Beyond Furbank and Owens: A New Consideration of the Evidence for the “Defoe” Canon

As long as Defoe lived and wrote, he whistled many of his favourite airs. And if his friends would take the trouble to listen to them, he might … be almost entirely preserved.

John Robert Moore

It was … Defoe’s common practice to conceal his authorship. It is the task of the student of Defoe to discover it.

John Robert Moore

… your Ldpp will perceive I have Disguised the Stile, and I am perswaded no body will so much as guess it is mine.

Daniel Defoe¹

The radical reduction in the Defoe canon proposed by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens has put Defovians in a variety of states ranging from acceptance, to doubt and consternation, to fury and denial. In 1988, Furbank and Owens published The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe,² challenging the soundness of the 570-item canon laid out in John Robert Moore’s A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe.³ In doing so, they confronted a problem that some scholars had worried about but none had ever really tried to reckon with. The sheer quantity was startling: could even a very industrious man have written so much, so fast, and for so many years? Yet more disturbing was the fact that many of the works in Moore’s canon were there simply because they “sounded like” or seemed “characteristic of” Defoe and no scholar had proven that they were by anyone else. Surveying the history of the growth of the canon, Furbank and Owens delivered a polite but blunt message: attributions should no longer be made from style and content alone, and serious reconsiderations were in order. Six years later they brought out Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist, objecting even more forcefully to Moore’s principles of attribution and arguing for the removal of 252 works.⁴ In 1998, they published A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, setting forth their revised canon comprising 276 items, divided into “certain” and “probable.”⁵

Some scholars have naturally resisted the proposed reduction, but a surprising number of the published responses to Furbank and Owens’s three books were essentially positive. Reviewers have pointed out minor inconsistencies or omissions, and critics have objected to the removal of this pamphlet or that one, but several established scholars in the field expressed relief at having Moore’s monster canon called into question. Reviewing Defoe De-Attributions, J. Paul Hunter lamented that “It is nothing less than a professional scandal that it has taken a full century to approach the Defoe Bubble with a pointed argument.” Whether or not we agree with particular judgments made by Furbank and Owens, he continued, they “have done important professional service in making us face the attribution issue with more than hunches and knacks.”⁶

That the bloated canon enshrined in Moore’s Checklist must be abandoned is generally conceded. The question that now needs to be addressed is whether the Furbank and Owens Critical Bibliography gives us a solid foundation on which to base future criticism and scholarship. Few people want to worry about evidence in attribution, and many students of Defoe seem to take the view that as of 1998 we are working from a rock-bottom, minimal canon that will probably expand a bit over time. They assume that, if the loudest advocates of conservative attribution include a work, then we can safely regard it as at least “probably” Defoe’s. I want to suggest that this is a dangerous kind of false confidence. If one actually examines the attributional evidence for the reduced canon, one quickly discovers that in a startling number of cases the proof of authorship is far from definitive, and in all too many it is worryingly dodgy. We need to take a hard look at the nature of the evidence and make some vital distinctions. My object is neither to de-attribute what Furbank and Owens include nor to re-attribute what they exclude from the canon. Rather, I want to try to develop what they have given us. The...