe, if you write for bread, you must please, and so wit, which is often
lewd, bawdy, or blasphemous, will prevail over sense. For such are the
realities of the marketplace. In vain does one write “Hymns and Histories from
sacred Writ.” Then follow the well-known lines: “Let this describe the Nation’s
Character, / One Man reads Milton, forty Rochester.” The preference is for the
lewd and not the sublime. The passage is most significant also for its pointed
references to “the Love and Honour” theme, “the Drunken Stile,” and quoted
remarks of the bookseller.
With
its huge outcroppings of scandalous chronicles, Reformation of Manners moves
along sluggishly. The structure, however, is simple: the introduction compares
the city of London with ancient capitals and outlines the chances now for any
honest reformation; part 1 introduces characters of the city; part 2 focuses on
characters of the country and the court; and in the conclusion Defoe reiterates
his theme of a true reformation. In part I the characterizations take the form
of nasty lampoons, especially when they arise from Defoe’s personal life. No
detail of private history, no matter how bizarre or perverted, is exempt from
the satirist’s scrutiny and exposure. Unremitting is the presentation of
high-class rogues of the city: Jeffreys, Lovell, Furnese, Sweetapple and Cole,
Clayton, Duncombe, Wills, and Blackbourne. So private are certain references
that they are now completely lost to the general reader, and here the artistry
suffers. In the midst of this succession of portraits of vile citizens, among
the “Tricks and Cheats of Trade,” appears suddenly the passage in which Defoe
attacks slavery, the bartering of baubles for the souls of men (323-332). The
characters of part 2 commit national crimes and so are of a much more serious
order: they include Clito or Milo who cannot now be identified, and many
others, such as Casco, who can be identified, shockingly, with one of the first
families of Hertfordshire. The characters fall into groupings: Tories or High
Churchmen, the military, the clergy, the ladies, and finally the “Beau’s at
Will’s.” In this last group is the couple, dull Flettumasy and Diadora
(1082-1119). They seem to be important, for they reappear in More Reformation
and A Hymn to the Pillory —and as the Fool Husband and Roxana in Defoe’s novel
The Fortunate Mistress .
The
main character scrutinized in More Reformation is Defoe himself. While some
fourteen other characters are drawn, they serve primarily to illustrate a
theory that full names are not needed: the character speaks for itself. The
response to Reformation of Manners, because of the characters, was ferocious;
and in More Reformation, both in the preface and the poem, Defoe sets out to
defend himself and his ideas of satire. The theory he most favors is that the
poet’s intention should be clear. If the name is necessary, then there is “a
Deficiency of Art.” In the preface and again in the poem (648-661) he tells of
a Dutch painter who was not understood because he did not identify the man and
the bear in his painting. The picture, Defoe claims, should be adequate in
itself, just as he was obviously the Booby in Reformation of Manners without
the need of any “Gazet Marks.” As part of the theory he also counsels against
“Ironies” (690). In spite of these comments, the method of character-drawing
does not seem very different from what it had been in earlier poems, even in
those seven characters designed to illustrate the theory. As he describes the
motives for writing satire, he gives the character G——, who from selected
details as well as from the “Key” to The Genuine Works of Mr. Daniel D’Foe
(1721) is known to be Charles Gildon. Such a method of presenting a picture he
uses with most of the characters. However, the method does not work effectively
for characters who are total unknowns and at the same time uninteresting in
their traits. Mainly because of the theory, the characters in More Reformation
are not as fascinating as earlier ones, except for Flettumasy and Diadora
(755-768), who continue as unknowns in real life and yet invite attention.
More
Reformation is mainly autobiographical: Defoe intersperses discoveries about
himself as a poet. He will not, like Marvell, criticize the king (538-539). He
describes how his “Luxuriant Fancysoar’d too high, / And scorch’d its Wings,”
and, like Icarus, fell back into the night (574-577). Somewhat later he calls
himself a fool, and (for the second time) claims that he put his own eyes out
to open the public’s (833). He cites “Rauleigh’s Cautious Rule” about the true
reprover’s being hated. The poem closes with tightly controlled emotion as the
poet expresses his feelings of betrayal by the Dissenters, his bitterness over
a Dissenting minister’s praying for a highwayman and not for the poet, and the
poet’s rejection by “three Petition’d Priests”—in short, his complete abandonment
in Newgate.
