The Shortest Way with Defoe

Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel

Michael B. Prince

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813943664
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe contends that Robinson Crusoe contains a secret satire, written against one person, that has gone undetected for 300 years. By locating Defoe's nemesis and discovering what he represented and how Defoe fought him, Michael Prince's book opens the way to a new account of Defoe's emergence as a novelist.

The book begins with Defoe's conviction for seditious libel for penning a pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702). A question of biography segues into questions of theology and intellectual history and of formal analysis; these questions in turn require close attention to the early reception of Defoe's works, especially by those who hated or suspected him. Prince aims to recover the way of reading Defoe that his enemies considered accurate. Thus, the book rethinks the positions represented in Defoe's ambiguous alternation and mimicking of narrative and editorial voices in his tracts, proto-novels, and novels.

By examining Defoe's early publications alongside Robinson Crusoe, Prince shows that Defoe traveled through nonrealist, nonhistorical genres on the way to discovering the form of prose fiction we now call the novel. Moreover, a climate (or figure) of extreme religious intolerance and political persecution required Defoe always to seek refuge in literary disguise. And, religious convictions aside, Defoe's practice as a writer found him inhabiting forms known for their covert deism.

1

Lessons of the Pillory

Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 1702

The Puzzle and a Clue

In the space of about two decades, the son of a candlemaker transforms himself from a brick merchant and political pamphleteer, “a Man of great Rashness and Impudence,” as one enemy called him, “a mean Merceneries Prostitute, a State Mountebank, an Hackney Tool, a Scandalous Pen, a Foul-Mouthed Mongrel, an Author who writes for Bread, and Lives by Defamation,” into an artist who launched the English novel.1 How did this happen? The oddity of the situation has led reputable scholars to call Robinson Crusoe an accident.2 Assuming it was not a freak occurrence, how are we to explain Defoe’s remarkable breakthrough?

Many have been the attempts to solve this puzzle, and any new effort must rely on the work of preceding generations of biographers, editors, and literary historians. However, the sheer multiplicity of historical information—deattributions of the voluminous Defoe canon notwithstanding—has posed a great challenge, which Paula Backscheider acknowledges in her exasperated chapter titles “Four Hundred Thousand Words” and “Six Hundred Thousand Words.”3 It is not that Defoe left too few clues; he left too many. A short way from early to late, from bankrupt merchant and topical satirist to the immortal author of Robinson Crusoe, has eluded us.

Yet one clue, ignored until now, takes us immediately to the angry heart of the matter. The year is 1720, the triumph of Robinson Crusoe secure. Defoe nevertheless takes what appears to be a parting shot at someone he despises. His Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe begins with the narrator’s assurance that “The Fable is always made for the Moral, not the Moral for the Fable.”4 One might expect Crusoe to say next what the moral is and how the fable serves it. No such luck. Instead, the narrator adds the following paragraphs, which I quote here in full and refer to throughout this investigation:

I have heard, that the envious and ill-disposed Part of the World have rais’d some Objections against the two first Volumes, on Pretence, for want of a better Reason; That (as they say) the Story is feign’d, that the Names are borrow’d, and that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place, or Circumstances in any Mans Life; that it is all form’d and embellish’d by Invention to impose upon the World.

I Robinson Crusoe, being at this Time in perfect and sound Mind and Memory, Thanks be to God therefore; do hereby declare, their Objection is an Invention scandalous in Design, and false in Fact; and do affirm, that the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical; and that it is the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexampled Misfortunes, and of a Variety not to be met with in the World, sincerely adapted to, and intended for the common Good of Mankind, and designed at first, as it is now farther apply’d, to the most serious Uses possible.

Farther, that there is a Man alive, and well known too, the Actions of whose Life are the just Subject of these Volumes, and to whom all or most Part of the Story most directly alludes; this may be depended upon for Truth, and to this I set my Name.

The famous History of Don Quixot, a Work which thousands read with Pleasure, to one that knows the Meaning of it, was an emblematic History of, and a just Satyr upon, the Duke de Medina Sidonia; a person very remarkable at that time in Spain: To those who knew the Original, the Figures were lively and easily discovered themselves, as they are also here, and the Images were just; and therefore, when a malicious, but foolish Writer, in the abundance of his Gall, spoke of the Quixotism of R. Crusoe, as he called it, he shewed evidently, that he knew nothing of what he said; and perhaps will be a little startled, when I shall tell him that what he meant for a Satyr, was the greatest of Panegyricks.5

On the face of it, the passage might signal the autobiographical nature of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is Defoe in disguise. These lines have also sent scholars searching for historical individuals—Selkirks and Dampiers—who could have served as the real-life models for Defoe’s story of a twenty-eight year castaway who lived to write about it. The lines also appear to affirm the value of historical truth through the odd expedient of a fictional character swearing an oath by his fictional name. None of this accounts for what comes next: a seeming non sequitur to Don Quixote and its reputation as a disguised satire, written against one man, the Duke de Medina Sidonia, the commander of the Spanish Armada at the time of its destruction.6

If one were to paraphrase the final paragraph, it might run something like this: a few specialists know that Don Quixote was a satire aimed at one man, but that did not keep Cervantes from writing the book in such a way that thousands would read it with pleasure even without knowing the historical key. There is a malicious critic out there whom I shall not name.7 This scoundrel dares to suggest that my book, Robinson Crusoe, is quixotic in the same way. This critic is a fool, and I reject, vehemently, any suggestion, such as the one I am not now making, that Robinson Crusoe is a satire targeting one person. Even granting the case, since “the Figures [in Don Quixote] were lively and easily discovered themselves, as they are also here [in Robinson Crusoe],” this idiot will be startled to find that his criticism is my praise, because satire has been transformed, by the alchemy of genius, into panegyric—which can be said of both books, Cervantes’s and mine.

