Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World: The Stoke Newington Edition

By Daniel Dafoe, Maximillian E. Novak, Manuel Schonhorn and 2 more

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684483327

Daniel Dafoe

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was an English author, journalist, merchant and secret agent. His career in business was varied, with substantial success countered by enough debt to warrant his arrest. Political pamphleteering also landed Defoe in prison but, in a novelistic turn of events, an Earl helped free him on the condition that he become an intelligence agent. The author wrote widely on many topics, including politics, travel, and proper manners, but his novels, especially Robinson Crusoe, remain his best remembered work.

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Cover: Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, The Stoke Newington Edition by Daniel Defoe, Maximillian E . Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhorn

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World

Figure 1. Map of Crusoe’s Island. Frontispiece to the first edition, 1720. Courtesy of William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA.

¹

1. Illustration: The large illustration is an attempt to locate and depict the various adventures experienced by Crusoe during his time on the island as well as the narrative of those left behind on the island as narrated in The Farther Adventures (1719). In the middle is a representation of the bower with the bird sounding out "poor Robin Cruso" in a cartoon bubble. At the bottom, Robinson Crusoe and Friday are shown with the English Captain whose ship will be recaptured and provide the means for leaving the island. The upper right depicts the wicker work house constructed by the English sailors. In the upper part toward the middle is the battle between the settlers and the cannibals after they have set fire to the houses. At the bottom, toward the left, is Friday’s rescue of his father, while also on the left are various scenes involving the cannibals feasting around their fire and murdering a victim. The feast scene toward the upper left has various body parts lying about the periphery of the dancers, including a leg, some arms, and a round object that is probably a head. The ladder placed against a hill between the scenes depicting the meeting with the English Captain and Crusoe’s bower probably indicates the location of the enclosure where Crusoe had his cave.

The print is signed, Clark & Pine sc. 1719, the same John Clark (fl. 1710–1720) and John Pine (1690–1756) who engraved the frontispiece for The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures. The date of the engraving, as well as the subject matter, opens the possibility that it may originally have been intended for The Farther Adventures either accompanying the map of the globe tracing Crusoe’s travels that was used in that volume or as a substitute illustration.

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World

The Stoke Newington Edition

BY

DANIEL DEFOE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK

IRVING N. ROTHMAN

MANUEL SCHONHORN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731, author. | Novak, Maximillian E., editor. | Rothman, Irving N., 1935– editor. | Schonhorn, Manuel, editor.

Title: Serious reflections during the life and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his vision of the angelick world / by Daniel Defoe; with an introduction and notes by Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhorn.

Description: The Stoke Newington Edition. | Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016204 | ISBN 9781684483303 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684483310 (cloth) | ISBN 9781684483327 (epub) | ISBN 9781684483334 (mobi) | ISBN 9781684483341 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Crusoe, Robinson (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | LCGFT: Action and adventure fiction.

Classification: LCC PR3404 .S47 2022 | DDC 823/.4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016204

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World was first published in 1720 by William Taylor.

Introduction to this edition and scholarly apparatus copyright © 2022 by Bucknell University Press

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Figure 2. Title page of first edition, 1720. Courtesy of William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA.

Contents

Contributors

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World

Robinson Crusoe’s Preface

Publisher’s Introduction

1 Of SOLITUDE

2 An Essay upon HONESTY

3 OF THEImmorality ofCONVERSATION, ANDThe VulgarERRORSof Behaviour

4 AnESSAYon the present State ofRELIGIONin the World

5 Of listning to the Voice ofPROVIDENCE

6 Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World

A Vision of the Angelick World

Notifications of Books Printed and Sold

Bibliographic Descriptions

List of Editorial Emendations

Selected Bibliography

About the Editors

Index

Contributors

KIT KINCADE, Indiana State University

MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK, University of California, Los Angeles

JOHN G. PETERS, University of North Texas

IRVING N. ROTHMAN, University of Houston

MANUEL SCHONHORN, Southern Illinois University

Illustrations

1. Map of Crusoe’s Island. Frontispiece to the first edition, 1720.

2. Facsimile title page. First edition, 1720.

3. Crusoe among the Planets. Frontispiece to the French translation, 1721.

Acknowledgments

This edition, as with other volumes of the Robinson Crusoe trilogy, has had the generous support of the University of Houston Martha Gano Houstoun Foundation in the Department of English and the Small Grant fund of the University of Houston. This funding has supported the effort of students involved in the collation of separate editions.

We are appreciative of the following students who provided proofreading and textual assistance: Meredith Allison, Jordan Bailey, Pritty Bhalla, Nicholas Cenegy, Mignette Dorsey, Albert Kidd, Emilie Koenig, Samantha Lay, Bruce Martin, Laura Marzola, Matthew McKinney, and Charles Miles. Matthew C. Poston received a Provost’s University Research Fellowship (PURF) in Fall 2002 to conduct a study of philosophy in Serious Reflections, with his findings being a contribution to the Line Notes.

We are also grateful for the research of Dr. Irene Beesemeyer and for the thorough work of Dr. Anthony W. Lee, who was responsible for a careful reading and correction of all three of the Crusoe volumes.

Introduction

1

Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World was published by William Taylor around 6 August 1720 with the entry in the Stationer’s Register dated 3 August 1720.¹ The volume was announced in The St James’s Evening Post and The Post Boy in their issues of 4–6 August. It went through only one edition and was seldom reprinted. Nevertheless, if it lacks the genius of the earlier volumes, Serious Reflections is not without interest in its own right and as a commentary on the earlier volumes. In his biography of Defoe, William Lee began by lamenting the lack of a full autobiography by Defoe and solemnly accepted Defoe’s comment in Serious Reflections, In a Word, there is not a Circumstance in the imaginary Story, but has its just allusion to a real Story, and Chimes Part for Part, and Step for Step with the inimitable ‘Life of Robinson Crusoe,’ ² as evidence that The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures might be read as an emblematic autobiography.³ One of the explanations Lee gives for Defoe’s failure to write a full autobiography is that with the noble reticence of a true patriot, he refused to divulge the secrets of his relationship with William III.⁴ Even the greatest admirer of Defoe has to cringe at such hero worship. Although Serious Reflections possesses some biographical interest, its chief importance lies in providing the reader with an opportunity to hear Defoe talk on some of his favorite subjects, including the first two volumes of Robinson Crusoe.

