 |
BEYOND FURBANK AND OWENS: A NEW CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE
FOR THE "DEFOE" CANON
|  |
BEYOND FURBANK AND OWENS: A NEW CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE FOR THE "DEFOE" CANON
by Ashley Marshall
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 first word in my title is precisely what is meant—not "contra" in any sense, but beyond Furbank and Owens. In what follows I do critique their apparent inconsistencies, but only in order to build a more refined and subtle version of the Bibliography they have provided. My aim is to put forward an alternative representation of their results in a format designed to communicate more clearly the realities of the "Defoe" canon—to sensitize us to the nature and solidity (or lack of same) of the evidence we currently have. Furbank and Owens offer three possible verdicts: definite, probable, and de–attributed. I want to demonstrate that in quite a lot of particular cases a more nuanced and tentative judgment is as far as the evidence can carry us.
1. The Logic of the Furbank and Owens Canon
When Furbank and Owens decided to tackle the problem of Defoe's canon, they inherited a mess. From George Chalmers (1790) to Moore, bibliographer after bibliographer had wished to add works, often without any good basis for doing so. Moore in particular was motivated by an impulse to attribute new titles and by enormous faith in his ability to hear Defoe's voice in anonymous texts. Many scholars accepted his attributions without doubt or demur, glad to
Furbank and Owens stress "three fundamental rules" that need to be followed in attribution. The first is that one cannot "base any part of one's argument on some other merely probable attribution." In other words, parallels drawn from works tentatively assigned to Defoe are not admissible. Their second stipulation is simply that one should not add a work to the canon without explaining why one is doing so—an obvious desideratum, but one whose importance any user of Moore's Checklist will understand. The third principle is in some ways the most vital: plausibility alone is not enough. A piece dealing with a subject Defoe is known to have been concerned about and written in a style not incompatible with his should not be added to the canon solely on that basis. A corollary to that principle is that a work should not be admitted "provisionally" (i.e., "until some better candidate for authorship appears").8
The key question, for my purposes, is what constitutes evidence. On what grounds do Furbank and Owens include a work, or remove it, or label it merely "probable"? The great problem in Defoe studies from Chalmers to Moore has been excessive reliance on internal, and especially stylistic, evidence—meaning thematic parallels with other known writings, similar uses of language, or an idiosyncratic line of argumentation. Furbank and Owens are rightly suspicious of "favourite phrases," which count for almost nothing in their Bibliography. They
For an item to be treated as definitively Defoe's, therefore, Furbank and Owens demand at least a scrap of external evidence. External evidence takes the form, they say, of "contemporary witness"—by which they mean "a contemporary affirmation as to a work's authorship, whether by a known person or otherwise." They "extend the term 'contemporary' to include a posthumous attribution to Defoe during the years in which he was still a living memory," and define those years as "any time before the publication of Chalmers's 'List of Writings' of 1790" (xxvi). Why sixty years (rather than twenty or forty or ninety) they do not explain, but for them an attribution to Defoe made before the end of 1789 counts as legitimate external evidence. Like stylistic evidence, "contemporary" attribution is suggestive rather than probative: if an unreliable or unknown source assigns a work to Defoe that seems to be totally un-Defovian, then for them the attribution does not stand. They weight external evidence much more heavily than internal, in other words, but they are prepared to reject an eighteenth-century attribution on the basis of a work's content.
Furbank and Owens's assessment of the internal and external evidence leads them to sort works into three categories—certain attributions, probable attributions, and de-attributions. For an item to be labeled "certain," they require one piece of external evidence plus stylistic/thematic plausibility. "Probable" works are supported by more than one piece of internal evidence or by a possible but unproven piece of external evidence (e.g., "this might be the pamphlet Defoe refers to in a letter"). Furbank and Owens de-attribute items for which (from their point of view): (a) there is only slight and speculative internal evidence and nothing external; or (b) there is external evidence negated by the implausibility of the style or content. Items belonging to the third category—out of the canon—are listed in their Defoe De-Attributions volume.9 The Critical Bibliography includes the remaining 276 items, divided into certain and probable (the latter labeled "P").
Samuel Schoenbaum's scathing critique of attribution studies as of the mid–1960s seems painfully relevant here: "attribution studies frequently offer little or nothing in the way of description or defense of the methods employed. In some cases apparently no thought has been given to methodology, or so one would conclude from the cavalier violations of ordinary principles of logical procedure." The "vague standard of doing 'the best one can', offered instead," he continues, "may seem inadequate to the conscientious student faced with the frustrating complexities of a canon." See Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship: An Essay in Literary History and Method (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 162–163. In the same year appeared Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution, ed. David V. Erdman and Ephim G. Fogel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), comprising thirty-one old and new essays plus a bibliography of more than a hundred pages. Evidence for Authorship opens with Arthur Sherbo's "The Uses and Abuses of Internal Evidence," a ringing endorsement of attribution from parallels in style and content of the sort that (we now discover) underlie a very large number of items in the Defoe canon, even the reduced canon of Furbank and Owens. If Defovians had evaluated Moore's attributions in the light of the eight criteria proposed by Schoenbaum, or had taken on board Fogel's "Salmons in Both, or Some Caveats for Canonical Scholars" (chap. 4 of Evidence for Authorship), a vigorous rebuttal of Sherbo, the Defoe bubble would have been popped just as the boom in criticism of his "novels" was getting under way.
2. Practical and Conceptual Issues
The methodology adopted by Furbank and Owens is obviously vastly more conservative than those employed by earlier Defoe bibliographers, and their conservatism is a good thing. But, as some reviewers have noticed, there is a significant problem with Furbank and Owens's attributional policies, as well as a variety of inconsistencies in the execution of those policies. I want here briefly
First, the one serious reservation about Furbank and Owens's policy on evidence. What they have to say about internal evidence is essentially sound, but their notion of external evidence is disconcerting.10 Any attribution made before 1790 is deemed "contemporary"—a loose definition of contemporaneity. (By this standard, James Joyce [d. 1941] would have been a living memory as late as the year 2000.) That some posthumous references should be considered valid is clear; in the 1730s, and possibly in the 1740s, Defoe was still very much a "living memory." There is no inherently right cutoff date. But why not stop at (say) the list of writings included in the 1753 Shiels/Cibber "life" of Defoe? Not much is attributed for the first time to Defoe in the years between 1753 and the mid-1770s, by which point we are nearly half a century beyond his death. Why did Furbank and Owens extend their notion of "contemporary" to include the 1770s and 1780s? Probably this was not an arbitrary decision, but one having to do with the fact that the only external evidence we have for linking Defoe to most of his "novels" dates from the years between 1775 and 1787. Of the fiction only Robinson Crusoe, Col. Jacque, and A Journal of a Plague Year had been publicly attributed to him as of 1753. The situation remained essentially unchanged for another twenty years. Captain Singleton is advertised as Defoe's in 1767,11 and in the 1770s and 1780s, a rogue bookseller named Francis Noble assigned to Defoe mangled versions of Moll Flanders and Roxana, as well as Memoirs of a Cavalier (the last mostly faithful to the original). After someone else credited Defoe with A New Voyage in 1786, Noble promptly issued a three-volume edition of that work under Defoe's name. I have discussed Noble and his connection to Defoe's fiction at length elsewhere.12 At the moment what matters is that Noble is all the external evidence we have for attributing two thirds of "Defoe's" most important fiction to him.
