An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (review)

Daniel Defoe wrote his study of apparitions, angelic and diabolic, late in life, after the novels (not a term he used) for which he is famous: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and others. Apparitions were a lifelong interest of Defoe's: twenty years earlier he had published an account of how a respectable lady named Mrs. Bargrave is visited by an old friend named Mrs. Veal, only to discover later on that at the time of the visit, or visitation, Mrs. Veal was already dead.

Whether Mrs. Bargrave was visited by a supernatural messenger or haunted by a ghost or was simply dreaming the early Defoe does not venture to guess. The later Essay is much more searching in this respect. Here Defoe tries to steer a middle course between two radically opposed philosophical schools: on the one hand the rationalists, represented by Thomas Hobbes, who believe that, having created a self-regulating universe, God the clockmaker stands back and allows it to run itself; and on the other the angelologists, represented by the eccentric clergyman Joseph Glanvill, who believe that the air around us is thick with interfering supernatural presences (Edgar Allan Poe would later draw on Glanvill for his Gothic stories).

Defoe's mature position is that there are no such things as ghosts, that is to say, wandering souls of deceased persons. Much as we may want to believe that the souls of the departed linger on after death to watch over us, Scripture tells us that as of the moment of death the soul is rapt away into another realm. If souls did indeed have the power to stay behind—and this move in the argument is quintessential Defoe—we would see many more ghostly testators hovering around, making sure that we carry out the letter of their wills.

Defoe was a Puritan Christian and a providentialist, that is, someone who believes that God has a plan for each of us. Since they cannot be ghosts, apparitions can only be angels or devils. How can we tell the two apart, given that more often than not they appear in disguise? Answer: angels are the ones who guide us on the path God has prescribed for us, devils the ones who try to lead us astray. Where do angels reside when they are not visiting the sublunar earth? Answer: in the Void, that is, in that part of the universe not occupied by physical objects.

This more or less sums up the theoretical side of Defoe's Essay. The rest is taken up with case histories, a few drawn from the Bible, a few from the classics, the overwhelming majority from Defoe's England, narrated with an engaging art whose chief concern is to seem to be artless.

For those who think that angels belong to a superstitious age, and that Defoe's interest in them is merely quaint, Michel Serres' Angels (1993) may be a corrective. We are in transition, says Serres, from a cosmology that treats of physical objects to a cosmology of messages. The map of the universe is unceasingly being redrawn for us by angel-messengers. If we don't see them, that is because it is in the nature of the messenger to disappear in favor of the message.

In this new edition of the Essay, Defoe's text occupies 283 pages. In addition we are offered a useful 86-page historical introduction and 204 pages of scholarly apparatus. Whether the text is reliable I am not in a position to say. The fact that Kit Kincade has not proofread her own introduction does not breed confidence.