Whereas it is clear that Defoe was already writing The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe when the first volume was published, the occasion for Serious Reflections is less transparent. The year of its publication, 1720, was one of heightened economic activity leading up to the South Sea Bubble and its eventual collapse. Although F. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens have raised doubts about some of the tracts attributed to him by John Robert Moore and others for this year, they agree with the attribution of several economic tracts written at this time.⁵ As someone who remained a projector throughout his life, Defoe was clearly very much involved with the excitement caused by the many projects being proposed at this time. His Anatomy of Exchange Alley had appeared in 1719, and in his journal, The Manufacturer (1719–1720), he took the side of the weavers against the East India Company and its importation of calicoes. In The Chimera (1720 [for 1719]), he had glanced skeptically (but with considerable curiosity) at the experiments in paper money being conducted by John Law in France. And in his Commentator (1720), he engaged in a defense of the soundness of the South Sea Company compared to the Mississippi Company in France, which indeed collapsed during the run of this journal. Economic matters, then, seemed very much in the air during the composition of Serious Reflections, yet economics is a subject that plays a minor role in this work.

In addition, Defoe had published two major fictions: Memoirs of a Cavalier in May 1720 and The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton in June 1720. It is also highly likely that he was responsible for the Continuation of The History of the Wars, of His Late Majesty Charles XII of Sweden published in May of the same year. And he was probably already at work on the three great works of 1722: Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack. Thus, he was near the height of his powers as a writer of narrative. Why, then, would he decide to write a work, which, though filled with brief narratives, is essentially a series of essays on miscellaneous subjects?

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that some part of the responsibility had to do with the publisher of all three volumes, William Taylor. The first volume had been enormously popular and had doubtless enriched Taylor. Both Crusoe volumes had "Written by Himself on the title pages, as did the third volume, apparently alluding to Robinson Crusoe as the author. But the claim that Robinson Crusoe was a real Mariner" and that his account was literally true had been challenged and ridiculed by T. Cox, the publisher of an abridgement of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, and by Charles Gildon, who, in the text of his The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D.… . De F … of London, Hosier (London, 1719), revealed Defoe as the author and sneered at the errors in the text.

Taylor took out an advertisement against Cox and his abridged version in The St. James Evening Post of 7 August 1719 and began a suit in Chancery.⁶ Cox responded by threatening to reveal both that Robinson Crusoe was a fiction and the name of the true author.⁷ Taylor would rightly have believed his financial investment in Defoe’s work threatened by such revelations. He may have asked Defoe to blunt such criticisms. Defoe responded with a defense of his fiction that took it out of the realm of romance and into that which he called Allegorick History. This raises the question of whether Defoe would do such a thing for a business associate. Defoe’s close relationship to his publishers and printers was noted in the anonymous pamphlet, The Battle of the Authors Lately Fought in Covent-Garden (1720), in which he was depicted as bringing along his numerous "Booksellers and Printers as his advocates in arguing his case for the first prize before the Goddess Ignorance."⁸ But if Defoe was going to put together a volume of miscellaneous essays to justify the earlier Crusoe volumes, it would be natural for him to turn it into an occasion for expressing some of his cherished ideas on a wide variety of subjects.⁹ And he would not be the first author who would consider the money-making possibilities of a sequel to a blockbuster.

In addition to the defense of fiction, he appears to have drawn together some old prose pieces, some comments on Christianity, and some materials that were eventually to be more fully exploited in such works as The Political History of the Devil (1726), A System of Magick (1726), An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), and A New Family Instructor (1728). The most obvious example of this turn to theological argument is A Vision of the Angelick World, which is advertised on the title page but paginated separately. It is so obviously the product of Defoe’s readings in theological sources that were to inform these later writings that it has the appearance of a work pieced together out of scraps of that research. Most of this material has very little to do with the Robinson Crusoe who, in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, had to confess his inability to answer Friday’s questions about the existence of evil in the world. But that brings up the vexed question of Crusoe’s character and its relation to Defoe. In writing the line notes, where we are dealing with arguments that seem to be associated with ideas that Defoe expressed elsewhere, we usually relate the comments to Defoe. On some occasions, as when Crusoe speaks of the experience of feeling a weight on his body while lying in his cave, Crusoe is clearly an extension of the character appearing in the earlier volumes. When he is dealing with fine points of theology or quoting Thomas Burnet’s ideas on nature, Robinson Crusoe the mariner and traveler is entirely beside the point. Defoe’s explanations of the relationship between a fictional character and the author do not make such a decision easy.

The early reviewers of the Robinson Crusoe volumes showed how uncommon it was to read a work of fiction that undertook to treat serious themes composed in a realistic manner and in a plain style. Most were hostile to both romances and the more realistic novels that usually concentrated on aspects of love. Even so brilliant a work as Madame de Lafayette’s Princes de Cleves (first translated into English in 1679) was not fully appreciated. But they praised Robinson Crusoe as a new type moral romance, presaging the possibility of a serious type of fiction that was to emerge in the writing of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.¹⁰ In accepting the three volumes of Robinson Crusoe as works of fiction, these reviewers appeared to ignore the statement on the title page that insisted these works were indeed "Written by Himself," composed by a person named Robinson Crusoe. The fictional memoir, written by a supposed author in his or her own voice, was an established form by 1719–1720, and the reviewers on the Continent disregarded the statement about authorship, accepting it as a work of fiction.¹¹

Defoe might have pursued this course, insisting that the professions of truth that had been prefaced to the earlier volumes were not unusual ways of introducing works of fiction, that the volumes had been extremely well received because they told exciting stories in a convincing manner, and that the most important things about them were the truths they contained about human nature. Defoe follows this strategy to a degree, and it is central to The Publisher’s Introduction, as well as (to a certain extent) to the comparison of his work to Don Quixote in the Preface. Gildon had already revealed Defoe’s authorship in his pamphlet attack, and in England at least, his responsibility for the text was well known. What further harm, then, could be done by confessing his authorship and stating that he was the creator of Crusoe and his adventures?