Concerns about what constitutes contemporaneity in external evidence notwithstanding, we need to ask just how consistently Furbank and Owens apply the criteria they promulgated for attribution. The answer is less reliably than one might hope, though in fairness one must admit that the nature and scope of the
The evaluation of internal evidence is likewise sometimes disquieting. Several items in the De-Attributions volume are removed from the canon because one piece of stylistic evidence is in itself inadequate. For example: "Defoe was unquestionably fond of this anecdote, but on its own ..." (no. 324a), they say, and no. 334 includes a remark that is "very close to a line" from The Mock Mourners, but "the allusion, if it is one, could admit of various explanations."15 That one suggestive internal tidbit does not constitute a sufficient basis for attribution seems a sound conclusion. But several works labeled "probable" in the Critical
Part of Furbank and Owens's procedure is to ask whether a work for which we have external evidence of Defoe's is a plausible attribution. Broadly speaking, this is a sensible policy. We want to know whether something ascribed to Defoe by a contemporary could have been written by him. One obvious problem with trying to determine Defovianness is that the works we can be certain he wrote are relatively few in number, and many of them date from early in his career. A second problem is that we need to allow for fits of temper and changes of mind. A work that does not square with what Defoe said elsewhere is not necessarily an implausible attribution. To say that Defoe "sometimes wrote badly, but ... was not capable of certain kinds of badness, as of certain kinds of excellence" is problematic.16 Highly skilled and competent people have bad days. Given all the uncertainties surrounding Defoe, "assume nothing" is probably a good guideline for proceeding.
A core principle for Furbank and Owens is that one should never make a new attribution without explaining one's reasons. But if one is undertaking a drastic reconsideration of the old canon, then one ought to take the opportunity to provide reasons for the retention of every item. For most of the "novels," no such case is made. We are duly told about Gildon's attribution of Crusoe to Defoe. The sequels, Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections, are presumably in the Critical Bibliography because Defoe scholars seem always to have assumed that the author of the first part is necessarily the author of what follows.17 This is not the place to test that presumption, but the point is that Furbank and Owens did not explain the nature of the evidence that justified the preservation of the sequels in the "definite" category. Unfortunately, the same could be said of Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, Col. Jacque, Roxana, and A New Voyage.
The only significant work of fiction (other than Crusoe) for which Furbank and Owens give anything beyond the shaky external evidence is Memoirs of a Cavalier,
At this point I want to move beyond the particularities of inconsistencies and oddities, and to consider the broader utility of the Critical Bibliography. What Furbank and Owens have accomplished in this and in their two previous books is phenomenal. They have effected a radical reduction of a much-cherished but much-swollen canon. What they did needed to be done, and if scholars do finally commit themselves to a smaller canon more scrupulously justified, that will be thanks largely to Furbank and Owens's pioneering efforts. The question is not whether their Bibliography has value—it is extremely valuable—but what we can (and cannot) safely use it for, and how it can be improved upon.
Let us remember the big picture. Almost all of the items Moore attributed to Defoe were published anonymously. In a huge number of cases, therefore, we have to depend upon something other than self-identification for the attribution. Furbank and Owens wisely insist upon external rather than internal evidence if a work is to be considered "certain," but extrinsic evidence varies wildly in quality, and most of it is proof of nothing. For that reason, they test contemporary attribution against content and style—also reasonable, though we need to remember that the apparent plausibility of subject and approach is likewise far from probative. In the Critical Bibliography, Furbank and Owens confer "certainty" and "probability" for a variety of reasons, arriving at their verdict by weighing different kinds of evidence, and then sort everything into only two categories. This division into "definite" and "likely" is potentially misleading. An item that is ascribed to Defoe by an enemy in his lifetime and that is stylistically plausible, Furbank and Owens label "certain"—but such an item is nothing like as certain as those of which he unambiguously acknowledged authorship.
What we need are more categories—that is point one. But we should remember that these categories cannot really reflect degrees of probability. What I am suggesting, in other words, is not that we re-categorize works into "definite," "highly probable," "somewhat probable," "slightly less probable," and so on. We need a layout and set of groupings that make clear the nature of the attributional evidence, but to assume that we can calculate the percentage of probability is foolish and dangerous. We can take the nature of the dubiety into account, but not the degree. For example, we can distinguish between an antagonistic or disreputable source and a sympathetic and reputable one. If the sainted Jacob Tonson
The problem we are dealing with here is twofold. First, we have no way of judging how likely most of the attributions are. Rogue booksellers and malicious rivals are not ideal sources, misinformation abounds, several items were attributed to Defoe but also to someone else, and Defoe's denials of authorship are surely sometimes but probably not always disingenuous. This is unfortunate, frustrating, and unfixable. The evidence is the evidence. The second problem is one we can address and it will be the subject of the next section.
There are five exceptions, works which appear in both Defoe De-Attributions and the Bibliography. About two de-attributions, Furbank and Owens explain, "we have now found reason somewhat to modify our opinion, and as regards three other works, though we feel unable to include them ... it seems wrong to us to pass them over in silence. Thus we discuss them in a separate section ... under the heading 'Unresolved problems in attribution'" (CB, xxviii). The two de-attributions that Furbank and Owens decided to restore—at least to "probable" status—are 188(P) and 193(P).
Some reviewers of the Critical Bibliography have pointed this out. See Tom Keymer, The Review of English Studies, n.s., 50 (1999): 533–536, at 535; and G. A. Starr, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12 (2000): 584-589. Starr justly complained that Furbank and Owens "may have good grounds for believing that [Defoe's] 'living memory' survived for sixty years, rather than thirty or ninety, but they do not give them" (587).
Noble associates Defoe with Captain Singleton again in his 1784 edition of Memoirs of a Cavalier. The 1767 advertisement is in The London Chronicle for 23–25 June.
Marshall, "Did Defoe Write Moll Flanders and Roxana?", Philological Quarterly 89 (2010): 209–241 Details on these attributions are provided in the table below. See also Furbank and Owens, "Defoe and Francis Noble," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1992): 301–313.
For discussion of the Boyer and Wodrow attributions, see Defoe De-Attributions, xiv-xvii. In the Political State for June 1717, Boyer attributed fourteen works to Defoe; Moore retained twelve of those in his Checklist; Furbank and Owens include seven in their Bibliography. Wodrow died in 1734. His attributions were not public, but were handwritten on his private collection of pamphlets. Eight works, Furbank and Owens explain, "may be described as first-time attributions ... in the sense that, by writing 'By Dan. De Foe' or some such phrase on his copies, he was the earliest person to associate them with Defoe" (xvi). Moore included all eight in his Checklist; Furbank and Owens admit only two (nos. 85 and 89(P)).