A
Hymn to the Pillory represents the final
“stage” of Defoe’s tragedy in 1703. Its form is the hymn in highly irregular
Pindarics, used both for praise or blame, panegyric or satire. The freedom this
form elicited was necessary for the defiant tone that persists throughout the
poem. The hymn is an oration addressed to the pillory that modulates from
triumph to despair and then to realistic acceptance of the situation. The
speaker starts by addressing the pillory, “Hail! Hi’roglyphick State Machin”;
he continues through a long succession of varied metaphorical references to the
pillory: human (brows, face), stage (“modern Scenes,” theater), mountain
(pinnacles, ridge), military (turrets, counterscarp), scaffold (“Great Monster
of the Law”), and numerous others. “Stage” seems to be dominant. Rhetorically
he inquires after the secret of emblematic (“hieroglyphic”) meaning of the
pillory. Because of the self-discoveries represented by these references the
speaker works his way through different interpretations of the pillory
experience and reaches the startling conclusion that the pillory is an absolute
subversion of justice, as is the state.
In
a sense, then, the pillory is itself a major character; its features dominate
the poem and fall into the patterns described. The inquiry and background are
given in an introduction, and there follow sections on “criminals” of the past
(the most “favorable” being John Selden), inept statesmen, “modern Scenes of
Fame” (Vigo, for example), “the Men of Great Employ,” judges and magistrates,
clergy, lawyers, “heroes,” those refusing to take oaths, and high-ranking
culprits robbing the state. Up to this point people are fully named when they
are out of the past and presented as illustrations (Bastwick and Prynne, for
example); and they are designated by initials and blanks when they are
contemporaries or recently alive. Altogether eight persons are named, and eight
are not.
The
poem reaches a climax as the speaker visualizes the great pageant changing its
“Dirty Scene” with ladies appearing on the pillory “steps.” Sappho is there,
and so are “Gay URANIA” (353-360) and the witty French harlot “DIADORA” along
with her brainless Flettumasy (361-374). The lines on Flettumasy, it should be
noted, were added to the “second edition corrected” (1703) as Defoe was quite
aware of the large design of his poem. He has gone from characters inextricably
linked to persons in real life, such as Duncombe’s mistress in The True-Born
Englishman, or Diadora in Reformation of Manners and More Reformation, to the
emblematic characters Urania and Diadora in A Hymn to the Pillory.
The
next poem, still showing the effects of the pillory, but now entirely concerned
with himself as a theme, is An Elegy on the Author of the
True-Born-English-Man. With An Essay on the late Storm. Defoe had been released
from Newgate early in November 1703, and he had agreed to certain severe
restrictions. He had begun writing and editing the Review on February 19, 1704
and would continue this phenomenal task into 1713. Among the penalties he
accepted in 1703, the requirement that he give sureties for good behavior
during the next seven years particularly aggravated him. In short, he might be
charged for any indiscretion he put into print. In Jure Divino he saw the penalty
as tantamount to silence, a “fancy’d Grave,” and explained at the start: “This
alludes to the particular Circumstances of the Poet, who having been bound not
to Write for Seven Years, had made his own Elegy and suppos’d his Satyr to be
Dead.” This larger fiction of himself “metaphorically dead” unfolds with all
sorts of dramatic flourishes in An Elegy. In the preface he describes himself
as “a poor abdicated Author,” his words appearing everywhere in the “scurrilous
Street Ribaldry, and Bear-Garden usage,” in both prose and verse. So full of
anger is he now, he must retaliate in the “allegory” of the poem. In An Elegy
Defoe’s defense of himself is most prominent, particularly when he poses as an
exacerbated writer, now dead and in his grave, rising to strike back at writers
who have insulted his muse, “the Whore of Poetry” (107): “Oppression makes a
Poet; Spleen Endicts” (153). But it is a somewhat chastened muse who introduces
characters in the middle section of the poem. Aside from the “great M[ontagu]”
(Earl of Halifax), the fourteen or so characters are inconsequential, examples
of high-class people who commit unnatural crimes or indulge in drunkenness or
corrupt the army and navy. There is a possible attack on “young S——,” who may
be Jonathan Swift, for debauching the House of God (376-381). Most important in
the poem is the long section of the poet’s self-defense (530-596), wherein he
sees himself as comparable to Lord Rochester’s “Virtuous Miss” who died with
the scandal, but none of the joy, of being a whore (in “Song. Phyllis, be
gentler, I advise”). While the specific targets are the same as in other
satires, they are given a renewed vitality by being made part of a new large
fiction. The theme of self builds up to a strong conclusion in which Defoe
depicts the allegorical self as a fool.
Curiously
joined with An Elegy is his Essay on the Late Storm, which is actually a poem.
Why Defoe calls it an essay is not clear. He does attempt to draw emblematic
meanings out of the natural phenomenon of the storm, which occurred from
November 24 through December 1, 1703. He visualizes the storm as a providential
warning against crimes spread over the “guilty Land.” In the extended passage
on William III he gives the impression of having known the king personally. He
lashes out against cowards in the navy and excoriates the natives’ plundering
the ship Goodwin at Deal. It is also a “High-Church Storm,” blowing the steeple
down upon the church: “th’ Emblem left the Moral in the Lurch” (295-298).