But as previously remarked, Serious Reflections continued to proclaim "Written by Himself" on the title page. The first line of defense was the proposition that the work was an allegory. Robinson Crusoe is to be seen as an allegorical figure, a representation of the life—or at least part of the life—of an unnamed but famous author, whom anyone with a knowledge of the British literary scene would know to be Daniel Defoe. But Defoe appears to have believed that so long as he retained the name Robinson Crusoe, he had to be accorded a degree of freedom to act as if he were someone else. And in that age in which pseudonymous and anonymous publications were the rule rather than anything unusual, such freedom was usually granted. As Samuel Johnson remarked in one of his Rambler essays, " ‘A mask,’ says Castiglione, ‘confers a right of acting and speaking with less restraint even when the wearer is known to the whole company.’ He that is discovered without his own consent, may claim some indulgence, and cannot be rigorously called to justify those sallies or frolicks which his disguise is a proof that he wishes to conceal."¹²

Although Johnson advised that an author should write in a manner that would include the expectation that his identity would be revealed, he does not dismiss Castiglione’s opinion.¹³ Amplifying the comments of Richard Steele in Spectator no. 555, Michael Warner argued that the use of the mask or persona, such as Tatler and Spectator, was one of the basic elements in the notion of the Public Sphere, establishing a contractual middle ground of anonymity between the writer and the audience.¹⁴

Charles Gildon allowed Defoe no such latitude. He made a personal attack on Defoe’s character and his career as a writer and polemicist, using Robinson Crusoe and Friday to chastise Defoe for his misrepresentations. Defoe, in turn, took the opportunity to assert a paradoxical existence for his Mariner, even while changing him from the adventurous survivor and enthusiastic Christian into a philosophic observer of the human condition and theological controversialist whose ardor for Christianity now assumes an even more militant form.

Defoe attempts to accomplish this by sleight of hand using a variety of approaches. The most outrageous, in some ways, is the straight allegorical approach. The various events in Crusoe’s life are supposed to have a direct parallel with the events of Defoe’s own life. If Defoe was suggesting that fictional characters always share some aspects of personality with their creator, that might be an interesting viewpoint, but what he maintains is that he set out to write an allegorical autobiography and that the events of Crusoe’s life are parallel to those of the unnamed author. For example, Crusoe beset by the cannibals is actually our unnamed author (understood by the reader to be Defoe), cruelly attacked by his enemies. The notion of a one-to-one allegory led several biographers to assume that, in Serious Reflections, the tale of the man who decided to remain silent in relation to his family for decades had to apply to Defoe’s own relationship with his family.¹⁵ The possibilities for such misunderstandings are endless. Intriguing as it is, then, the allegorical approach has to be dismissed out of hand. Even allowing some allegorical relationship between the writer and his creation does not solve the problem of answering the attacks of Gildon and Cox, since Defoe still admits that The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures is, in some way, a work of fiction.

Defoe seems to play with the notions of John Locke in much of this obfuscation. Cannot a fiction create as clear an idea of reality as the thing itself? Is not identity to a great extent merely a memory of who we are? And if the reader has a vivid notion of someone named Robinson Crusoe, who is to say that he is not as real as Daniel Defoe? If as Defoe says famously, ’tis as reasonable to represent one kind of Imprisonment by another, as it is to represent any Thing that really exists, by that which exists not,¹⁶ is it not possible that the fictional character, Robinson Crusoe, possesses some obscure form of reality?

In broaching such arcane possibilities, Defoe appears to argue for the text as containing hidden messages. And the notion of impenetrable languages actually becomes a theme in The Farther Adventures, when Crusoe and his ship encounter a tribe whose guttural sounds refuse to yield any hint of meaning to Western ears. Defoe was later to expand upon similar themes in Mere Nature Delineated (1726), a work in which he puzzled over teaching the deaf to speak and learn. In Serious Reflections, Defoe even seems fascinated by the notion of a secret language that so engaged the commentators on Ludwig Wittgenstein and involved the use of Robinson Crusoe as an example.¹⁷ If the work is a secret allegory, the meaning of which at least one biographer believed he had discovered, perhaps it contains other coded messages that readers have not been able to unravel? This would not be the first time that Defoe would confess that he appeared to be the only person who actually understood what he had written.¹⁸

Nevertheless, Defoe is reluctant to surrender the notion that there is a real Robinson Crusoe or admit that his story is merely a work of fiction. The opening paragraphs of the preface repeat the words real, true, and history time after time. Whatever the thrust of the argument might be, the language in which it is couched goes in the direction of asserting that both Crusoe, the writer, and the adventures he recounts have a real existence or that they are both real and allegorical. Thus, in comparing his work to Don Quixote, he insists that Cervantes’s masterpiece was actually a satire on one of the author’s contemporaries. In sliding from an allegorical interpretation toward satire, Defoe was on somewhat firmer critical ground. Certainly a satire such as Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, a work alluded to several times in Serious Reflections, was thought to be a satire on particular individuals, in addition to being a general satire on the various sects of Puritans and their abuse of power during the Interregnum. Satire sometimes sustains a fairly realistic fiction, despite its continual plunge into didactic attacks on ideologies and individuals.¹⁹