Defoe De-Attributions, 27. Here they are concurring with J. A. Downie, "Defoe and The Advantages of Scotland by an Incorporate Union with England: An Attribution Reviewed," PBSA 71 (1977): 489-493.
In another case, they explain that the first bibliographer to make an attribution must have been "merely influenced by the various quotations from and references to works by, or ascribed to, Defoe"—an influence they themselves sometimes seem under as well. See Defoe De-Attributions, 115 (item no. 401).
Furbank and Owens do not point out that Gildon attributes Farther Adventures (though not, of course, Serious Reflections) to Defoe in 1719; see the note to item 204 in the appendix below.
3. The Evidentiary Basis of the Furbank and Owens Canon
Invaluable though the Bibliography is, its structure and layout necessarily make the radical differences in the quality of the attributional evidence hard to appreciate. Users cannot easily see just how many of the items included are anything but solid and secure. In the appendix I have tried to provide a short-form representation of the entire Furbank and Owens canon, abandoning the "certain" and "probable" division and re-categorizing works according to the nature of the evidence we have for associating them with Defoe. The tabular form of the appendix is an attempt to represent the reduced canon in ways that make explicit, item by item, what the basis for inclusion actually is. This table is not a revision but an extension of Furbank and Owens's work: it is meant to represent their Bibliography in a way that should help us more readily grasp the complexities and limitations of the evidence on which it is based. In the next section I will try to offer some analytic conclusions, but first we need to understand exactly what we are dealing with. Let me reiterate an important point: my object is not to determine the authorship of these works. I have supplied additional evidence when I have become aware of it, but mostly the table is meant to illustrate their canon and its foundation. The aim is to make plain how many different kinds of evidence are at issue. I want both to clarify the nature of the basis for attribution in each case and to represent vividly in visual terms just how much of the Furbank and Owens canon comes from each sort of evidence.
The evidence for initial acceptance of a title into the Bibliography falls into six categories. The shorthand category names are listed here with brief explanations of what each one includes.
- Claimed by Defoe. This includes
items published in authorized collections, as well as those acknowledged
by name in letters, in the Review, or in An
140Appeal to Honour and Justice. Because the presence of a name on a title page is not necessarily proof of authorship,18 where the strongest piece of evidence is a title-page attribution the work is labeled "signed" rather than "claimed by Defoe."
- Signed. That is, a work is attributed to Defoe (or one of his known pseudonyms) on the title page or otherwise within the text.
- Contemporary attribution (made in Defoe's lifetime or in the first decade after his death).
- Late attribution (made any time between the 1740s and the end of the eighteenth century).
- Deduced from context. This includes works that are possibly referred to in other "Defoe" writings, or for which there is some other external referent.
- Deduced from content. Items in this category are generally consonant with Defoe's views, include passages similar to passages in "Defoe" writings, or contain favorite allusions or anecdotes.
Works belonging to the first category—claimed by Defoe—appear in boldface type in the table. They are the only works for which we have anything like certainty. The other categories are meant to be non-judgmental. In other words, the implication is not that items included on the basis of a contemporary attribution are necessarily more probable than works included because of a late attribution, or that either is preferable to one made on the basis of content alone. This is not a spectrum from very certain to highly doubtful and should not be taken as such. All categories except the first inevitably contain works of varying probability.
A work labeled "signed" means that it names Defoe as author (or is attributed to "the Author of the Review" or another pseudonym), or that it has "Defoe" in the title (e.g., no. 98, De Foe's Answer, to Dyer's Scandalous News Letter). Readers need to realize that Furbank and Owens de-attribute some works with such an identifier, as for example Good Advice to the Ladies ... By the Author of The True-Born Englishman (De-Attributions, no. 46).19 They observe that "many poems were saddled illegitimately upon" the author of Defoe's most famous poem, and so "one is thrown back on one's stylistic intuitions."20 Of Good Advice to the Ladies, they conclude that it does not seem stylistically characteristic of Defoe. Whether such a conclusion is accurate or not, the implication is that works signed with one of Defoe's pseudonyms and included as certain in the Bibliography have been admitted on the basis of their plausibility. What Furbank and Owens tend to say in accounts of such works is simply that there "seems no reason to doubt the attribution on the title-page" (e.g., nos. 68, 74, 75). Given that pseudonyms were often fraudulently applied by resourceful publishers, and that mere plausibility is not grounds enough to make an attribution, "signed" is necessarily less definitive than "claimed."
Having complained about Furbank and Owens's seemingly arbitrary cutoff date, I need to explain my distinction between "contemporary" and "late" attri
Of course we need to remember that all external evidence—whether "contemporary" or "late"—is suspect, suggestive rather than conclusive.23 An attribution made in 1714 is usually going to be weighted more heavily than one made in 1753, and both will generally inspire more confidence than one made in the mid-1780s. But even the "contemporary attribution" works, those attributed to Defoe in his lifetime or in the decade after his death, vary in the degree to which they inspire faith or doubt. Robinson Crusoe—a virtually certain ascription—belongs to the "contemporary attribution" category, but so does item 63, Queries upon the Bill against Occasional Conformity, attributed in an anonymous pamphlet to "A Dislocated Hosier." The "hosier" is very likely Defoe, which is why the ascription counts for Furbank and Owens as solid external evidence—but it is also less direct and certain than an allusion to "Daniel Defoe" by a known individual who was well-informed about the London publishing scene. I point out that roughly a fifth of the "contemporary attribution" items were also attributed in Defoe’s lifetime to someone other than him and/or were in some fashion disclaimed by him.
Works belonging to the "deduced-content" category are those supported by no external evidence. They are the weakest attributions, and most of them are considered no more than "probable" by Furbank and Owens. Crudely speaking, these items are those included because they have long been ascribed to Defoe and
The distinction between "deduced-content" and "deduced-context" is often smudgy. Works that contain allusions to other "Defoe" pieces belong to the former category; works that are alluded to in other texts belong to the latter. The attributional evidence for items deduced from context tends to be a bit more convincing than that for those deduced from content because it involves something extrinsic to the text (and to Defoe’s other "known" writings). But again there is wide variation. The strongest evidence for 140(P) and 141(P), Reasons against Fighting and A Further Search into the Conduct of the Allies, comes from a letter. Defoe explains that he is sending to Harley two works, one meant to make "people ... see How The wholl Nation was Forming into One Tribe of Issachar, and Taught to Couch Under The Tyranny of Our Neighbours," and the other written "in Answer to The Dutch Memorialls" with a similar purpose.25 The subtitle of the A Further Search includes the phrase "a Reply to the several Letters and Memorials of the States-General," and the content of the pamphlets suggests that these are in fact the two letters being referred to by Defoe. The authorship of both is deduced from something outside the text but not explicitly claimed by Defoe himself. The attribution is virtually certain without being absolutely so. One could say the same of 125(P). Several of the "deduced-context" items are works to which Defoe "might have" referred in his letters. The epistolary allusions are frustratingly varied in their specificity. In some cases, Defoe mentions a work more or less by name (see 134(P)), and in those instances I have categorized the work as "claimed." Elsewhere he simply describes a piece he has written or anticipates writing; where an item is supported by these vaguer, more ambiguous references, I have categorized it as "deduced-context."
