Defoe’s America (review)

In this absorbing book, Mr. Todd tightly focuses on Defoe’s knowledge of the American colonies from Brazil to the Chesapeake Bay. Defoe’s colonial novels, principally Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Colonel Jack, are admired for the realism of their descriptions of historical events and places. Surprisingly no one has examined the accuracy of Defoe’s representation of America in his novels. We have assumed that Defoe’s enthusiastic accounts of the success of transported felons and shipwrecked adventurers in the New World were based on fact, or at least on solid probabilities. Mr. Todd’s research, however, uncovers some contradictions to Defoe’s optimistic view of the colonial experience. Cycles of economic depression in the late seventeenth century—the period depicted in the novels—made emigration to Virginia and the Carolinas risky. The original landowners, who had come over in the 1640s and 1650s, did very well, but those who followed in the 1670s and 1680s were likely never to escape servitude of one sort or another. Nor did their prospects improve much in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe embraced servitude, making it a cornerstone of the spiritual regeneration that his fictional narrators attain, but the experience of actual transported felons was very different.

In separate chapters on each of these three novels, Mr. Todd examines the extent of Defoe’s knowledge of conditions in the colonies and measures it against his representations in the narratives. Crusoe is the story of a renegade’s struggle to control his own passions and to subdue the savage within. This story is actually a “double conversion” narrative in that Crusoe must reason himself into a knowledge of Christianity in order to convert and civilize his Carib servant Friday. Mr. Todd sees a parallel between Crusoe’s conversion experience and that of the American colonies as a whole after 1690: the colonialists had by that time fallen away from their original religious purposes in settling the New World. Consequently, their relations with such Indian tribes as the Iroquois became antagonistic, and when the Indians turned to the French for assistance, the English settlements on the East coast were jeopardized. Thus Defoe’s fictional history of Crusoe was probably intended to serve as a model for recovering the original spirit and method of colonizing America through the conversion of native Americans. Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders also represent, and to a degree misrepresent, the colonial experience of transportation, servitude, and self-transformation. Jack’s transformation from thief to servant to master seems implausible, and Moll’s reformation strikes many readers as incomplete, but Defoe overcomes our doubts (and his own) in part because these novels are set in America, where anything seems possible.

Mr. Todd’s book is timely because it coincides with the emerging practice of reading English and American literatures not as national or regional entities, but as cultural movements across borders in which literary genres both effect change and are themselves transformed by their subjects. He contrasts Defoe’s novels with narratives written by indentured servants; Defoe subtly altered the loneliness and alienation typical of such narratives into stories of redemption and prosperity. His purpose was not to falsify the experience of servitude, but to offer hope to a class of persons whose chance of rising in the world was small as long as they remained in England, while he also sought to ensure the survival of the English colonies at a time when they seemed most vulnerable. If in the process he laid the foundation of the English novel, that was an unintended consequence.