Unfortunately, despite moments of satire in volumes 1 and 2 of Robinson Crusoe, no one would find such passages sustained enough to argue that they shift the essential genre of the work. In its introspection, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures is a combination of fictional spiritual autobiography and adventure novel, while The Farther Adventures, despite its satirical treatment of Chinese civilization, is essentially a novel of travel and adventures. And both appeal to the struggle to survive under dangerous circumstances. Like the suggestion that both volumes are allegorical autobiography, the satirical argument fails to sustain careful examination.²⁰

Defoe ends with what is an appeal for the validity of those fictions that contain meaningful ideas. He defines this as Parable or Allegorick History brought to pass, … for moral and religious improvement (sig. A6). He gives as his example invincible Patience recommended under the worst of Misery (sig. A6), a theme that may or may not have specific religious import. In fact, Defoe’s definition might apply to any of his works of fiction, since the social themes of Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana might be considered as serious in their own way as anything in the Robinson Crusoe trilogy. For all of his elaborate indirection, then, in the end Defoe’s defense would apply even to his Captain Singleton, which, except for a quickly rendered religious conversion at the end, is essentially a series of adventures. Singleton’s courage and refusal to despair can certainly be worked into a moral, but the reader’s main interest lies in a realistically rendered, exciting series of events.

2

Defoe begins his series of essays with Of Solitude, a subject with which Crusoe had made himself intimately familiar through his experiences on the island. It was a theme that clearly fascinated Defoe. If one of the great themes of the eighteenth century was sociability, an interest in various forms of isolation had dominated the seventeenth century in both philosophy and religion. Blaise Pascal had maintained, "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.²¹ And Jean de La Bruyère stated, All men’s misfortunes proceed from their aversion to being alone.²² In England popular handbooks such as Bishop Edward Wettenhall’s Enter into Thy Closet; or, A Method and Order for Private Devotion (1666) had urged the necessity of being often alone and withdrawing into a private room for prayer and meditation twice a day.²³ And to a certain extent, the practitioners of Quietism, who are mentioned somewhat disparagingly in Serious Reflections, attempted to reach an unmediated contact with God through silence and meditation. But Serious Reflections is very much an early eighteenth-century text. Whole sections are devoted to Conversation or the benefits of sociability. After all, once Friday arrives on his island, the restless Crusoe succeeds in achieving a degree of genuine happiness. In all of the Robinson Crusoe volumes, Defoe manages to blend his interest in solitude with idealizations of the social—of the interaction between human beings.

As had so many of his contemporaries, Defoe had done some reading in Michel de Montaigne, who has an essay on the benefits of social isolation by the same title as that used by Defoe. Defoe also appears to have been familiar with the debate between Sir George Mackenzie and John Evelyn on the advantages of retirement compared to the active life.²⁴ But Crusoe’s isolation is far more extreme than that envisaged by any of the above authors, even if Montaigne refers occasionally to the lives of hermits. In announcing that Life in general is, or ought to be, but one Universal Act of Solitude (2), Defoe was speaking for an age in which the concept of the isolated self had already evolved from Descartes’s cogito through John Locke’s radically subjectivist view of the person,²⁵ to Bishop George Berkeley’s argument that the mind perceives only ideas. And the individualism, with all its social and economic aspects, that Ian Watt saw as a distinct aspect of Crusoe’s existence was also part of the contemporary ideological mix.²⁶ To supplement this already complicated amalgam of systems, Defoe used a blend of Rochester’s Satyr upon Mankind and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to arrive at something resembling the modern self—isolated in the midst of crowds, moved by the desire for what is pleasant. Solitude, for Defoe, is a psychological state, perhaps more attainable in the middle of London’s crowds than on an uninhabited island.

Defoe takes the occasion to attack that type of solitude sought by hermits as suggestive of the limitations of the mind to achieve true solitude than as something admirable. The truly isolated self needs no such external trappings. He instances a diligent and religious Laborer, who devotes himself to his work and his religious meditations. Defoe contrasts such a person to Saint Hilary spending time in the desert among the Lions and Crocodiles (14). Whereas the Laborer is able to live well enough in civilized society on his earnings, the desert hermits would be forced to spend a considerable time that might have been passed in religious meditation in searching for food and water. Even aside from the obvious dislike of what Defoe considered to be the absurd miracles associated with some of the Catholic saints, there is something peculiarly Protestant about this insistence upon relying upon the self and the conscience as guides toward the moral life. Through Crusoe, Defoe insists that the moral life is to be led in society, not by a monkish withdrawal.

Although the example of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures appeared to overthrow Aristotle’s dictum that isolation was impossible for a human being, Defoe now reasserts that notion. Man is a Creature so form’d for Society, he writes, that it may not only be said, that it is not good for him to be alone, but ’tis really impossible he should be alone (12). Perhaps Defoe saw that one of the routes leading out of Crusoe’s island would arrive at Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Solitary Walker with its almost obsessive concern with inner experience. Certainly he wanted to be sure that he would not inspire a new age of hermits allied to the Catholic Church. Part of this process of undoing any harm (and one of the major themes of Serious Reflections) will be his insistence upon the need for sociability.²⁷

3

Defoe followed his discussion of solitude with a series of essays on what he calls Honesty. Although Defoe ties this in with Crusoe’s experiences by alluding to the Widow who did so much for him when he was in Brazil and to the Portuguese Captain who helped him at that time as well as some three decades later when he had been rescued from the island, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this was something Defoe adapted from a draft that he had in the drawer of his desk.²⁸ Defoe had been thinking hard about honesty since his first bankruptcy, when, as he confessed, he had done things of which he was deeply ashamed, and he had discussed the subject in his first book in 1697.²⁹ Honesty is Equity, writes Defoe in Serious Reflections, every Man is Lord Chancellor to himself (37). Defoe sees a situation such as that in which a family may be destroyed by debt as something that cannot be entirely a matter of rigid law. It concerns the entire society.

