Defoe's "Mobbish" Utopias

Abstract

Daniel Defoe was regarded by many of his contemporaries as a somewhat sinister figure—a representative of the “commonwealth principles” that had propelled the rebellion against Charles I and the advent of Oliver Cromwell. He was viewed, particularly by the Tories, as a proponent of mob rule, an enemy of the divine right of kings, and a proponent of a completely egalitarian society. The Whigs had a somewhat more favorable opinion of him, at least until his defense of the “Tory” peace with France in 1712. Most of these criticisms were correct. Some of his principles were indeed both “Hobbish” and “Mobbish.” In fact, Defoe believed in the equality of each person at birth, and he believed that government, at its moment of formation, depended on the will of every person. He also believed that a properly informed “mob,” such as that of the Revolution of 1688–89, might be the instrument through which a bad government could be removed. But if self-defense was his most essential principle, he did not believe it would ever lead to absolutism. The heroes and heroines of his fictions tend to rise, through their natural abilities, from dire poverty or extreme conditions to considerable wealth.

At the beginning of Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton, Captain Bob, acting as if he is being interviewed for a biographical dictionary recording the deeds of great men such as he, notes that he cannot give much information about his "Pedigree" other than knowing that he was stolen away from his parents, sold to a woman, and used as a sales prop, much as Daniel Day Lewis does with an orphan in There Will Be Blood.¹ Some irony may implicate the wealthy pirate who perhaps half-believes he is indeed a great figure, but most of it points to the concept of noble birth as nonsensical. As Defoe was to argue in the conclusion to his poem, The True-Born Englishman, such concepts are a "Cheat": it is only what we achieve—"Personal Virtue"—that makes us "great."² And why not after all a great, famous pirate? At the base of Defoe's conception of society, spread through his journalism, poetry, and novels, is a radical egalitarian ethic—no more radical perhaps than that which informed the English Jacobins at the end of the century, but radical enough for a time when Henry Gandy could proclaim, in 1707, that the people had no power, no rights, and no access to the sword.³ All power came from God and was lodged in the monarch. Despite John Locke's derision, Sir Robert Filmer, that enthusiastic advocate of patriarchalism, still had his followers.⁴

In describing Defoe's politics, Ned Ward rhymed "Mobbish" with "Hobbish."⁵ He regarded everything that Defoe had to say about politics as completely wrongheaded. The talk of natural rights (particularly the right to self-preservation), a seeming indifference to the monarchy, an antipathy toward the Church of England—to Ward, all of this was radical. And to his mind Defoe had taken Thomas Hobbes's arguments about a right to self-defense and made them popular through his poetry and journalism.⁶ Indeed Defoe turned this part of Hobbes's ideas into an indisputable fact of existence and politics:

No man was ever yet so void of Sense,As to debate the Right of Self-Defence;A Principle so grafted in the Mind,With Nature born, and does like Nature bind:Twisted with Reason, and with Nature too:As neither one nor t'other can undo.⁷

Ward considered such beliefs to be a return to 1642 and 1649: the revolt against Charles I, his beheading, and the power of the army under Henry Ireton.⁸

Ward, of course, was a High Church Tory and continued to attack Defoe throughout the reign of Queen Anne. And he was hardly alone in viewing Defoe as an agent provocateur. One writer said, on noticing Defoe at a celebration, that one could see the "downfall of Parliaments in his very Countenance."⁹ Others saw him as an opponent of both the monarchy and of Parliament, and still others, like Ward, accused him of trying to bring back "Commonwealth-Principles."¹⁰ John Dunton called him "Bold."¹¹ The author of The Reformer Reform'd accused him of advocating "King Killing."¹² Like Ward, Mary Astell argued that Defoe was a follower of Hobbes in that he placed the law above the monarchy. Indeed Defoe's assumed persona, the "Poor Man," has no reluctance about referring to himself as part of the "Mob" in protesting the unfair treatment of the poor by the Law.¹³ At the very least, his writings were unsettling.