This is in some ways the least satisfactory of the categories because of the wide range of evidence involved. A highly probable epistolary reference is strong evidence, but an item included because it is a continuation of a work Defoe only "might have" written seems far from being a secure attribution. Item 182(P), Some Considerations on a Law for Triennial Pamphlets, is a shaky "deduced-context" case. The best Furbank and Owens can say about this piece is that Crossley and Lee believe it to be the one to which Defoe refers in an article in the St. James’s Post, and that this hypothesis "seems plausible" (CB, 164). The argument for attribution is somewhat bolstered by a favorite allusion—but it is nothing like as compelling as the evidence for 140(P) and 141(P). Ideally, one would avoid categories even as broad as "deduced-context" and "deduced-content" (and never mind "probable"), but the evidence involved in establishing the Bibliography is such that dividing the relevant items into sub-groups would require far too many categories to be useful. We would need groups for "two favorite allusions," for "two allusions plus one favorite anecdote," for "one possible external reference plus one quotation of a known Defoe writing," and so on.
In many cases, Furbank and Owens offer two kinds of evidence—for example, both a contemporary attribution and internal evidence. Almost every attribution could be described as having been deduced from content as well as something else—Furbank and Owens often test external evidence of whatever sort against thematic and stylistic plausibility. To label each item for which this is true "contemporary attribution; deduced-content" would result only in clutter. The category assigned is meant to signal the principal basis for attribution to Defoe. The column at the right of the table explains (in shorthand) the further evidentiary basis where one is offered. The reader is of course referred to the Critical Bibliography for fuller details and explanations.
For example, Furbank and Owens exclude from the canon The Fifteen Comforts of a Scotch-Man. Written by Daniel D'Foe in Scotland (no. 143 in Defoe De-Attributions) as well as The Modern Addresses Vindicated, and the Rights of the Addressers Asserted, by D. De Foe (no. 177).
Another instance is The True-Born Britain. Written by the Author of The True-Born Englishman (Defoe De-Attributions, no. 147).
This is a more or less contemporary attribution, though how much faith we should have in it is something else again. Arthur Sherbo’s ODNB entry on Applebee explains that he "is known principally for his connection" with Defoe, and that he had printed four pamphlets of Defoe’s in the 1720s. This would seem to make Applebee an authoritative source for Defoe—except that all four of those pamphlets were convincingly de-attributed by Furbank and Owens.
An apparent exception is The Present State of Jacobitism Considered, which Furbank and Owens include because the preface is signed "D. F." It was attributed by James Ralph in the 1740s (see no. 28 in the table), but the principal basis for its inclusion in the canon is the prefatory signature.
Even Moore, not known for rigorous skepticism in the realm of attribution, warned that he had not found contemporary attributions to Defoe reliable, "except when the ascriptions were obvious." He concluded that "the eighteenth century had no extensive or accurate knowledge of Defoe." See "The Canon of Defoe’s Writings," 161. For some contemporary misattributions, see pp. 161–162.
4. Some Facts, Statistics, and Observations
What can we learn from the table that constitutes the appendix to this article? Furbank and Owens do not offer any statistics on what percentage of their canon includes works claimed by Defoe, how many were based on contemporary attributions, and so on—but we can learn much from such a breakdown. Three years before the appearance of the Critical Bibliography, J. A. Downie urged scholars to go "back to the early writings, with the True Collections as the bedrock of the new structure," so that "a different, less flimsy Defoe canon might be constructed."26 We need to know what "bedrock" consists of, and the tabular representation of the canon should make it plain. Downie is right to point to Defoe’s authorized collections of his own work, and we should also include additional "certains," such as Jure Divino, the Review, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, and the other titles boldfaced in the table. All told, there are 67 items publicly or privately acknowledged by Defoe to be his (plus thirteen reprints from the Review).27 Most of the
Works in the remaining categories (to repeat an important point) are of varying and essentially incalculable degrees of probability. There are 28 "Signed" items: 11 of them include the name "Defoe" on the title page or "Defoe’s" signature within the text, and the other 17 are attributed to one of his noms de plume. The Furbank and Owens canon includes 44 "contemporary attributions" (in my definition). These are the items for which we have what they consider reliable attributions made in Defoe’s lifetime or within a decade of his death. Only 15 items were first attributed later in the eighteenth century ("late attribution"), but 7 of them are of what most of us regard as major works. About those, more shortly. 48 items belong to the "deduced-context" category, and a staggering 67 works fall under "deduced-content."
The table shows a sobering amount of white space. Especially as one gets beyond 1706 or so, and certainly beyond 1710, one starts to notice a great many blanks in the middle columns. A virtue of the tabular representation of the canon is that it lets us see very quickly that for a significant number of works, we have neither name nor even pseudonym, and no attribution until the end of the eighteenth century or later. The white space one encounters between items 131(P) and 147(P), or between 205 and 218 (Roxana) is unsettling. Unlike Moore, Furbank and Owens are admirably honest in stating what the evidence for most attributions is—but looking at particular items or moving from entry to entry in the Bibliography, one does not see what a startling number of cases lack the kind of support a hard-headed theorist of attribution would demand.
The blanks in the middle columns of the table are part of the reason "deduced-content" and "deduced-context" represent the biggest categories. Most of the former are labeled merely "probable" by Furbank and Owens; these are the pieces for which we have some thematic or stylistic evidence but nothing external. The fact that there are the same number of "deduced-content" items and "claimed" items is worrying (each category accounts for roughly twenty-five per cent of the whole). One can only conclude that a frightening proportion of the canon is founded on critics’ sense that a particular work is consonant with Defoe’s outlook and techniques. Should we permit some degree of stylistic/thematic consonance, or some number of parallels, to count as sufficient grounds for inclusion
The same could be said of the "deduced-context" items, several of which are in the canon on the basis of decidedly thin evidence. The only case made in support of item 95 is that it was reprinted in the Review. Passages from item 97 were also reprinted there, though as Furbank and Owens admit, "the overall context [in 97] is somewhat more conciliatory" (CB, 88). Both of these pamphlets seem better classified as probable rather than definite attributions; they are among the most worrisome of the "deduced-context" items. Other problematic cases belonging to that category are 187(P) and 196(P). Furbank and Owens consider these pamphlets to be probable attributions primarily because they are acclaimed (separately) in Mercurius Politicus, a journal "Defoe admitted having been associated with."29 The first is "praised as one of the ‘merriest Pieces of Drollery’," and the second is "puffed" in an "obtrusive manner" (CB, 168, 181). That Defoe would reprint works not by others in the Review is entirely conceivable, and (assuming he is responsible for the relevant passages in Mercurius Politicus) he might well have been prepared to express approval of pieces written by others that were in accord with his own thinking. In such instances, the external "evidence" is at best unsatisfactory.