John
Dunton wrote about his friend Defoe in 1706 that “by his printing a Poem every
day, one would think [he] rhimed in his sleep.” Defoe’s output of poetry from
1704 to 1706 was unbelievably large. All the poems, still mixing panegyric and
satire, were “occasional,” each celebrating a public event and surrounding it
with considerable history. Now the poet, rescued from Newgate by Robert Harley
and feeling an immense gratitude toward him and Queen Anne, brought strong
support to the ministry in pamphlets and the Review. His strategy for the way
he uses poems on his travel missions for Harley can be traced in his letters.
Important persons like Charles Montagu appreciated the “pretty” turns of phrase
in A Hymn to Victory, published on August 29, 1704, and The Double Welcome,
published on January 9, 1705; and he transmitted to Defoe a gift of money from
Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. In A Hymn to Victory Defoe was close
to what George Macauley Trevelyan calls the “national mood.” Marlborough’s
victory at Blenheim had shaken all Europe on August 10, 1704: the news had
reached England on August 18. “Ye Heav’ns!” says Defoe in his poem, “What’s God
a-doing in the World!” (645). The dedication to the Queen and the conclusion,
addressed to the Duke of Marlborough, are signed conspicuously with Defoe’s
name. In the poem itself, as he addresses Victory, Defoe finds parallel
triumphs “at Crescy, Agin-Court, and at Poictiers” (82); in the battles of
William III; and in the military successes of Gustavus Adolphus. The satire is
still there, especially directed toward Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester,
Edward Seymour, and Daniel Finch, second Earl of Nottingham. Characters
represent the defeated leader Camille d’Hostun, later Duc de Tallard, as well
as the victors, Marlborough and Prince Eugene.
Just
over four months later Defoe published The Double Welcome honoring the
Duke of Marlborough, who while he was not precisely a Whig was a hero of the
Whigs and whose land victories seemed to offset the sea victories of Sir George
Rooke. In this poem Defoe introduces a new role for the Duke: “Councils at Home
and Conquest from Abroad.” As the poet’s main thrust, and as he would do also
in the prose work The Consolidator (1705), he pushed his idea of the
consolidator. He pleaded with the Duke “to calm our wild Debates” and balance
parties—in short “to Consolidate” (309-316). Near the beginning of the poem he
argues that it is difficult to differentiate villains from heroes, and then
makes another one of his illuminating comments on a sister art: “The Painters
thus by Contraries present / The allegorick Devil like the Saint, / But by some
faint Reflection show their Care / The Cloven Meaning should not fail t’appear”
(50-53). It is not clear how these lines apply to the poem. He urges the use of
a plain style as the poet writes about truth, “‘Tis Subject makes a Poet” (62).
He sees himself as entirely abject, “the meanest Poet of the Train” (165).
Joseph Addison, in his poem The Campaign (published three weeks earlier)
represented everything that Defoe despised in poetry. In presenting the
“character” of Addison (179-198) Defoe is torn apart by envy over a young poet
who never suffered gaols or “Party-Spleen” and by an artistic sense that in a
military poem Addison never described the “how” of battles. Defoe’s poem is
full of statistics and specific places as he narrates Marlborough’s victory at
Blenheim, as if he wishes to demonstrate that difficult, exotic names can be
turned into poetry in a way that “soft Boileau” could not do (209). In particular,
Defoe is incensed at Addison, “our Modern Virgil” who will not write his poem
until he has his pension.
In
a later important part of the poem, Defoe describes the “Pulpit War” at home
that Marlborough is called upon to settle. Another bill to prevent occasional
conformity has been rejected by the House of Lords, and “the strong Bandity of
the Gown” (that is, Church of England ministers) are up in arms against the
Lords (372-379). The occasion gives Defoe the opportunity to draw the
not-unfamiliar characters Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, Luke Milbourne,
and William Bromley.