As he expatiates upon his subject, Defoe transforms honesty into the glue that binds society together. He dismisses the idea that found its most prominent spokesman in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury—that everyone possessed a moral sense that prompted him/her to act ethically.³⁰ After stating that he would not discuss whether Honesty be a natural or an acquired Virtue (26), he does exactly that, rejecting the notion of natural goodness and asserting the failure of human beings to live up to a standard of morality established by God. The honesty he wants to discuss has to do with human relationships. In some sense it is an extension of his many arguments about credit extended to the social sphere, and he brings in examples involving the ways in which credit works and is sometimes abused.³¹ Human society depends upon trust, and trust depends upon honesty. Honesty of this kind, however, depends upon a system involving the confession of inevitable breaches of honesty accompanied by forgiveness by the offended party. Such a system, unfortunately, is not to be found in any nation’s courts. It has to be discovered in a sense of Equity supported by Reason (37–38).

Under the heading Of the Tryal of Honesty, he next takes up the theme of Necessity, a subject he had treated at some length in the Review, and which was to become a crucial theme in his novels.³² Defoe argues along the lines set forth by Hugo Grotius and other philosophers of natural law. In explaining why theft may be justified under conditions of extreme necessity, Grotius maintained that such a condition returns those in necessity to a stage of society when all things were held in common. Under such circumstances, there can be nothing that can be called theft. Later theorists, such as Samuel Pufendorf, stressed the requirement of those in a state of necessity to make restitution when they could. The subject had broader ramifications in law, however, and some of those ramifications were to have a place in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The two shipwrecks encountered by Crusoe on his way back to the island involve questions of cannibalism under situations of dire necessity. Would it be permissible to draw lots, murder, and devour one of those who survived a shipwreck if all must die of starvation otherwise? The natural law philosophers judged that, under such circumstances, cannibalism would be justified, and Defoe defends it once more under a Kind of Equity (40).

A somewhat less extreme example occurs in The Farther Adventures in the case of the passengers of the ship that has been adrift. The crew, concerned with their own survival, has neglected to provide for the mother, son, and maid, who have come close to dying of starvation when Crusoe’s ship arrives. Although the son and maid recover, the mother actually dies. Is the crew guilty of murder? Driven by a desire to save their own lives, the crew could plead Necessity, and be justified under natural law. In Serious Reflections, Defoe alludes to such cases and concludes, All that can be said is, that Necessity makes the highest Crimes lawful, and Things Evil in themselves in their own Nature are made practicable by it (41).

Such judgments by the writers on natural law were put forward as part of a system of law that was supposed to be governed by reason, rather than religious dictums or the laws of particular societies, and they had great influence on Western European societies at a time when philosophy and science had placed a high value on governing their disciplines by rational ideals in method and goals. During a period when the various legal systems of Europe appeared to follow often arbitrary standards, a major goal of enlightened thought, from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) to Emmerich de Vattel (1714–1767), involved searching for a single, rational standard of law.³³ Perhaps the most obvious examples of what seemed irrational punishments were those involving crimes committed as acts of self-preservation—acts that fell under the rubric of Necessity. As Samuel Pufendorf remarked concerning the ferment of thought on this subject, "The Case of Necessity is a thing in every Body’s Mouth."³⁴

The final two sections on the subject of honesty turn to the subjects of the contingencies of promises and to education. In the first Defoe argues that all contracts are provisional and contain a usually unstated clause to the effect that the party who receives goods or money agrees to pay his debt unless unforeseen circumstances prevent such repayment. He maintains that the modern notion of being a Gentleman (58) depends not on noble blood but on behavior based on honesty. Defoe was to state this position most forcefully in his Compleat English Gentleman, a work that Defoe left unfinished at his death in 1731,³⁵ but in 1701, at the end of his True-Born Englishman, he had already asserted ’Tis personal Virtue only makes us Great. In the section titled "Of Relative HONESTY, he addresses the debt owed to children to educate them properly, by which he means educating them according to their Inclinations and Capacities. It is a difficult point for Crusoe to argue, since his father clearly did not consult his son’s desire to travel, but the character of Crusoe seems to have been left far behind at this point. Although the examples provided are generally apt, the final section leads to the discussion of a black Maletta look’d Man (72). Although Defoe presents him as a person of learning and sensibility, he is full of self-hatred. He blames his father for having had intercourse with and married a black Cook-Maid and then educated his son well, but to no manner of Purpose. The speaker thinks that the best position in life that he could attain would be a learned Valet de Chamber (73) and that his frightful Face (73–74) would always stand in the way of a satisfying career in society. He ends his confession in tears, and Defoe praises him as deserving, modest and judicious." But despite his sympathy, Defoe presents this case as an example of a bad choice of education. Perhaps both the mulatto and Defoe were simply appraising their society in realistic terms. Perhaps in the early eighteenth century no one would have accepted his learning and scientific knowledge as reasons for employing or encouraging him. Nevertheless, Defoe had here an occasion to remark on the failure of society to look beneath the outward appearance; and he does not do it.³⁶

In fact, the concern with character and countenance forms a large part of the first section of the third chapter, "OF THE Immorality of CONVERSATION, AND The Vulgar ERRORS of Behaviour."³⁷ Defoe argues that a pleasant face is part of good conversation and good company and contrasts it with the countenance of the Man of Crime, whose face always shows the evil that is gnawing at his soul. This concern with physiognomy played a part in The Farther Adventures, when Crusoe dwelled on the various postures and facial expressions of those saved from a seemingly inevitable death at sea. Here it is used to suggest that religious faith plays an important part in the appearance of such happiness. Defoe even breaks into poetry on this subject, the first of a number of philosophic and religious poems scattered throughout Serious Reflections.