The table lets us see some patterns. This is not the place to consider all of the implications at great length, but a few points need to be made. The overwhelming majority of "claimed by Defoe" cases appear early in the table. If one looks at the first column (the item number in Furbank and Owens), one discovers several long strings of "probable" cases. From 111(P) to 143(P), all but three items are labeled merely "probable." From 173(P) to 193(P), Furbank and Owens label only four items as certain. In the last instance, what this means is that seventeen of the twenty-one "Defoe" works published between April 1715 and late spring 1717 are only probably his. I note in passing that for that particular time period, Defoe is also not known to have been involved in any periodicals. The broader point here is that for significant lengths of time, we have little definite knowledge of what Defoe was doing. Between 1704 and 1713, he was running the Review, but beyond that we are sometimes in the dark. The layout of the Critical Bibliography does not make these patterns at all clear.
The scariest fact about the "Defoe" canon is not the small number of "certain" works, but rather that the novels are not among them. Both Crusoe and Col. Jacque are relatively secure "contemporary attribution" items—the first attributed by Gildon in 1719 and the second attributed by Applebee in 1738. Gildon also attributed Farther Adventures to Defoe; the ascription of Serious Reflections is based on "deduced-context," as it is included on the basis of its connection to the first part. Every other piece of major fiction is in the canon on the basis of a late attribution—in most cases, a very late attribution. A Journal of the Plague Year showed up in Shiels’s 1753 short list of Defoe’s writings, which is twenty-two years after Defoe’s death, but also more than twenty years before Noble associated Defoe with Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Memoirs of a Cavalier. In terms of the solidity of our evidentiary basis, a late claim by the shady Noble is nothing like the same thing as a self-identified work or even a (genuinely) contemporary ascription. Moll and Roxana are great books, but they are far from certain attributions.
Downie, "Defoe’s Early Writings," The Review of English Studies, n.s., 46 (i995): 225–230, at 229–230.
My numbers (67 claimed, 28 "signed," and so on) add up to only 270 items. Not included in this count are the two collections (items no. 1 and 2 in CB) and the letters (nos. 272–275).
The Compleat English Gentleman (not published until the nineteenth century) was probably written in the late 1720s; Of Royall Educacion, which is included in the holograph manuscript of The Compleat English Gentleman, is difficult to date with precision, but at least parts of it were apparently written after the accession of George II in 1727.
CB, 168. Furbank and Owens say that "we have Defoe’s own word for it that he was closely associated in an editorial capacity" with Mercurius Politicus, and that "it seems likely that Defoe, despite certain allusions in its pages to its ‘editors’ in the plural, was its founder and chief editor." They conclude that "it can be safely assumed that he wrote for [Mercurius Politicus, as well as Mist’s Journal] extensively" (CB, 242). See also their "Defoe, the De la Faye letters and Mercurius politicus," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (2000): 13–19.
5. Some Problems and Suggestions
Defoe represents a unique challenge. A tiny number of personal letters survive, and those are late-life and probably not typical; the writings we can attribute with confidence tell us much about his causes and commitments but not a lot about him as a man. Other major eighteenth-century writers published anonymously, but he is unusual in having put his name on so few works. From the end of the eighteenth century to the third quarter of the twentieth, a gigantically inflated canon grew up around him, most of it based on irresponsible attributions. At this late date we now need to confront two separate but related problems. The first is that many of our deeply ingrained ideas about Defoe have their basis in Moore’s canon, which has been (for most of us) effectively demolished. The second is that the Furbank and Owens canon is nowhere near as solid as we would like to believe. If we are going to tackle Defoe with confidence on a factual basis, then we need to reconsider just about everything.
The Critical Bibliography represents a huge advance on Moore’s Checklist, and we owe Furbank and Owens a profound debt of gratitude—but (as they themselves would say) we need to use the new canon responsibly if we are to avoid creating a further mess. The blunt truth is that we cannot afford to pretend that Furbank and Owens have settled the canon for us—which they never claimed to have done. In Starr’s favorable review of the Bibliography, he rightly praises Furbank and Owens for not writing with "an air of finality, of having fixed the canon once and for all" (585). Works entered with no cautionary "P" are not necessarily proven attributions, and those with a "P" are anything but close-to- certain. Furbank and Owens understand this—but any item-by-item survey at book length inevitably creates a close focus on individual items. For details of particular cases, it is a tremendous resource; for comprehension of the basis of the canon as a whole, it necessarily has limitations. The table constituting the appendix to this essay was conceived as a kind of second step, an enhanced view of the same material for different ends.
The bottom line is that we cannot assume that the Critical Bibliography represents a firm foundation. In some ways, it seems to be more conservative than it actually is. Most of us feel quite certain that Defoe wrote a lot of the items not labeled "claimed by Defoe" in the table, and we are possibly right. But our sense that he wrote some and even many of these works does not justify our behaving as though he wrote all of them or any particular one of them. Instinct and plausibility and even some degree of probability we have—but that is not grounds for attribution. I wholly concur with Starr’s judgment: "My own view is that there are really rather few works that we can say were Defoe’s with anything approaching ‘certainty,’ using that term in the everyday rather than the Humean sense, and that the sum should be smaller than Furbank and Owens’s figure of 160" (587–588). By my reckoning, at present our solid canon consists of 67 works (not counting the thirteen items reprinted from the Review).
Might quantitative stylistic analysis allow us to expand that canon with confidence? The answer unfortunately seems to be No. Quantitative methods of attribution have not worked very well to date, and there have been some problems—as for example Martin C. Battestin’s New Essays by Henry Fielding (1989), which claimed Fielding’s authorship of forty-one Craftsman essays almost entirely on the basis of stylistic parallels.30 Reviews of the volume were few and largely uncritical, though some critics did complain about illegitimate stylistic parallels and generally inadequate evidence.31 The Craftsman attributions were not disproven until 2008,32 by which point they had done serious damage to the field; they will no doubt continue to do so for many years to come. Battestin has since transferred his allegiance to the Cusum method, a different kind of stylometric analysis,33 whose legitimacy has also been called into question. In a devastating rejection of quantitatively-based theories of attribution, and of Cusum (or QSUM) analysis in particular, Stephen Karian offers this blunt verdict:
QSUM uses vague definitions for its terms, misuses a valid statistical technique, and relies on visual inspection without employing a standardized method for calculating scale. Finally, it does not, in any sense of the word, ‘work.’ QSUM has no validity. ... This method is so faulty that one can manipulate it to claim any position on any particular attribution.34
Karian’s sober analysis and critique bears out his conclusion that the Cusum method "cannot be rescued."