The
Dyet of Poland, published in July 1705, differs remarkably from
occasional poems like The Double Welcome. In many respects, it is closer to his
earlier ballad-like poems on current parliamentary issues. Unlike them, The
Dyet of Poland is certainly by Defoe. Like them, it shows him in the role of a
keen observer in the House of Commons: he signs himself an “Unconcerned Humble
Servant, Anglipoloski, of Lithuania.” His observations are, first, of men and
personalities—of characters, numerous and well developed, altogether about five
favorably regarded persons mainly in part 1, and twenty-two satirical ones in
both parts. Here he has taken the art of the character farthest along the
trajectory that leads to characters in the novels. He presents the character in
a short compass, taking full advantage of the virtuosity of language, different
styles, contradictions of personality, and above all artistic unities in the
relations of characters to one another. The English observer of Polish affairs,
the mask or persona, cannot be said to be “unconcerned.” His second group of
observations concerns his opposition to three bills to prevent occasional
conformity that were passed in the House of Commons and rejected in the House
of Lords from November 1702 to November 1704. As a part of Anglipoloski’s
fictional world the three bills are collapsed into a single bill. Defoe’s focus
as a caustic and at times cynical observer is on the use of such devices as
“the Tack” to attach the bill to the Land Tax Bill as was done unsuccessfully
in the House of Commons in November 1704. For Defoe to attack certain selected
members of the 134 who voted in favor of the tack was clearly dangerous in view
of his pillorying in 1703. The broad political parallel between England and
Poland is described by Defoe in the preface as being expressed in metaphors and
allegories, and he associates the technique with a similar one he had used in
The Consolidator.
He
worked hard at perfecting The Dyet of Poland, as he explained to Harley in his
letter circa June 1704, in order to bring copies with him on a junket for
Harley into “the Country.” The poem was thus in gestation for some eleven
months. We know about the methods of clandestine distribution of such poems
from Pittis’s Whipping Post (July 10, 1705) and Case of the Church of England’s
Memorial Fairly Stated (1705). It is clear also that Defoe was protected by
Harley from prosecution arising from his vitriolic attacks on high-class Tories
in The Dyet of Poland. The metaphors or allegories are quite transparent. He
makes use of current Polish politics, and the “translations” are easily made by
the reader: Poland (England), Sweden (France), Cossacks (Dissenters), Sobieski
(William III), Augustus (Queen Anne), and so on. He uses “hard Polish Names”
that are immediately recognizable for their English counterparts. The
characters are wide ranging as if the poet were presenting lives in miniature,
not targeted on single quirks of personality but on personality failures over a
long period of time. Defoe has in mind the model of Milton’s Paradise Lost—the
large artistic fiction of parliamentary members as orators or speakers in a
grand debate. His fallen angels are Tackers, Tookites, or Sneakers, and the
debate at his Pandemonium is over the prevention of occasional conformity. The
emphasis in presenting a character is on the oratory, rhetoric, or style of a
Polander. The alignments are balanced in part I with favorable, almost panegyric,
treatments for Taguski (Charles Montagu), Ruski (Edward Russell), Rigatski
(John Somers), and Cujavia (Thomas Tension); and satirical treatments for
Finski (Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham), Lawrensky (Laurence Hyde), old
Seymsky (Sir Edward Seymour), and Rokosky (Sir George Rooke). The oratorical
skill or lack of it in Finski (295-357) and Seymsky (395-492) catches the
attention of Anglipoloski. Defoe’s venom in the section on Finski is both
personal and political, for it was Finch and John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham
and Normanby (called Bucksky in the poem) who harassed Defoe when he was in
Newgate prison awaiting trial and punishment.
Part
2 has a massive display of characters all treated satirically except for
Cavensky (William Cavendish), who sided with the Cossacks (Dissenters), opposed
the “hasty Priest” (Sacheverell), and brought about the defeat of the bill to
prevent occasional conformity. Most of the characters here are presented
satirically, that is unfavorably; most are presented as orators; and most are
informed with a personal venom, as in the case of Tocoski (John Toke). Part 2
also deals primarily with the Tory Polanders’ machinations to pass a bill to
prevent occasional conformity. Certain characters appear at greater length, the
satire vicious, the banter brilliant, and the innuendo teasingly provocative.
Mackreski (Sir Humphrey Mackworth), for instance, becomes the type of the
totally ineffectual orator (570-612): “all Poland waited on his Chair.” In real
life Defoe intensely disliked Mackworth for his opposing views on occasional
conformity and on the poor. Sacharesky (Sacheverell), belonging to a group
“that always dealt in Tropes and Similies absurd” (669), makes use of
provocative language (as he did in his sermon Political Union, 1702, that at
least in part provoked Defoe’s The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, 1702).
While the character Bromsky (William Bromley) is shown by Defoe as having been
full of playful banter and nonsensical statements in Bromley’s book Remarks in
the Grande Tour of France and Italy (1692), the satire has a serious side in
that Harley’s second edition of the Remarks (1705) highlighted Bromley’s
leanings toward Jacobitism and Catholicism, and thus helped bring about
Bromley’s defeat for the position of speaker in the House of Commons. Defoe
would dredge up the Remarks again in the broadside A Declaration without Doors
(1705). The Bromsky character is severely satirical since this was the man who
proclaimed himself the “Father of the Bill” (837). For Meersky (Sir Thomas
Meres), a Sneaker yet anti-Dissenter, Defoe uses Lord Rochester’s comparison of
him to “Jouler the Hound, a Wiser Beast than he” (898), taken from A Satyr
Against Reason and Mankind (1679).