4

After a section devoted to fools and their conversation, Defoe turns to a subject he had raised at some length in his Essay upon Projects (1697), immoral conversation, his interest having begun in the 1690s when Queen Mary II attempted to reform the licentiousness and rakish language that had entered society with the Restoration. Perhaps he hoped that George I would follow in her footsteps. But now Defoe mainly has in his sights the battle over the Trinity that had divided the Dissenters in the famous Salter’s Hall gathering in 1719. He views those who, on that occasion, refused to sign the document asserting the traditional Christian view of the Trinity as undermining the religious base of society. By way of protecting himself, he adds a note stating, "This was all Written in King William’s Reign and refers to that time" (93), but Arianism and the attack on the Trinity were far more the concern of 1720 than of the 1690s. Some parts of his attacks on vice in Serious Reflections may have come from the period of the founding of the Societies for Reformation of Manners and Queen Mary’s reforms, but Defoe was obviously adapting such material to present concerns.

If Defoe of the reign of William III would have been concerned about atheism and deism, it was Defoe of 1720 who viewed both the Bangorian Controversy and the Salter’s Hall Controversy along with the writings of Shaftesbury, Collins, and Whiston and sensed a real threat to what he considered to be traditional Christian beliefs. Small wonder that he was quoting Saint Augustine (92) and early Christian sources as part of his defense. He had already written all or part of his poem beginning "The Great Promethean Artist, Poets say" (100), an argument for the existence of God as a first cause, by 1718, when he placed it in his A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, but he liked it enough to repeat it here and quoted it often enough in future works.³⁸ If Defoe’s arguments for the existence of God are hardly original, it has to be said that he does let out all the stops on his rhetoric. The deathbed conversion of that prince of Libertines, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is a constant motif here. For all the bravado of the atheists, in their heart of hearts they have to know they are wrong; the same is true for the deists who attempt to turn God into a fine well bred good natur’d Gentleman like Deity (105). These are people whom a well-run, moral society ought to punish. At the very least, he argues, they should be ostracized from good company.

In attacking swearing, Defoe was on old ground—material he had covered in his Essay upon Projects,³⁹ but in his attack upon lying and telling false stories, Defoe faced some difficulty. Had he not been accused of writing a work of fiction and lying about its authenticity? He takes the occasion to defend his practice of allusive allegorick History (121) once more. Comparing his work to the parables of the New Testament, he argues that it is design’d and effectually turn’d for instructive and upright Ends (121). He also manages to compare it to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and to make a pitch for his own work, the two volumes of The Family Instructor (124), that had been published earlier.

Chapter 4 appears to take advantage of the Quixotic nature of Crusoe, particularly his destruction of the pagan idol in The Farther Adventures. He poses now as the aged traveler reconsidering his experiences in his travels around the world. In a dialogue with an Old Gentlewoman, Crusoe quotes Rochester on a savage world in which humans pass their time in betrayal, violent conflict, and the quest for self-preservation. The Old Gentlewoman wants to hear about the prevalence of religion throughout the world, even Friday’s worship of Benamuckee, but Crusoe will have none of it. Except for the period spent in Brazil among the Roman Catholics living there, he could find no evidence of what he would regard as true religion. The followers of Islam in Barbary were brutish and fulfilled Rochester’s image of savage man. Unlike Islam, Christianity, he argues, always has a "Civilizing Influence (134). He continues his world tour to Asia, where he sees a world of Thieves and Cheats, watching to deceive you, and proud of being thought able to do it" (137).

His thoughts then move on to China, which he had depicted in The Farther Adventures as an impoverished land whose achievements had been falsely extolled by those seeking to find a great civilization, different from and superior to that in the West. This China bashing continues. Confucianism is a mixture (Crusoe calls it a Rhapsody [138]) of Moral Conclusions and Elements of Polity, Morality and Superstition (138). Compared with the religious worship of the Chinese, the gods of the Greeks and Romans were refined images of natural forces. And applying Western aesthetics to China’s idols, he finds them ugly and horrific. Similarly, he applies Western ideals of law and politics to China’s system of governing by Mandarins and judges the Chinese to be a passive and obedient people ruled by arbitrary laws and summary executions. Their science is pitiful compared to that of Europe, and their military capacities far inferior to those of Western armies. Throughout this diatribe Crusoe is John Bull in the proverbial China shop trying to destroy the myth of the "sage Chinois," which was to flourish throughout the eighteenth century. To ask for subtle distinctions here would be to miss the point. In this case, the mask of Crusoe, the traveler, helps Defoe to make his argument more forceful.

Defoe has Crusoe follow his travels through Siberia, where he found nothing that he thought resembled religion and where the natives, instead of looking up for inspiration, looked down. At this point, Crusoe is moved to poetry, and he glorifies the ancient Persians whom, he believes, rationally worshipped the sun. He begins, "Hail! Glorious Lamp, the Parent of the Day" (150). This is one of a number of poems reaching the sublime; their aesthetic value will be discussed later in this introduction. From the standpoint of its subject matter, it reflects an attempt on Defoe’s part to create a scale of relative value in matters of religion, with atheism at the bottom and what he considered his orthodox Protestant version of Christianity at the top. Four years later, in his New Voyage Round the World, Defoe approved of and idealized a society of natives in Australia worshipping the sun in this manner.⁴⁰ The message for the reader apparently is that such worship is more rational to European eyes than the complete denial of spirit among the modern atheists on the one hand and the worship of the grotesque idols among the peoples of the Far East on the other.

But Defoe was not willing to permit Roman Catholic Europe to escape without criticism. Recalling his time in Portugal, Crusoe reports on witnessing the barbarism of an auto de fe in Portugal. He concludes that nations permitting the existence of the Inquisition could hardly claim to be Christian. He quotes a traveler on the corruption of religion in Rome, and this, in turn, leads to the examination of a Quietist, the follower of a group active within Roman Catholicism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that advocated a mystical joining with God through meditation and passivity. Although this unidentified writer dismisses Quietism as too much conceal’d in the Cavities and dark Parts of the Soul, he agrees with the Quietist on one point, perhaps with some irony, that religion in Italy was "really invisible" (157).

