The Political History of the Devil by Daniel Defoe (review)

117 tunes in the War of the Austrian Succession. In the Female Spectator, Book V, for example, Haywood reproves unladylike contemporaries by referring to ‘‘Pandour and Talapack Ladies.’’Citing the OED in this instance, the annotator identifies thepandours as notoriously savage Croatian troops but fails to remark how very current Haywood’s 1744 comment is: the pandours were formed only in 1741; the earliest OED citation dates from 1747. (‘‘Talapacks’’ are probably the Hungarian soldiers called tolpatches.) This edition will foster more careful scrutiny of Haywood’s attention to party and domestic politics. Mr. Pettit and his co-editors have splendidly met our current need to contextualize Haywood’s fiction. However, to do so much so well raises hopes for even more. It is no modern fad to insist that Haywood was a novelist. Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, which emphasized her fiction (there are very few poems), was more durable than its 1724 rival, The Works of Mrs. Eliza Haywood; Consisting of Novels, Letters, Poems, and Plays. I hope this edition will eventually also include the works through which Haywood first won her literary fame. David Oakleaf University of Calgary DANIEL DEFOE. The Political History of the Devil, ed. Irving N. Rothman and R. Michael Bowerman. New York: AMS, 2003. Pp. cvii ⫹ 605. $178.50. Defoe published his Political History of the Devil in 1726, when his fictionalhistories of adventurers, pirates, whores, thieves, courtesans, and other persons driven by the devil were behind him. The book may thus be profitably read as a coda to his most imaginative period as a writer, a final justification of the view of man- and womankind that he had set out in his fiction. But in other ways the book calls to mind Defoe’s first long satire on mankind, the Consolidator, published in 1705. Both of these long (probably overlong) books regard mankind from a highly privileged position—the Consolidator from the Moon, where all things on Earth appear ‘‘lunatick,’’and The Political History of the Devil from the supernatural, an imaginative point from which the hidden workings of the universe may be observed. The Consolidator and The Political History of the Devil are the bookends of Defoe’s career as a writer, twin monuments to his learning and his tiresome garrulity that explain in general terms what his fictional histories of Robinson, Jack, Moll, and Roxana explore as particular cases. The fact that Defoe used the supernatural as a narrative point of view from which to regard mankind does not prove that he believed in the literal existence of the Devil, any more than the Consolidator proves that he believed in the Man in the Moon. He was a philosophical realist who gave credit only to the verifiable products of sense experience or to revelation embodied in Scripture. As the narrator of the History, he is certain that the Devil exists, but equally certain that no one alive has seen him, especially in his own form; nor is Holy Scripture itself much help, he says, since the references to Satan found there can be interpreted in so many different ways. The bestknown modern representation of the Devil is found in Paradise Lost, which the narrator of the History subjects to scrutiny and finds wanting. In Milton’s account of the Fall, Satan appears as an inexplicably fallen angel, Hell is pictured as a location rather than 118 a state of mind, and Christ is created not so much as the Son of God as a political scheme for restoring the balance of power in Heaven. The narrator dismisses Milton’s account of the battle for Heaven as ‘‘all invention, or at least, a borrow’d thought from the old Poets, and the fight of the Giants against Jupiter, so nobly design’d by Ovid, almost two thousand years ago; and there ‘twas well enough; but whether Poetic Fancy should be allow’d to fable upon Heaven, or no, I leave that to the Sages.’’ Instead of poetic fancy, Defoe proposes to describe the nature of the Devil by observing cases, or in other words telling stories of persons whose erratic or violent behavior can be explained only by attributing it to...