In
The Dyet of Poland Defoe seems to have recognized, as he did also in The
Consolidator, the emblematic function of character; it is this recognition that
advances him closer to the novel as a distinct form of literary discourse.
Referring to Tackers and Tookites as being the same, Defoe says in The Dyet:
“The Emblematick Title’s eas’ly known, / Their Coat of Arms stands up in Warsaw
Town” (814-815). Elsewhere in the poem he uses heraldry or a coat of arms to
sum up the essence of a character. Bucksky is one of the most brilliantly
realized characters (1023-1049) this side of Pope’s Dunciad partly because it
utilizes this emblematic function. About Bucksky’s home, the poet says, “the
Emblematic sides Describe his Grace, / This Double Front, and that a Double
Face.” Bucksky is not only like Buckingham House (built in 1703), he is the
house. The larger scope of the characterization gets at Bucksky’s impotence,
which will not allow him to give his mistress what she most desires; it gets at
his greed and corruptibility; and the Latin mottoes on his conspicuously lavish
house, such as “Laetentur Lares” (the household gods delight in such a
situation) insinuate that he is also irreligious. This is the man who, with
Lord Nottingham, visited Defoe in Newgate and thus earned the wittily expressed
hatred here. The character Bucksky shows Defoe’s balance of personal venom and
genuine artistry.
In
spite of the considerable negativism of The Dyet of Poland, the poem strikes
more positive notes as it draws to a conclusion. Not only does the poem
dramatize in Miltonic terms the defeat of the bill to prevent occasional
conformity, it celebrates the purging by Augustus (Queen Anne) of his house,
meaning the removal from office of the Tory Lord Nottingham and others. More
important, the poem looks forward with considerable affirmation to the joint
leadership of Casimir (Sidney Godolphin) as lord treasurer and the Dyet’s
Marshal (Harley) as secretary of state. Henceforth, these two leaders would
bring peace to the land and contentment to the people, including the Cossacks.
However, the poem does not end with unmitigated affirmation. The conclusion, as
generally happens with Defoe, has more to say about Poland’s being saved from
knaves who are also fools.
During
Defoe’s second tour for Harley to bolster his candidates for the general
election to parliament, the anonymous poem A Declaration without Doors was
published on October 25, 1705. It was timed to appear exactly on the opening
day of the new parliament and was concerned entirely with the candidacy of the
high-flying William Bromley for the position of speaker in the House of
Commons. The ballad-like poem is probably but not certainly the work of Defoe
on the basis of internal evidence (see volume 7 of Poems on Affairs of State,
1975). A Declaration, like The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, is all irony.
Bromley comes forward and delivers twenty stanzas of his “declaration” for the
position of speaker. He brags of all the things he will do for High Church if
he is elected to the position. Parts of the poem are richly humorous and
deserve an appreciative reading.
A
Hymn to Peace, published on January 8, 1706, however is quite different. For
the most part it is made up of the near-fatal philosophizing that one finds in
Jure Divino, on the theme of “Peace and Union” arising from the joint address
of the two houses of parliament to Queen Anne shortly before December 6, 1705.
Peace, in the poem, is the inner contentment of the poet in this time of
political harmony as the treasurer Godolphin puts together a Whig alliance.
Rarely does A Hymn to Peace come alive, except perhaps in the long account of
“sleepy Momus” (520-630), who appoints only scandalous justices of the peace
all over England.
More
than any other poem Jure Divino: A Satyr. In Twelve Books reveals and reflects
the mind of Defoe. Published on July 18, 1706, the satire made its appearance
ostentatiously, in the full pride of authorship, with an elegant portrait
engraved by Michael Van der Gucht as a frontispiece, with the poet’s motto
“Laudatur et Alget” (honesty is praised, yet starves) with a dedication to Lady
Reason, and with verses “To the Author” by A. O. The title page announced the
work to be by “The Author of The True-Born-Englishman.” Jure Divino has been
described variously by critics or it has been neglected. Only recently is Jure
Divino coming into its own as representing the ideological center of Defoe’s
thought, the breadth of his reading, and the complexity of his mind. It is
especially impressive for its political theory.
In
the preface Defoe tells of writing the poem “under the heaviest Weight of
intolerable Pressures,” mostly while he was in prison. He delayed the
publication while parliament was in session for a year. He relied upon agents
and booksellers in cities like Shrewsbury and Norwich for subscriptions to the
book, and he found that the delay caused subscriptions to slump. In letters to
friends he constantly pushed subscriptions and in the Review announced
publication dates and postponements. A piracy of the poem may have appeared
even before its official publication. Years later Charles Gildon, in The Life
and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D—De F—(1719), jokingly made Robinson
Crusoe boast that Defoe earned five hundred pounds by writing Jure Divino in
about three weeks “out of this Prolifick Head.” Nevertheless, at this time,
Defoe was pulling himself out of the bankruptcy and debt the pillory had
brought upon him; he was now doing “intelligence” work for Harley; and he
seemed to find more time for reading and writing in the frantic pace of his life.
