"Can you apply Arithmetick to Every Thing?" Moll Flanders, William Petty, and Social Accounting

"Can you apply Arithmetick to Every Thing?" Moll Flanders, William Petty, and Social Accounting REBECCA E. CONNOR When in 1692 Daniel Defoe went to prison for owing creditors the then astronomical sum of £17,000, one friend described him as "not well vers'd... in accounts." The description was a kind one. Defoe's poor accounting was in large part to blame for his bankruptcy, and he remained throughout his life dogged by the consequences of ill-kept finances.1 Yet despite the chronic chaos of his personal records, Defoe would in print extol the virtues of diligent bookkeeping, going so far as to declare disordered accounts "unnatural." In his fiction and nonfiction alike, exact financial documentation always pays off. Successful commerce depends upon it in The Compleat English Tradesman, and the eponymous heroine of Roxana arguably thrives by mastering the same skill. But accounting in Defoe is by no means confined to money. Robinson Crusoe is as careful to count the turtle eggs on his desert island as he is the number of coins he saves from the wrecked ship's locker. From A Journal ofthe Plague Year to A TourThrough the Whole Island of Great Britain, from the number of dead in London to the tons of cheese produced in Chester, everything, it seems, is counted. We may in fact locate Defoe within a movement of social accounting, one propounded by early demographers John Graunt, William Petty, and Gregory King.2 This new sensibility of quantification provides a useful backdrop against which to explore the particularly rich trope of accounting in Moll Flanders. It is a cultural need to fix identity, I hope to show, that fuels Moll's desire to count. 169 170 / CONNOR Her accounting begins quickly, with the simple accrual of numbers. People may be disturbingly anonymous in Moll Flanders, but they are thoroughly quantified; numerically "written" if blank in name. This counting of character actually starts before the story begins, as the title page summarizes Moll's life arithmetically: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, & c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of Continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent? As we shall see, there is little Moll leaves untallied, yet the reader is not told where or when Moll becomes numerate: valuation seems an almost innate skill. Presumably, she learns some arithmetic in the Gentlewoman's household —by the later 1600s, many believed it should be part of everyone's education , including women's—but the omission is nonetheless puzzling, since Moll is careful to tell us she acquires other skills at that house, like dancing, French and writing. Defoe, on the other hand, was probably more familiar with numbers than most. Beginning at the age of fourteen, he had for six years attended one of the most respected Dissenting academies in England. At Charles Morton's Newington Green Academy the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music formed a substantial part of the core curriculum. Morton himself had excelled at mathematics as a university student, and kept at his school a rare collection of mathematical instruments . Whether as a pupil Defoe responded to his tutor's penchant for computation, as a young man he had cause to put his classical education to commercial use. Though imprisoned at age thirty-two for debt—an incident that hardly testified to his accounting acumen—Defoe afterwards found work as a "manager-trustee" of the government lotteries. Two years later he was keeping books for the commissioners of the new Window Tax.4 But Defoe's interest in accounting went far beyond the practical. Sweeping through England and Europe was a quantification fever, and Defoe had caught it. If most of the English population was still experiencing number on a small scale at the end of the seventeenth century, there was a vigorous movement afoot to make numbers pre-eminent. The mathematical probability theory posited by Blaise Pascal and Pierre Ferm...