Supposing someone actually did develop a more reliable method of stylistic analysis, how effective would it be if applied to Defoe?35 Defoe turns out to be highly problematic as a subject for quantitative analysis. The lack of a sufficient number of works irrefutably attributed to him makes stylistic comparison dangerous at best. We just do not have enough to constitute a satisfactory sample.36 A writer like Fielding, whose output is mostly signed, is a different proposition. The majority of the works we can feel reasonably confident that Defoe wrote, moreover, date from quite early in his career. Would stylistic markers from The True-Born Englishman or The Shortest-Way or even the Review help us with Roxana? This seems highly unlikely: such works differ generically as well as modally, and never mind the broad chronological spread of composition involved.37 Including a work in the canon on the basis of internal parallels to other supposed "Defoe" pieces is unwise: as Furbank and Owens warn, we cannot count a work as Defoe’s because it sounds like other things he might have written. A related danger is that of over-emphasizing stylistic similarities and not considering significant stylistic discrepancies, a point Rodney M. Baine made in his de-attribution of Madagascar: or, Robert Drury’s Journal38
What about paragraph lengths and common phrases? Maximillian E. Novak in particular weights these very heavily, maintaining that "wide paragraph length
What, then, are we to do? The crux of the answer is that we cannot afford to ignore the uncertainties that are probably an irresoluble feature of the Defoe bibliography. We need to learn to live with a much-reduced canon. In the post- Furbank-and-Owens era, more scholars will naturally want to re-attribute questionable titles than de-attribute yet more of them, but the temptation to rescue favorite items is best resisted. Erring too far in the direction of conservative attribution is at worst a shame; erring too far in the opposite direction is a disaster. We therefore need to come to each item in the Critical Bibliography—no matter how often taught or how heavily written upon—without commitment to its retention. In time we can return to the De-Attributions and reconsider them. But we need first to make sure we are using the Bibliography in ways that are intellectually honest and methodologically defensible—in ways worthy of the careful work it represents. Ideally we would find evidence either to bolster current attributions or to disprove them, and (in principle) we ought to be equally glad of either.40
At this point, we can decide simply to ignore the problems and carry on, building anew atop woefully shaky foundations. Alternatively, we can decide not to base interpretations or biographical constructions on the Furbank and Owens canon without considerable caution and admission of its limitations. What does "caution" look like in practical terms? The 67 works unambiguously claimed by Defoe are safe. Beyond that, how a particular text gets treated should depend not on whether Furbank and Owens include it but on what sort of evidence we have for it—and even where the nature of the evidence is similar, the probability can vary drastically.
This is an obvious conclusion, but it needs to be made explicit and acted upon, especially since even Furbank and Owens at times seem too casual about
One of the implications of the canon problem is that our comprehension of "Defoe" is based principally on the body of works attributed to him: who he was depends upon what he wrote.43 And if a significant percentage of the items included in the Furbank and Owens canon are uncertain, then so too are our characterizations, both critical and biographical. The two most substantial modern biographers of Defoe, Paula R. Backscheider (1989) and Novak (2001), both decided to stick with Moore’s canon, with the exception of a small number of works.44 Backscheider was finishing her Daniel Defoe: His Life just as Furbank and Owens were beginning to publish their misgivings about the canon. Novak had more opportunity to revise his account, though by the time of Furbank and Owens’s advent on the Defoe scene, he too had been working for many years on his Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions. In his introduction, he objects to Furbank and Owens’s dismissal of stylistic evidence, explaining that he is "draw[ing] upon [his] years of reading [Defoe’s] texts and those of his contemporaries." Novak’s commitment to his own sense of Defoe’s corpus (which is not identical to Moore’s
We need to be prepared to test every bit of inherited wisdom about Defoe. What kind of writer was he, really? Does the fact that he was a master fabricator, able to mimic voices not his own, strengthen the case for his authorship of Moll Flanders and Roxana? Perhaps, but first we need to ask whether he was in fact a master fabricator. The letters to Harley are ample proof of his willingness and ability to lie, but how many of the 67 works we can be sure about involve mimicry and impersonation? Item no. 20 is ostensibly by a member of the "Yeomandry, and poor Freeholders of England" (p. 3); no. 144 is in the voice of "an Englishman at the court of Hannover"; in no. 148 (like no. 144, one of the 1713 succession pamphlets), Defoe assumes the guise of a Jacobite pressing for the return of the Pretender; and no. 37 is The Shortest-Way, his most brilliant piece of satiric impersonation. No. 52 is "in the person of a Dissenter" (CB, 48), so not Defoe-speaking-as-Defoe but hardly a feat of mimicry. In these five works, Defoe assumes a voice not his own, or at least not only his. The Shortest-Way alone proves his capacity as a mimic, but his inclination toward mimicry is not necessarily on the scale critics have long imagined. If we add Robinson Crusoe, we have another example of a persona not identical to Defoe. If Defoe did write (say) Moll Flanders, then we have a dissenting Protestant male assuming the persona of a female pickpocket cum prostitute. This does not seem to be impersonation of the sort we find either in The Shortest-Way or Crusoe. Could Defoe have done a different kind of mimicry? Yes. Does the rest of his output lend credence to the argument that he actually did so? No. What is crucial here is that we need to look again, and skeptically, at every established verity. Some of them will withstand further scrutiny—but they cannot be relied upon until they are tested against a much smaller canon.
This is a frustrating state of affairs, all the more so because it could have been avoided. Half a century ago, Moore produced a bibliography which was de facto unreviewable; he did not explain the evidentiary basis for particular attributions, making judging plausibility functionally impossible. That reviewers did not assess his Checklist in nitty-gritty detail is not astonishing. Lacking the evidence, how could they have done so? What is dismaying is that the contents of an unverified and essentially unverifiable list were so widely accepted. One of the lessons we should learn from the history of the Defoe canon is that we need to be much tougherminded about how we respond to new attributions. R. S. Crane long ago warned against letting one’s "guiding principle" in interpretation be "a will to believe."46 In the case of attribution, we would do well to be driven by a will to doubt. For the
The future of Defoe studies will depend heavily upon how we proceed from here. Some scholars have resisted abandoning Moore’s Checklist, though many Defoe scholars have cheerfully restricted themselves to Furbank and Owens’s canon. The idea of shrinking further is probably a hard sell for most scholars, especially when several of the major works are not exempt from skepticism. I do not see my conclusions as negative or gloomy. We are probably always going to be left with a significant degree of uncertainty about quite a lot of even the reduced "Defoe" canon: the problem is not lack of certitude in attribution but in refusing to admit that lack. Historical study is at best difficult, and the troubling question of how we can know the past at all is always with us. G. Thomas Tanselle has observed that "The essence of any inductive process, such as ... the pursuit of the past, is uncertainty," and he has a point.47 The record that has come down to us is incomplete—as the increasing concern with attribution and (more broadly) with the realities, frustrations, and implications of anonymous publication makes clear. A considerable part of what we think we know is the result of potentially fallible inductive reasoning, not just something read or discovered. Refusing to go beyond the bounds of what critical judgment can justify is crucial—which brings us back to the practicalities of weighing such evidence as we have and living with its limitations.