His
aim in Jure Divino was to write in defense of “the common Right.” He starts the
preface by saying that he published this work as “the World seem’d to be going
mad a second Time with the Error of Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance.” In
the growth of Jacobitism and in a strengthened High Church Tory party Defoe
sensed a crisis. The threat was against his own strong belief in monarchy
without any divine right and only with the consent of the people as expressed
through parliament. Tyrants would therefore be the exact opposites of the
limited monarch he had in mind. His larger fiction in Jure Divino is to
challenge Satyr to trace the history of tyrants right up to the present, to see
tyranny as “the Tincture” in the blood as created in man by the devil, as he
says in the introduction, and to demonstrate that tyranny is inextricably
joined with crime and vice. It is quite a dramatic fiction Defoe announces here
and then uses to organize the twelve books of his epic. Jure Divino has thus
the definite structure and unity of the epic. For it does hold the reader
through its grand sweep chronologically of vicious tyrants and violent images
of lust, murder , and rape, as for instance in the case of the character
Sardanapalus (book 8). Defoe has a strong political point about freedom—he even
sings a hymn to Liberty in book 5. He views Liberty or emergent Reason as
marking the end of tyranny’s progress or at least an interruption. He concludes
the epic, which is dedicated to Reason (who therefore may be seen as the epic’s
hero), on a note of vigorous optimism as both William III and Queen Anne
represent forces that doom tyranny.
Jure
Divino stands out also for its large amount of critical theory about his poetry
and art in general. Defoe is especially self-conscious about how poetry is
written and observes, for instance (in the preface), that when the poetry is
overburdened with argument, he “sacrific’d the Poet to the Reasoning Stile” and
used historical notes where the poetry was not “explicit” enough, as Abraham
Cowley had done in Davideis (1668). By “Reasoning Stile” Defoe has in mind “the
legislative style” Dryden defined in the preface to Religio Laici (1682) as
being apt for instruction. But Defoe also has in mind Milton’s Paradise Lost,
which he mentions frequently and admiringly as it were his model for
argumentative verse and “the best Ideas of the Matter of Original Crime, of any
Thing put into Words in our Language” (book 7). He continues the exploration of
poetry in comparison to painting or the limner’s art, stressing the idea that
the graphic artist may do the face, but Satyr does the “character” (books 2 and
12). Not infrequently in Jure Divino, Defoe will introduce an extended story or
character through what he calls a “digression,” and at the same time he
continues the progress of his narrative as he would do in A Journal of the
Plague Year (1722) and other books. In Jure Divino he also develops the art of
integrating adventure and ideology. No better example may be found than the
pattern of thought that brings together his ideas of “property,” patriarchal
theory, consent of the governed, and sovereignty. With the digression on man’s
compulsion to go to war and with the story of the three men left upon the
island of Burmudas—“but these Three Kings fell out about Property” (book
7)—Defoe already has a glimpse in 1706 of Crusoe’s island in the distance.
Defoe
totally immersed himself in his next mission for Harley. On September 13, 1706
Defoe took horse to Edinburgh, arrived in October, and returned to England on
December 31, 1707. He was under Harley’s instructions (these seemed always to
be arriving late or not at all). It was a lonely, difficult, and dangerous time
for Defoe. His assignment was to enter in among the Scots, participate at all
levels of society, and report back to Harley on the attitudes of the Scots
toward the proposed union between the two countries. Defoe enjoyed playing
different roles, assuming half-true disguises, and endlessly improvising.