Everything that Defoe had to say about the "Rights" of the citizenry infuriated his enemies. It was not only The True Born Englishman, the Hymn to the Pillory, and The Original Rights of the People of England that seemed to irritate his opponents, it was a seeming tolerance of mob behavior. As Defoe put it in the latter:

The Government's ungirt when Justice dies,And Constitutions are non Entities:The Nation's all a Mob; there's no such thingAs Lords and Commons, Parliament or King,A great promiscuous Croud the Hydra lies,Till Laws revive, and mutual Contract ties.A Chaos free to chuse for their own shareWhat Case of Government they please to wear.¹⁴

In the fight over the Kentish Petitioners and the Legion Papers, Defoe showed a contempt for Parliament or what was supposed to be the people as represented in Parliament. The true voice of the people was not to be found there, he contended. And in signing the protest as Legion ("our name is Legion for we are many"), he was evoking the image of the "unclean spirits" whom Jesus encountered and overcame.¹⁵ The biblical allusion gave to this protest a Satanic political force—a seeming revolt of the masses. These years mark a time when Defoe was an activist radical. The story of his assuming the disguise of a woman when delivering the petition to Robert Harley, the then leader of Parliament, may be apocryphal, but the delivering itself was daring enough.¹⁶ There is no doubt that at this point in his life, Defoe was in the midst of the political action and enjoying every minute.

Defoe interpreted the Act of Settlement (1701) to mean that there was no real hereditary right to the throne. He may have been scornful of Parliament when it failed to carry out the beliefs of the people, but there was no question in Defoe's mind that Parliament had the right to choose what monarch would rule over England. He regarded any argument about royal blood as nonsense—the equivalent of "Tyranny."¹⁷ And his lengthy poem, Jure Divino, set out to show that attaching the concept of divinity to monarchs was ridiculous. Rehearsing the early history of monarchy in England, Defoe dismissed any divine claim to the throne:

The strongest King, the Weaker's Crown possest,Conquest was always Law, Descent's a Jest.¹⁸

He argued that the concept of divine right was an absurd idea that had been introduced relatively recently by James I. The established laws of the nation—the English "Constitution"—were always superior to those that any monarch might want to impose.¹⁹

Sections of Defoe's writings putting forward these notions were read aloud during the Sacheverell Trial (1710), shocking some members of the audience. His comment in the Review attacking the notion of the divine right of monarchs argued, with some hyperbole, that Queen Anne "had no more title to the crown than my Lord Mayor's Horse."²⁰ This horrified Abigail Harley, who was present at the trial and who felt it proved that both the Church and the State were in danger.²¹ It is hardly surprising then that the 1711 engraving of The Whig's Medley by George Bickham, which had Defoe as its central figure, surrounded by the Pope and the Devil, also included a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, thereby associating the writer with the radicalism of the Interregnum (see Figure 1). Bickham's insinuation that Defoe was somehow an agent of the Vatican was unusual; less so was the notion that he was somehow in the pay of the Devil. But that his ideas represented a continuation of the radical politics of the Interregnum, along with the execution of Charles I, was a common theme in many pamphlets

Figure 1.

George Bickham, The Whig's Medly: The Three False Brethren (1711).

© The Trustees of the British Museum.

of the time. After the rioting of 1715, Defoe wrote his Hymn to the Mob. He exhorted the mob to recognize the advantages of having George I as King, but in the process he put forward the viewpoint that, although the mob might occasionally be led astray, it was usually right.

     Nor is thy Judgment often wrong,Thou seldom are mistaken, never long;However wrong in Means thou may'st appear,Thou gener'ly art in thy Designs sincere;     Just Government and LibertyOften's upheld, always belov'd by thee.²²

All of this amounts to a career in which Defoe was perceived as radical and subversive. Admittedly some of this resulted from his desire to scandalize his contemporaries. When the first issue of the Review appeared, dedicated to accurately describing France's status in Europe at a time when England was at war with that nation, Sidney Godolphin wrote a letter suggesting that Defoe should be tried for treason. In fact, Defoe was hardly supporting the French; he was mainly recounting the history of French power in Europe to a largely uninformed audience. But putting aside this inclination to shock his audience, he also held a radical Whig view of political power.

When it came to writing fiction, Defoe finds its expression in the stories of successful criminals—pirates, thieves, prostitutes, and courtesans—that he wrote. And he made his readers like them. As previously mentioned, Captain Singleton wants his narrative to be equivalent to a genre not yet invented: the biographies of successful businessmen. Defoe often enough compared stock jobbers to thieves.²³ If they were permitted to keep their ill-gotten gains, buy an estate, and pass as gentlemen, why should not a retired pirate? Moll Flanders ends up returning to England after her transportation to Virginia (and subsequent sojourn in Maryland) and living off her earnings as a thief, with the husband she always wanted, along with a loving son.²⁴ Only on rare occasions do we laugh at her as we might at the traditional picaresque heroine. Instead, we sympathize with her sufferings and how she was driven by necessity. When she is imprisoned, we feel her sorrow, we want her to escape somehow, and we enjoy her final success.