Continuing his survey of religion throughout the world, Crusoe examines the religious beliefs of Poland and Russia, both of which are found unsatisfactory. The Poles persecute Protestants, but those Protestants turn out to be the heretical Socinians. The Russians are afflicted with obstinacy and ignorance. Even the Protestant Lutherans of Germany come under criticism, and he completes his survey with a view of religion in England, which he faults for its lack of genuine religious feeling. Defoe’s criticisms are not without sharp social commentary. He notes that some of the Jews being executed in Portugal had thoughtlessly become too rich, thereby inviting the cupidity of the Church, while others had made the error of being too poor and defenseless. In his commentary on Germany, he criticizes the magnificence of the courts of Saxony and Prussia—a magnificence built by impoverishing the people. Though it is "poor Robinson Crusoe (173) who is supposed to be writing this, the remark that the true Ends of Government; the thing we call Government was certainly established for the Prosperity of the People" (164) and not the enriching of the rulers is pure Defoe.

Defoe concludes this survey of religion throughout the world on a conciliatory note. As mentioned previously, he was writing at a time when the Bangorian Controversy was having a wrenching effect on the Church of England; and the dispute over the Trinity at Salter’s Hall had divided the Dissenters over the doctrine of the Trinity. In addition, the Dissenters were attempting, unsuccessfully, to get the Whig ministry and George I to remove the burden of the Test Act from them. Under these circumstances, Defoe advocates a degree of toleration. England seems to be a land that cultivates different approaches to Christianity. Could they differ with Humility, Defoe writes, they would differ with Charity; but it is not to be, in Religion, whatever it may be in civil or politick Affairs (177). Reminding his readers that the validity of such differences will be resolved in Heaven and not before, Defoe preaches charity toward the beliefs of others and predicts that at the Revelation, those whose zeal made them adhere violently to relatively minor doctrinal differences would eventually be ashamed of themselves. It is difficult to know what to make of his reminder that persecution always seems to reconcile those who have fallen out over minor religious points. Such a statement would have made more sense in a text written during the 1690s,⁴¹ when the danger of James II’s attempts to move England in the direction of Roman Catholic beliefs would have been fresh in the memory of his readers, than in 1720, when no equivalent danger was on the horizon.

5

The next section, with the ironic title, "Of the wonderful Excellency of Negative Religion, and Negative Virtue" (183), is partly a homily against religious hypocrisy, somewhat in the manner of John Bunyan’s Mr. Badman, partly what may be Defoe’s defense of his inner ethical and religious life, and partly an opportunity for Defoe to write two religious poems on the subject of Eternity and Faith. The first is devoted to an attack on those who appear to live as virtuous religious people but who are all outward show. Defoe creates a kind of character, in the manner of the seventeenth-century literary form, for such people. Their overwhelming pride makes them oblivious to their lack of true belief and morality. He consigns such people to likely damnation.

In contrast to these sinners, whose outward behavior brings the misguided praise of society, are those who are held in contempt by society but preserve an inner strength of belief that enables them to endure such opprobrium. Such a life requires a world of Courage and Steadiness of Mind to support (186), but it is the kind of life that will receive a heavenly reward. Defoe, who might well have complained about the contempt that was heaped upon him by the pamphleteers and journalists during the reigns of Queen Anne and George I, comments, But, be this my Portion in this World, with a Heart that does not reproach me with the Guilt (186). Surely Defoe was thinking of himself, when he was describing the man who retains his inner peace while damn’d by the Tongues of Men, even for this World and another (187).

It is difficult to say when Defoe wrote his two poems, Eternity and Faith, or whether the chapter was written around them or they were composed to give added force to his message. Eternity takes its model from John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s poem Upon Nothing, with its metaphysical investigation of existence. Rochester’s poem concludes with an attack upon the hypocrisy of the world and may have had some part in influencing Defoe’s subject matter. But unlike Rochester’s skepticism, Defoe’s poem asserts the centrality of an eternal afterlife. Perhaps its most interesting element is Defoe’s treatment of time, which appears to show the influence of John Locke, but otherwise it is fairly traditional religious poetry. The subject matter is a sublime vision of a permanent state superior to time itself. The concept itself is grand enough to compensate in part for the lack of original imagery. Written in the same iambic pentameter couplets as Eternity, Faith tends to be more abstract and rambling. It has one memorably terrible couplet, however, in which faith, in the manner of the worst Metaphysical poetry, is compared to

Heaven’s High Insurance Office, where we give,

The Premium Faith, and then the Grant receive.

Here Defoe seems to be playing to some of the crassest aspects of Christianity satirized by Robert Burns later in the century and by Sinclair Lewis in his portrayals of American religion. For the most part, Defoe depends on biblical allusions to give strength to his arguments, but in so doing he sets up a comparison with his source that is hardly flattering to his own abilities as a poet.

The fifth chapter, "Of listning to the Voice of PROVIDENCE, concerns the ways of reading the signs of God’s presence in the world. If then the Events of Things are his as well as the Causes, writes Defoe, it is certainly well worth our Notice, when the Sympathy of Relation between Events and Things and their Causes, most eminently appears" (214). Unlike some sections of Serious Reflections, this is indeed a theme that operates through all of the volumes of Robinson Crusoe. As Douglas Patey claims in his book on probability and belief, almost all the writers of the eighteenth century tended to believe in a God whose presence in the world had to be read through signs.⁴² Since God was seen as operating mainly through second causes, or Nature, it was in those second causes that his will might be deciphered and understood. The difference between, say, Henry Fielding and Defoe, however, was that Defoe’s world seemed to be haunted with the presence of spirits ready to offer hints that needed to be heeded and put into action, or with significant parallel dates or events that required close examination and study for their significance. The world that Fielding created in his novels avoided such particular signs as superstition and looked to a more general, guiding Providence. But to neglect particular signs and parallel dates, Defoe argues, is equivalent to a kind of practical Atheism (220). To support his arguments, Defoe tells a variety of stories in which the violation of ordinary probability suggests a supernatural intervention.