His
job was also to influence and change public opinions about the union. He did
this through numerous prose pamphlets and broadsides, the Edinburgh edition of
the Review, and a few remarkably varied poems. The first of these, The Vision
(1706), survives in a holograph manuscript that tells us a great deal about
Defoe’s method of composing, the relationship of one of his manuscripts to the
printed texts, and the swift communication between Edinburgh and London in
these hectic days of negotiation. John Hamilton, Lord Belhaven, was the
principal actor in the verbal altercation that took place on November 2, 1706,
when the Scots parliament was debating the article of incorporating union. He
delivered a lengthy harangue against the union that was filled with historical
parallels and classical allusions. The Jacobite George Lockhart, in his Memoirs
(1714), suggests that Belhaven “acted a double part.” So effective was
Belhaven’s speech, the vote on the article was delayed over the weekend, and
early in the following week Defoe’s “Vision” was circulating in manuscript and
had a devastating effect on Lord Belhaven’s argument. In The History of the
Union (1709) Defoe reported the entire incident including the Earl of
Marchmont’s reply to Belhaven: “Behold he dream’d, but, lo! when he awoke, he
found it was a Dream.” In The Vision Defoe brings the art of lampoon to
perfection. The entire poem, like A Declaration without Doors, is irony,
without any revealing of the poet’s real attitude toward the union. All the
histrionics of Belhaven’s original speech are there: “But [he] Let Drop a Few
Hypocriticall Teares / So The Crocodile weeps on The Carcass he Tares”
(107-108). And the poem ends with a reminder by the Lord in the North that the
betrayal going on in parliament is not very different from Brutus’s of Caesar.
Almost immediately after the printed version of The Vision appeared, Lord
Belhaven followed with A Scots Answer, and Defoe retaliated with the broadside
A Reply to the Scots Answer, to the British Vision—entirely focused on
Belhaven’s language and style in a manner reminiscent of Dryden’s
“MacFlecknoe.”
The
poems that followed are at the heart of Defoe’s participation in the act of
union approved on May 1, 1707. Of the two major poems, Caledonia, A Poem In
Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation had certain embellishments in the
Edinburgh edition published in early December 1706: a license from the duke of
Queensberry (printed on the verso of the title page) prohibiting any piracy of
the poem and a dedication to the duke himself. Publication, as with Jure
Divino, was by subscription. A few weeks later the poem was issued in London.
In contrast to A Scots Poem: Or A New-years Gift, From a Native Of The
Universe, To His Fellow-Animals in Albania (1707), the earlier poem
deliberately avoids any direct advocacy of the union and deals with the theme
of “improvements” for Scotland by a recommitment of national energies.
Caledonia is a panegyric of a nation. Character, says Defoe in the preface, is
not the aim of his book, but “a Circumstance like the finishing Strokes of a
Fine Picture added to grace the Work: The principal Design was the Climate,
Nation, Seas, Trade, Lands, Improvements and Temper of Scotland and its
People.”
Patterns
In
Defoe's writings, especially in his fiction, are traits that can be seen across
his works. Defoe was well known for his didacticism, with most of his works
aiming to convey a message of some kind to the readers (typically a moral one,
stemming from his religious background). Connected to Defoe's didacticism is
his use of the genre of spiritual autobiography, particularly in Robinson
Crusoe. Another common feature of Defoe's fictional works is that he claimed
them to be the true stories of their subjects.
Attribution
and de-attribution
Defoe
is known to have used at least 198 pen names. It was a very common practice in
eighteenth-century novel publishing to initially publish works under a pen
name, with most other authors at the time publishing their works anonymously.
As a result of the anonymous ways in which most of his works were published, it
has been a challenge for scholars over the years to properly credit Defoe for
all of the works that he wrote in his lifetime. If counting only works that
Defoe published under his own name, or his known pen name "the author of
the True-Born Englishman," there would be about 75 works that could be
attributed to him.
Beyond
these 75 works, scholars have used a variety of strategies to determine what
other works should be attributed to Defoe. Writer George Chalmers was the first
to begin the work of attributing anonymously published works to Defoe. In
History of the Union, he created an expanded list with over a hundred titles
that he attributed to Defoe, alongside twenty additional works that he
designated as "Books which are supposed to be De Foe's." Chalmers
included works in his canon of Defoe that were particularly in line with his
style and way of thinking, and ultimately attributed 174 works to Defoe. Many
of the attributions of Defoe’s novels came long after his death. Notably, Moll
Flanders and Roxana were published anonymously for over fifty years until
Francis Noble named Daniel Defoe on their title pages in edition publication in
1775 and 1774.
Biographer
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens built upon this canon, also relying on what they
believed could be Defoe's work, without a means to be absolutely certain. In
the Cambridge History of English Literature, the section on Defoe by author
William P. Trent attributes 370 works to Defoe. J.R. Moore generated the
largest list of Defoe's work, with approximately five hundred and fifty works
that he attributed to Defoe.
Death
Defoe
died on 24 April 1731, probably while in hiding from his creditors. He was
often in debtors' prison. The cause of his death was labelled as lethargy, but
he probably experienced a stroke. He was interred in Bunhill Fields (today
Bunhill Fields Burial and Gardens), just outside the medieval boundaries of the
City of London, in what is now the Borough of Islington, where a monument was
erected to his memory in 1870. A street in the Bronx, New York is named in his
honour (De Foe Place).
