Why Defoe Probably Did Not Write The Apparition of Mrs. Veal

Why Defoe Probably Did Not Write The Apparition ofMrs. Veal George Starr The short answer is because he did not believe in ghosts, as he understood the term and in what is "now the prevailing sense" (QED n8a): "the soul ofa deceased person, spoken ofas appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living." A ghost ofjust this sort is the central figure in an anonymous work long thought to be Defoe's: A TrueRelation oftheApparition ofoneMrs. Veal, The next Day afterHerDeath: to one Mrs. BargraveAt Canterbury. The 8th ofSeptember, 1705 (AMV).1 Defoe's lifelong interest in what he called "the Invisible World" embraced a beliefin spirits, and in their active communication with mankind. Toward the end of his life he wrote a book ofnearly 400 pages devoted to the subject, An Essay on theHistory and Reality ofApparitions. BeingAn Account ofwhat they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. As aho ???? tve may distinguish between the Apparitions of Good and Evil Spirits, and how tve ought toBehaveto them (HRA). "What they arenot" Defoe argues emphatically , are ghosts. "Whence they come not" are from heaven and hell, 1 TIu Apparition ofMrs. Veal (AMV) is quoted from a photocopy of the Harvard copy of the first edition (1706), reproduced in Accounts oftheApparition ofMn. Veal by DanielDefoe anil Olliers, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (LosAngeles: Augustan Reprint Society Pub. No. 115, 1965). References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 3-4, April-July 2003 422 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION where souls go immediately after death, once and for all. They "do not appear again, or concern themselves in the Affairs of Life" because, as Defoe memorably puts it, "the Good would not if they could, and the Bad could not ifthey would."2 In the following pages, I shall challenge the ascription to Defoe of AMVon grounds that abundant evidence demonstrates his disbelief in ghosts, from the decade ofAMVas well as the decade ofHRA, and on grounds that several authors referred to approvingly within AMV were Anglican divines whose High Church, anti-dissenting positions were anathema to Defoe: within a year of the publication ofAMV, he wrote sarcastically about two of them. I shall draw upon (but also question) very useful books about Defoe and the supernatural,3 and about the problems ofthe Defoe canon and the attribution ofanonymous works to him.4 The attribution of AMV to Defoe depends on a story almost as extraordinary as Mrs Bargrave's, but less fortified with circumstantial narration or other scepticism-allaying devices. "The tradition among the Booksellers is, Thatwhen Drelincourt's Consolations against theFears ofDeath first appeared, the book would not sell. Defoe said he would make it sell, and he made the Apparition recommend Drelincourt's Book of Death, as the best on that subject ever written."5 This is an agreeable yarn, but what grounds are there for believing it? No 2 Daniel Defoe, Essay on the History and Reality ofApparitions. Being an account ofwhat they aie, anil what lliey are not ... As also how we may distinguish between the apparitions ofgood and evil spirits, etc. (!IRA), 1st ed. (London:J. Roberts, 1727), p. 123 (quoted from a photocopy of the British Library copy). References are to this edition. The Review is cited from Defoe's Review, facs. ed. Arthur W. Secord, 22 vols (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1938). 3 Rodney M. Baine provides abundant background information about such topics as angels, apparitions, and the devil, and assembles many ofDefoe's statements about them, in Daniel Defoe and lite Supernalwal (Athens: University ofGeorgia Press, 1968). 4 See P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, The Canonisation ofDaniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique off.R Moore's "Checklist" (London: Hambledon Press, 1994); A Critical Bibliography ofDaniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998). For my sense ofthese three books as "the most significant development in Defoe studies in the past decade" see a review ofthe CriticalBibliogiaphyin EigiUeenlli-Centwy Fiction 12:4 (2000), 584. 5 George Chalmers, "List of Writings" appended to Life of Daniel De Foe (London: John Stockdale, 1790), quoted in Furbank and...