We need to remember that the "Defoe" we now study and teach is a relatively recent construction. Half a century ago, Defoe was very differently judged and valued. Let me propose a counterfactual. Imagine that we were transported back to the 1930s—before Ian Watt and others turned Defoe into the father of the English novel; before Moore inflated the canon; before a flock of New Critics set about demonstrating Defoe’s artistry and the cohesion of his novels. Suppose that in those circumstances scholars had started from scratch, applying the sober attribution methods and standards that specialist readers for leading learned journals would insist upon today. What canon would be constructed for Daniel Defoe? What picture of the life-and-works? Doggedly maintaining faith in a canon we cannot defend does not make sense: if we are going to set the bibliographic situation aright, then this is the time to do so. The question now before us is whether we will finally face facts or continue to play the ostrich.48
Battestin, New Essays by Henry Fielding: His Contributions to the Craftsman (1734 –1739) and Other Early Journalism, "With a Stylometric Analysis by Michael G. Farringdon" (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).
The only vehemently negative review was by Claude Rawson, "Fielding in the Dock," London Review of Books, 5 April 1990, 20–23. Milder reservations were expressed by Hugh Amory in ‘"It Is Very Probable I Am Lord B—ke’: Reflections on Fielding’s Canon," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1996): 529–533; and by Simon Varey in The Scriblerian 25 (1992): 56–59.
Thomas Lockwood, "Did Fielding Write for The Craftsman?" The Review of English Studies, n.s., 59 (2008): 86–117.
For Battestin’s defense of the Cusum (cumulative sum) technique, see "The Cusum Method: Escaping the Bog of Subjectivism," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8 (19g6): 533–538.
Karian, "Authors of the Mind: Some Notes on the QSUM Attribution Theory," Studies in Bibliography 57 (2005–2006): 263–286, at 281. The following quotation is at p. 285.
Furbank and Owens raise the issue of stylometry, and even produced computergenerated concordances of Moll and Robinson Crusoe. They point out that while stylometry might conceivably be useful if one is trying to decide between two candidates for authorship, where the field is virtually limitless much of the utility vanishes: "it was illusory to suppose, as some stylometrists claim, that an author has a unique statistical ‘fingerprint,’ distinguishing him or her from all others." They also warn that the "temptation to get the answer you want ... is simply too compelling." See "The Defoe That Never Was: A Tale of De-Attribution," The American Scholar 66 (1997): 276–284, at 283.
In his 1974 stylometric study of parts of Defoe’s canon, Stieg Hargevik identified words, phrases, syntactical structures, and sentence patterns that he found to be indicative of Defoe’s style, measuring their appearance in Defoe’s writings against their appearance in the work of his contemporaries. He demonstrated that the stylistic tendencies he regarded as Defovian appeared only very rarely in select texts by Abel Boyer, Anthony Collins, Benjamin Hoadly, Swift and others. See The Disputed Assignment of Memoirs of an English Officer to Daniel Defoe, in two parts (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiskell, 1974), Part I. The problem with this methodology is that for it to be seriously effective we would need more definitive attributions and then we would need to test them against a very large sample of different kinds of writings. Hargevik himself admits that statistical methods can only "indicate likelihood and not proof" (26). For a cautious defense of Hargevik’s methods and findings, see Irving N. Rothman, "Defoe De-Attributions Scrutinized under Hargevik Criteria: Applying Stylometrics to the Canon," PBSA 94 (2000): 375–398. I concur with Furbank and Owens that, especially in the case of Defoe, stylistic analysis is insufficient to solve attributional puzzles. As they remind us, "stylo-metricians are unlikely to present their results as ‘unambiguous’ and self-sufficient, requiring no support from other and non-stylometric types of reasoning" (Canonisation, 177).
I do not share Moore’s faith that "the Defoe who wrote the boyish religious verse of 1681 is astonishingly like the elderly man who published social and economic tracts forty-nine years later. We can trace him through his Protean changes of appearance. If we hold him tightly, he remains essentially himself" ("The Canon of Defoe’s Writings," 164).
Baine, "Daniel Defoe and Robert Drury’s Journal," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16 (1974): 479–491, especially pp. 484–486. "The wider the Defoe canon becomes, the easier it is to establish other attributions of the basis of style and idiom. We have a widening gyre whose center will not hold" (484).
Novak, "A Vindication of the Press and the Defoe Canon," Studies in English Literature 27 (1987): 399–411, at 406–407. Stephen Bernard has demonstrated conclusively, on the basis of internal and external evidence, that A Vindication of the Press was written not by Defoe but by Giles Jacob. See "After Defoe, Before the Dunciad: Giles Jacob and A Vindication of the Press," The Review of English Studies, n.s., 59 (2008): 487–507.
Schoenbaum’s counsel is wise: "It is good, I believe, that now and then we pay tribute to the virtue of recognizing our limitations," he concludes, and the scholar "must have his own kind of negative capability. He must know and accept the often frustrating limitations of the methods available to him if, in his quest to dispel illusions and errors, he is not to create new ones in their place" (Internal Evidence, 219).
For a discussion of the various ways in which "Defoe" has been constructed by biographers and critics, see my "Fabricating Defoes: From Anonymous Hack to Master of Fictions," Eighteenth-Century Life 36.2 (Spring 2012): i–35.
John Richetti’s more recent biography of Defoe is based on the Furbank and Owens canon (with only a few exceptions). Richetti makes a good point: "even Furbank and Owens cannot resolve the uncertainty surrounding some of what we think is Defoe’s massive output, and in their Critical Bibliography ... they list works that are ‘probably’ by Defoe, and in their ongoing collected edition of large numbers of Defoe’s works they ... reprint and annotate some of those pieces that they mark as merely probable in their Critical Bibliography." The Life of Daniel Defoe (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), vii.
Novak, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5.
Crane, "On Hypotheses in 'Historical Criticism’: Apropos of Certain Contemporary Medievalists," in The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 2:241.
Tanselle, "Printing History and Other History," Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 269–289, at 282.
An oral version of this essay was presented at the second biennial meeting of the Defoe Society, July 2011. For advice on drafts, I am grateful to Julian Fung, Patricia Gael, Robert D. Hume, Leah Orr, and David Wallace Spielman. The anonymous readers for Studies in Bibliography provided extensive and extremely useful commentary for which I am grateful. For technological assistance I am much obliged to Tom Minsker. Obviously I am deeply indebted to Furbank and Owens, who meticulously assembled the complex mass of evidence I have recast and analyzed here. This enterprise depends on their pioneering work. I did not consult them about this piece, and any blame attaching to it must be mine. If Defoe studies has a good future it is largely because of Furbank and Owens’s efforts.