Legacy
A
man of many talents and author of an extraordinary range and number of works,
Defoe remains in many ways an enigmatic figure. A man who made many enemies, he
has been accused of double-dealing, of dishonest or equivocal conduct, of
venality. Certainly in politics he served in turn both Tory and Whig; he acted
as a secret agent for the Tories and later served the Whigs by “infiltrating”
extremist Tory journals and toning them down. But Defoe always claimed that the
end justified the means, and a more sympathetic view may see him as what he
always professed to be, an unswerving champion of moderation. At the age of 59
Defoe embarked on what was virtually a new career, producing in Robinson Crusoe
the first of a remarkable series of novels and other fictional writings that
resulted in his being called the father of the English novel.
Defoe’s
last years were clouded by legal controversies over allegedly unpaid bonds
dating back a generation, and it is thought that he died in hiding from his
creditors. His character Moll Flanders, born in Newgate Prison, speaks of
poverty as “a frightful spectre,” and it is a theme of many of his books.
Selected
works
Novels
The
Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon:
Translated from the Lunar Language (1705)
Robinson
Crusoe (1719) – originally published in two volumes:
The
Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner:
Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years [...]
The
Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Being the Second and Last Part of His
Life [...]
Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (1720)
Captain Singleton (1720)
Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720)
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
Colonel Jack (1722)
Moll Flanders (1722)
Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724)
The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts (1726)
Nonfiction
An Essay Upon Projects (1697) – subsections of the
text include: "The History of Projects," "Of Projectors,"
"Of Banks," "Of the Highways," "Of Assurances,"
"Of Friendly Societies," "The Proposal is for a Pension
Office," "Of Wagering," "Of Fools," "A
Charity-Lottery," "Of Bankrupts," "Of Academies" (including
a section proposing an academy for women), "Of a Court Merchant," and
"Of Seamen."
The Storm (1704) – describes the worst storm ever to
hit Britain in recorded times. Includes eyewitness accounts.
Atlantis Major (1711)
The Family Instructor (1715)
Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1717)
The History of
the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard (1724) – describing Sheppard's life of
crime and concluding with the miraculous escapes from prison for which he had
become a public sensation.
A Narrative of All The Robberies, Escapes, &c. of
John Sheppard (1724) – written by or taken from Sheppard himself in the
condemned cell before he was hanged for theft, apparently by way of conclusion
to the Defoe work. According to the Introduction to Volume 16 of the works of
Defoe published by J M Dent in 1895, Sheppard handed the manuscript to the
publisher Applebee from the prisoners' cart as he was taken away to be hanged.
It included a correction of a factual detail and an explanation of how his
escapes from prison were achieved.
A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain,
divided into circuits or journies (1724–1727)
A New Voyage Round the World (1724)
The Political History of the Devil (1726)
The Complete English Tradesman (1726)
A treatise concerning the use and abuse of the
marriage bed... (1727)
A Plan of the English Commerce (1728) – describes how
the English woolen textile industrial base was developed by protectionist
policies by Tudor monarchs, especially by Henry VII of England and Elizabeth I,
including such policies as high tariffs on the importation of finished woolen
goods, high taxes on raw wool leaving England, bringing in artisans skilled in
wool textile manufacturing from the Low Countries, selective government-granted
monopoly rights, and government-sponsored industrial espionage.
Pamphlets or essays in prose
The Poor Man's Plea (1698)
The History of the Kentish Petition (1701)
The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702)
The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd (1704)
Giving Alms No Charity, and Employing the Poor (1704)
The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706)
An Appeal to Honour and Justice, Tho' it be of his
Worst Enemies, by Daniel Defoe, Being a True Account of His Conduct in Publick
Affairs (1715)
A Vindication of the Press: Or, An Essay on the Usefulness
of Writing, on Criticism, and the Qualification of Authors (1718)
Every-body's Business, Is No-body's Business (1725)
The Protestant Monastery (1726)
Parochial Tyranny (1727)
Augusta Triumphans (1728)
Second Thoughts are Best (1729)
An Essay Upon Literature (1726)
Mere Nature Delineated (1726)
Conjugal Lewdness (1727) – Anti-Contraception Essay
Pamphlets or essays in verse
The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1701)
Hymn to the Pillory (1703)
An Essay on the Late Storm (1704)
Some contested works attributed to Defoe
A Friendly Epistle by way of reproof from one of the
people called Quakers, to T. B., a dealer in many words (1715).
The King of Pirates (1719) – purporting to be an
account of the pirate Henry Avery.
The Pirate Gow (1725) – an account of John Gow.
A General History
of the Pyrates (1724, 1725, 1726, 1828) – published in two volumes by Charles
Rivington, who had a shop near St. Paul's Cathedral, London. Published under the name of
Captain Charles Johnson, it sold in many editions.
Captain Carleton's Memoirs of an English Officer
(1728).
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