The moment is tantalizing. Is Defoe prepared to identify this individual, this English Duke de Medina Sidonia, and thereby reveal the human forces that motivated his masterpiece? Of course not. This final insult, Robinson Crusoe, will be all the more final for being deeply disguised—as popular entertainment, “a Work which thousands read with Pleasure, to one that knows the Meaning of it.” Having raised the possibility of a nemesis, Defoe’s narrator promptly drops the subject: “Without letting the Reader into a nearer Explication of the Matter, I proceed to let him know, that the happy Deductions I have employ’d myself to make from all the Circumstances of my Story, will abundantly make him amends for his not having the Emblem explained by the Original.”8 Defoe could have explained the emblem (Robinson Crusoe) by the original (naming his enemy and all he represents), but he omits any “nearer Explication of the Matter.” Instead, we get a consolation prize, those “amends” or “happy Deductions . . . from all the Circumstances of my Story” that so annoy modern readers and, judging from this passage, served even at the time as a smokescreen for something else. Defoe has Crusoe nearly admit that those moral bromides are meant to distract the reader from motives the author wishes to keep secret.

Defoe’s evasions worked. Robinson Crusoe does not read as satire, and no one has looked to the war that broke out between Defoe and this unnamed adversary for a biographical, intellectual, and aesthetic account of the genesis of the novel.9 He covered his tracks so well that the whole notion of a personal explanation seems outlandish. Yet Defoe points the way to a reading of Robinson Crusoe as an act of literary revenge. The question then becomes: to whom does Defoe steadfastly not refer when he invites comparison between Cervantes’s nemesis and his own? Since nothing so petty as a personal grudge could have issued in a work as great as Robinson Crusoe, how did this confrontation operate on Defoe to produce a work of lasting interest not just to this or that nation or religion or race, but, apparently, to the whole world? Three hundred years have passed since Defoe added this postscript comparing Robinson Crusoe to Don Quixote. It is time to test the hypothesis that for once he was telling something like the truth: find my nemesis, Defoe suggests; figure out what he meant to me, and what I did to him; and by that means you will arrive at the origin and meaning of Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe’s Nemesis

In search of Defoe’s nemesis it is safe to assume he would have had something to do with the greatest calamity in a calamity-filled life. Sure enough, we find this enemy who became more than an enemy in the shadow of the pillory (see fig. 1). Turn therefore from the triumph of 1720 to the dark winter and spring months of 1702–1703, the famous episode of “the pillory’d Author” that finds Defoe fleeing London, Queen Anne’s exorbitant bounty on his head; captured and incarcerated in Newgate Prison; questioned as to motive and accomplices; put on trial for seditious libel (the original charge was treason, punishable by death); and sentenced, despite his ill-advised guilty plea, to the ignominy and danger of being pilloried in three different parts of London, as well to a potentially interminable jail sentence, a hefty fine that bankrupted him and cost him his brick- and tile-making factory—with the addition of a paid surety for seven years’ good behavior—all for publishing, on December 1, 1702, a thirty-page pamphlet titled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.10

Historians and biographers find this chapter of Defoe’s life irresistible, as did Defoe himself. The pillory was a turning point, for this was the moment, Backscheider writes, that Defoe the speculative businessman and polemicist became Defoe the man of letters: “By the time Defoe stood in the pillory, everyone knew Defoe and his story. He had gone from Luttrell’s unknown ‘La Foe’ to ‘Daniel Foe, author.’”11 “Defoe was an author,” observes John Richetti, “whose life was changed by one piece of writing.”12 “It may be allowed,” writes Maximillian Novak, “that Defoe felt deeply enough the anguish of these times in prison to have felt some imaginative empathy with Crusoe’s island experience.”13 John Robert Moore quotes E. M. Forster to the effect that “something occurred to him in prison, and out of its vague, powerful emotion Moll and Roxana are born.”14 Moore poses a rhetorical question to which he assumes the answer is no: “If Defoe had continued to flourish as a pantile manufacturer, and if he had become a great force in politics, would he have been likely to write Robinson Crusoe?”15 These are tremendous claims. They suggest a direct line from The Shortest Way with the Dissenters to Robinson Crusoe. Only no one has filled in the historical basis for this scholarly intuition. It has been left at Forster’s “vague, powerful emotion.”

Figure 1. Defoe in the pillory. From George Bickham, The Whig’s Medley, 1711. (Courtesy of Harvard University, Houghton Library)

Returning to the scene of Defoe’s crime, we discover something odd. Some basic questions remain unanswered and even unasked. Why did Defoe take such a huge risk with his Shortest Way with the Dissenters?16 Explanations range from the animal (he had irrepressible energy and just could not help himself) to the political (he sought to influence parliamentary deliberations on a bill hostile to the dissenters). We also have the non-explanation that the whole thing was a mistake: Defoe blundered badly and almost got himself killed.17 Who was the immediate target of The Shortest Way? Scholarly consensus coheres around one suspect, a fiery preacher named Henry Sacheverell, but that solution ignores obvious clues pointing to a more profound and consequential enemy. Did Defoe act alone, or, despite his repeated denials, did he h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Lessons of the Pillory: Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 1702
• 2. Defoe’s Lunar Voyage: The Consolidator, 1705
• 3. Cosmopolitan Defoe: A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris, 1718
• 4. Defoe’s Deist Masterpiece: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719
• 5. Defoe, Deism, and the Novel: Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1720
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index