In some ways, Colonel Jack embodies Defoe's idealization of how a man born into poverty might advance himself in the world. His foster mother told him that his father was a gentleman, and this motivates him despite a variety of setbacks. After being advised about securing the money he makes as a thief, he strives to educate himself, teaching himself to read and write. Jack eventually becomes a wealthy plantation owner in the North American colonies. He further educates himself with the help of a tutor and, at least in his own mind, achieves the status of a gentleman. A true gentleman, in Defoe's view, was not necessarily someone born to an estate, but rather a person who had educated himself and had a certain degree of wealth.²⁵ By the dominant standards of his time, though, a person who had actually worked could not claim to be a gentleman no matter how wealthy he might be. However, that wealth might enable his children to claim that they had wiped away the stain of actual labor. After achieving the status of a wealthy plantation owner in the North American colonies, Jack goes abroad and becomes a Lieutenant Colonel in the French army at a time when a military officer could claim gentility.²⁶ There are problems with Jack's pursuit of gentility. He gets implicated in the Jacobite cause, and toward the end he becomes involved in an illicit trade with various people in the Spanish colonies. But at the conclusion Jack is back on his plantation, a true gentleman in Defoe's eyes.²⁷ It was a radical concept of gentility.

It seems to me that some recent critics have failed to see this radical aspect of Defoe. It was apparent enough to a number of critics of the twentieth century—especially the Marxist critic Arnold Kettle, whose two-volume Introduction to the English Novel first appeared between 1951 and 1953. He admired Defoe's treatment of members of the lower classes and of their insistence on struggling to survive.²⁸ After all, Defoe had been willing to support workers against what Kettle's generation termed the "bosses."²⁹ Ian Watt, of course, admitted to being a Marxist of a sort and credited Defoe with starting the novel, even if his training in a Cambridge dominated by Q. D. and F. R. Leavis brought him to deny Defoe the status of a true artist.³⁰ The exaltation of realism as the essence of the novel may have been a passing phase, but Defoe's interest in extreme states of being—solitude and sickness along with sympathy for the poor—will surely always attract readers and scholars of fiction.

Perhaps the most interesting example of this sympathy occurs in A Journal of the Plague Year. I am not pointing to the wonderfully sympathetic conversation with the Waterman, whose family has become sick from the plague. I have dealt with this almost Wordsworthian encounter elsewhere.³¹ What I want to look at more closely are the travels of the three artisans through London to Epping Forest and the society that they construct along with other Londoners fleeing from the plague. I want to approach it from the standpoint of its radical view of social and political origins: how societies get built.

The reader of A Journal of the Plague Year needs to respond to a situation in which government is temporarily dissolved. H. F., who carries the burden of the narrative, may applaud the methods used by the Lord Mayor of London to provide food for the poor as a means of keeping order. He also has a Malthusian appreciation of the swiftness of the plague itself in carrying off so many of those who might have revolted against all order. But the narrative of the three artisans tells another story—that of government reduced to the relationship of a few friends. Perhaps Ward was not so far off in seeing Defoe as a follower of Hobbes. Defoe did believe that the right of self-defense took priority over any other aspect of existence. The three artisans reject any attempt by legal authorities to prevent them from crossing through the city to safety. Although they never have to use physical force to overcome their opponents, they are certainly determined to prevail against the obstacles placed in their way, particularly the attempts of officials to restrict the movement of persons wishing to leave London.

The aim of the three artisans is survival for themselves, but they are not unwilling to take up with people they meet along the way. When they finally manage to settle in Epping Forest, they restart society more or less from the beginning. They get their own food and find people to manufacture what they need. We don't learn in any detail what happens to their community after the plague is over, except for being told that the severe cold made life difficult and that the three artisans eventually returned to the city. The narrative shifts back to H. F. and to the pronouncement of both his and London's survival. But this notion of founding society anew without titles of nobility, with "no one there to tell us / What to do," as the Beatles would have it, was always at the back of Defoe's mind, whether he was contemplating London mobs or Crusoe on his island.