While Defoe is careful to warn against the kind of absurd attention to omens that makes the character of Foresight, in William Congreve’s Love for Love, so amusing, in his insistence on attending to all the Hints as from Heaven (222), Defoe has Crusoe approach perilously close to such an extravagant position. Crusoe instances his own story—his failure to pay attention to the storm that almost destroys him on his trip from London to Hull—but this example is fraught with ambiguities, and he quickly moves on to other stories. The important point in this discussion is the dismissal of anything resembling luck or chance. In Crusoe’s world, every event has its purpose, and every human being should feel compelled to examine it.

In the sixth chapter, Crusoe returns to the subject of the state of the Christian religion throughout the world and his argument with the Gentlewoman. This time, however, he is concerned with Christianity rather than with the pagan world. Whereas in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures Crusoe had lamented the destruction of the American Indians by the Spaniards, now he sees the hand of Providence in this slaughter. The Crusoe who speaks in this chapter is very much the man who, in The Farther Adventures, exploded the pagan idol in Siberia. Since that event brought down upon his caravan a large part of the Tatar nation, it is difficult to know how seriously one is to take this advocacy of a new crusade to convert the world to Christianity and beat the very Name of Mahomet out of the World (245). Since Crusoe believes that only Christians will be reserved for immortal life, he defines this as an act of compassion. He admits that the Christian world is divided in its beliefs, but he feels it is not reason enough for the Christian world to avoid doing its Duty (249) to proselytize and convert.

Of course Crusoe does not envision converting these conquered nations at the point of the sword. What he wants is allowing people their choice of religion once they have been exposed to Christianity. There is to be no persecution, just the subduing of the populace and the destruction of their temples. That the Defoe behind the mask of Crusoe was more tolerant and that he thought of Crusoe as an enthusiast, in the contemporary sense of someone advocating extreme religious positions, is demonstrated by his discussion of this subject in The Commentator of 17 June 1720. There, the writer proclaimed, by way of arguing for joint European action against the Barbary Pirates, "I am no man for Crusadoes, nor am I a man for a general War against the Infidel World by Way of a Mission ad progaganda fid." The persona of The Commentator was that of a calm, rational citizen, and throughout Defoe tried to imitate the ideal of polite discourse exemplified in The Spectator. Crusoe’s vision is neither polite nor restrained.

It is impossible to avoid the feeling that behind this enthusiasm for the spread of Christianity lies a fairly materialistic colonialist project that would subdue the world to European trade and power. That Crusoe begins to digress at this point on changing sides in politics as well as religion and commences an attack on those who those who fail to see a Necessity to change Hands or Sides in both (253) is curious. As if aware that he has strayed from his character’s voice, Defoe has Crusoe justify him in the Face of his Enemies (255), even though, so far as we know, Crusoe has no antagonists. To distance himself further from this attack on his enemies, Defoe brings in George Wither as the example of another writer who was ill treated by society. Only with some difficulty does Defoe get Crusoe back to what he calls punningly his "Cruisado" (262). In the end, Crusoe confesses that he sees no such dedication to such a good cause in his lifetime. It is sad enough that during the nineteenth century Crusoe’s vision of the colonizing of Africa and the East by the European nations actually occurred with disastrous results for the natives of those lands.

6

The final eighty-four pages are titled A Vision of the Angelick World, and the separate pagination as well as the subject matter may suggest that this section was originally intended for separate publication. Much of the material seems to look forward to Defoe’s Political History of the Devil (1726), An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), and A System of Magick (1727 [for 1726]). Although there is a wonderful illustration in an eighteenth-century French edition of Robinson Crusoe, picturing Crusoe walking through the vast spaces of the universe, it may be pointed out that the Crusoe who was so concerned to give the reader a mass of realistic details in describing the making of clay pots is a far cry from the visionary Crusoe whom Defoe now presents to the reader. And in many ways this visionary Crusoe is perhaps even further from the Crusoe who wants to argue about abstract points of natural theology.

Crusoe begins by inquiring into the world of spirits that surrounds human beings and the scriptural bases for such beliefs. He now confesses that, while on the island, he had the tendency to imagine that he saw things that he now believes to be all Hypochondriack Delusion. Critically, he now reexamines how far the Power of Imagination may go (271). He instances his terror on encountering the dying goat in the cave, comparing it to the fear of Belshazzar on seeing the writing on the wall—the writing that Daniel interpreted as predicting Belshazzar’s doom. Crusoe admits that experiences such as this and the footprint in the sand left him with a case of the Vapours (273) that included a tendency to Hypochondriack Whimsies (273). In this respect, Crusoe narrates an island incident not in The Strange Surprizing Adventures—a pain and numbness in his leg as if it were some Creature lying upon me with all his Weight, and turning his Body upon me. In experiencing this almost classic image of a nightmare, Crusoe lashes out and breaks several pots. He then indulges in an absurd dialogue with his parrot, which keeps on repeating, "Hold your Tongue, and, What’s the Matter with you?" (273). Although Crusoe concludes that the pain in the leg had a physical cause, he admits that he did not recover from his fears until Friday arrived.

Crusoe wonders whether it was the Devil who was tormenting him, and while he rejects the Devil as a main cause, he insists on the existence of both evil and good spirits; and he delineates some of the ways in which humans communicate with them, from dreams to something as nebulous as Involuntary Sadness (79). What follows is a debate between two clergymen on the value of dreams as a communication with a spirit world. The skeptical clergyman raises the question: Why would God communicate in ways that were often impossible to interpret? The answer given is essentially that God moves in mysterious ways.

After this disquisition of twenty-four pages of this material in the original edition, Defoe is ready to launch Crusoe into the universe. He begins with the question of whether the planets are habitable, a subject that arises in a conversation with the same Friend who asks him about waking visions. Defoe uses this interlocutor as a device for transforming Crusoe’s experience into a visionary one, whether through imagination or the Power of the Converse of Spirits (278). Defoe does not insist on the exact method, but his