What can be said about this small utopian grouping, and what does it tell us about Defoe's way of looking at society—a viewpoint that, through his fictions, managed to be in some ways more influential than any of the more clearly organized utopias written during this period? To begin with, we might recognize its essentially egalitarian elements. Defoe had, after all, experimented with this in his Crusoe volumes. Crusoe was supposed to illustrate the essential sameness of all human beings: the idea that each of us contains within him- or herself the seeds of invention that Crusoe draws upon in his varied degrees of success as a hunter and gatherer, pastoralist, farmer, manufacturer of pots, and weaver of baskets. His semi-ironic notions of himself as monarch of his island ruling over his pets, then, gradually, compelling allegiance through gratitude, and finally governing through real and implicit contracts should not disguise the essential egalitarian quality of this island utopia. There is no aristocratic class. When Crusoe boasts of the toleration that prevails among the later inhabitants of his island as including Catholics, Protestants, and Friday's Father, a pagan, Crusoe does not distinguish among them on the basis of class. And if he upbraids himself for failing to act as a kind of governor for them, for not providing some kind of control over those whom he considers his subjects, he nevertheless refuses to assume that role or to establish some kind of order. If the colony seems doomed to failure at the end, it is unclear what lesson the reader was to draw, but the more or less anarchic colony that he discovers on returning to his island seems to be functioning well enough.

Defoe enjoyed playing with the paradoxical extremes of anarchic life. Hence his interest in the liberty that governed the pirate life in which the boatswain, rather than the captain, was the real leader—in which the potential excesses of the captain were always kept under control. Thus his version of the real (though mostly mythical) Captain Avery and the fictional Captain Singleton lead a very independent and dangerous band of pirates. In both cases, they eventually flee from pirate society, preferring instead to live a dangerous life of disguise in England. Defoe seems to be saying that anarchy is fun but that some form of government is necessary. He was an advocate of high wages for workers at a time when mercantilist economics demanded paying as little as possible.³² And at times he flirted with the ideas of the Levellers during an era when the very notion of doing so was anathema from the standpoint of both economics and politics. In other words, the radical political experiments of the Interregnum, more or less unmentionable during the decades following the Restoration, caught the attention of at least one interested journalist during the early eighteenth century.

This brings us back to 1722 and A Journal of the Plague Year. In the seemingly heroic artisans, functioning in a world in which all true government had apparently broken down, Defoe once more confronts the reader with a society formed under extreme conditions. In some ways, the situation resembled that of his proposal for a self-sustaining colony for the Palatine refugees in New Forest in 1707.³³ Defoe was to replay that scheme in his Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1724 where he supplied a diagram of the imaginary community with straight streets and a square in the middle.³⁴ Such schemes are typical enough of Defoe the projector, but it is significant that such imagined communities are set away from the world of commerce with which he is so often associated. Thus it is not entirely surprising that in the same Tour in which he appears to revel in the magnificence of London, he also informs the reader that it may one day collapse entirely. If Defoe enjoyed the spectacle of the growth of a commercial society, there was a part of him that fantasized about starting over again with a more or less egalitarian social structure and a primitive economy.

The view of Defoe's positions that I have been outlining contrasts oddly with the many recent laments that appeared on the occasion of the 300^th anniversary of the publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, most of which presented Defoe as a firm monarchist and a reactionary.³⁵ Let me end this essay with a few replies to these objections, along with some admissions of what, from a modern standpoint, may be regarded as Defoe's faults. As I have shown, Defoe was not a strong believer in hereditary monarchy. He was certainly in favor of colonial expansion. But he was not in any sense a believer in the racial superiority of Europeans.³⁶ Of course, the thoughts and actions of Defoe's fictional characters are not to be confused with what we know, with some certainty, to be the settled principles of their creator. And there may be a lesson in that: although Crusoe dreams of acquiring slaves, in Friday he finds someone equivalent to a student and a companion. Similarly, Lincoln Faller notes that Defoe's advocacy of treating slaves well through the character of Colonel Jack is hardly a satisfying position.³⁷ As an economist, Defoe defended slavery; as a moralist, he condemned it.³⁸ Defoe believed that the existence of society depended upon a hierarchy based on property, but, unlike many his contemporaries, he believed in a society open to individual initiative. And he acknowledged the legitimacy of the attempts of those without property to correct violations of the law by engaging in violent protest and rebellion as they had in 1688. He did not believe in suppressing the poor.³⁹ Gratitude is the motivation that binds Friday to Crusoe, and to a great extent Defoe followed Seneca's view of a society based on such a system.⁴⁰ Other ways in which a society might function in Defoe's system were through contract and through power. Although Crusoe insists on a contract of obedience from the Spanish sailors he brings to his island, it is never enforced. The invention of guns gave Western forces an advantage over societies without firearms, and Defoe seemed to believe that where such power existed it would be used, that, as he wrote in Jure Divino, "all Men wou'd be Tyrants if they durst."⁴¹ And as he argued throughout that poem, it was up to each individual to assert his own liberty and equality when encountering the will of those trying to infringe upon his natural rights.