APPENDIX
A Tabular Representation of the Furbank And Owens Canon
For an explanation of the logic of categorization and the analytic rationale of this presentation of the works attributed to Defoe by Furbank and Owens (both definite and "probable"), see section 3, above. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations and details in the table are from the relevant entry in the Critical Bibliography. The numeration is also from that volume; the table begins with item number 3 because numbers 1 and 2 are collections of works (the True Collection and the Second Volume). I have filled in as many columns as possible, but in most cases works are categorized on the basis of the strongest evidence. For example: in the case of items claimed by Defoe, I also list any other contemporary or late-life evidence in attribution noted by Furbank and Owens. Limitations of space require considerable abbreviation, including the shortening of most titles; that information is of course supplied more fully in the Critical Bibliography.
The table includes a number of shorthand references. Several initially anonymous works were reprinted in collections in Defoe’s lifetime with his name attached (column 7, "Reprint").1
| TC | Defoe’s A True Collection of the Writings of the True Born English-man (an authorized collection published in 1703). |
| SV | Defoe’s A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman (an authorized collection published in 1705). |
| How | A Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born English-Man (an unauthorized collection by John How in 1703); the volume included thirteen works, two of which (11(P) and 40(P)) Defoe did not include in the True Collection. |
Column 8 ("Epithet") lists instances where a work is signed with one of Defoe’s pseudonyms, which take the form of "by the author of [work]." To save space, I give only the title or an abbreviation (i.e., SW for The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters and TBE for The True-Born Englishman). Where I say "Review," then, the item in question is attributed on the title page to "the author of the Review." The tenth and eleventh columns record late attributions, those made in the second half of the century ("Later 18c") or between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the present ("After 18c"). The source of the attribution is given there. I take the assignment of attribution from Furbank and Owens, and except in one case (I have changed "Cibber" to "Cibber/Shiels") I use their shorthand terms.
| Chalmers | George Chalmers in his "List of Writings" of Defoe, included in his Life of Daniel De Foe (1790). |
| Cibber/Shiels | Robert Shiels in "Cibber’s" The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (1753); the entry on Defoe is in vol. 4 (pp. 313–325). |
| Crossley | James Crossley in his MS list of 60 "Defoe" works; the list was made between 1869 and 1883 and is reprinted in Furbank and Owens, Canonisation. |
| Lee | William Lee in Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings, 3 vols. (1869). |
| Stace | Machell Stace in An Alphabetical Catalogue of an Extensive Collection of the Writings of Daniel De Foe (1829). |
| Trent (Biblio) | William Peterfield Trent in an unpublished bibliography (on which he worked until his death in 1927). |
| Trent (CHEL) | Trent in the list of works included in his chapter on Defoe in the Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 14 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), vol. 9. |
| Trent (Nation) | Trent in his "Bibliographical Notes on Defoe, I-III," in the New York Nation 84 (June 1907): 515–518, and 85 (July and August 1907): 29–32 180–183. |
| Wilson | Walter Wilson in his Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel De Foe, 3 vols. (1830). |
| Author's name | Time of attribution | |||||||||||
| F&O # | Title | Evidence | Date | Imprint | Early ed. | Reprint | Epithet | Lifetime | Later 18c | After 18c | Other evidence | |
| Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsheets | ||||||||||||
| 3(P) | A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague | deduced-context | [1688] | false imprint | Moore | probable ref. in Review; ref. in 171 | ||||||
| 4 | A New Discovery of an Old Intreague | claimed by D | 1691 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 5 | An Essay upon Projects | signed | 1697 | R. R. for Tho. Cockerill | preface: D.E | |||||||
| 6 | The Character of the Late Dr. Samuel Annesley | claimed by D | 1697 | E. Whitlock | preface: D.F. | TC (1703) | Dunton, 17052 | |||||
| 7 | Some Reflections on ... An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government | signed | 1697 | E. Whitlock | 2nd ed. preface: D.F. | |||||||
| 8 | An Argument Shewing, that a Standing Army ... is not Inconsistent... | claimed by D | 1698 | E. Whitlock | TC (1703) | |||||||
| 9 | An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters | claimed by D | 1697 [1698] | 2nd ed. preface: D.F. | TC (1703) | |||||||
| 10 | The Poor Man's Plea | claimed by D | 1698 | 2nd ed. preface: D.F. | TC (1703) | |||||||
| 11(P) | Lex Talionis | contemporary attribution | 1698 | How 3 (1703) | Pittis (?), 17044 | discussion analogous to 62; description like 228 | ||||||
| 12(P) | A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England | deduced-content | 1698 | Trent (CHEL) | cites 8; quotes line from 4; favorite Dryden quotation | |||||||
| 13(P) | An Encomium upon a Parliament | deduced-context | [1699] | Ellis 5 | quoted in Review;6 similar style to 56; consonant with thinking in 8 and 10 | |||||||
| 14 | The Pacificator | claimed by D | 1700 | J. Nutt | SV (1705) | |||||||
| 15 | The Two Great Questions Consider'd | claimed by D | 1700 | R. T. for A. Baldwin | TC (1703) | |||||||
| 16 | The Two Great Questions Further Considered | claimed by D | 1700 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 17 | The True-Born Englishman | claimed by D | 1700 [1701?] | TC (1703) | several7 | |||||||
| 18 | The Six Distinguishing Characters of a Parliament-Man | claimed by D | 1701 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 19 | The Danger of the Protestant Religion Consider'd | claimed by D | 1701 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 20 | The Free-Holders Plea against Stock-Jobbing ... | claimed by D | 1701 | TC (1703) | lengthy excerpts in 202(P) | |||||||
| 21 | A Letter to Mr. How | claimed by D | 1701 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 22(P) | The Livery Man's Reasons | deduced-content | 1701 | TC (1703) | Trent (Biblio) | reflects known hostility and present concerns; quotes couplet from 17 | ||||||
| 23 | The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected | claimed by D | 1701 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 24 | The Succession to the Crown of England, Considered | contemporary attribution | 1701 | 17018 | ||||||||
| 25 | [Legion's Memorial] | contemporary attribution | [1701 ] | several9 | ||||||||
| 26(P) | [Υe True-Born Englishmen Proceed] | contemporary attribution | [1701] | 170310 | Stace | thematically consonant with 25; similar style to 56 | ||||||
| 27 | The History of the Kentish Petition | contemporary attribution | 1701 | several11 | Stace | four lines used in Review; two lines used in 81 | ||||||
| 28 | The Present State of Jacobitism Considered | signed | 1701 | A. Baldwin | preface: D.F. | Ralph, 1744–4612 | ||||||
| 29 | Reasons against a War with France | claimed by D | 1701 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 30(P) | Legion's Mew Paper 13 | deduced-context | 1702 [1701] | connection to 25 | ||||||||
| 31 | The Original Power of the ... People of England | claimed by D | 1702 [1701] | preface: D.F. | TC (1703) | 171014 | repr. at the end of 1790 ed. of 201 | |||||
| 32 | The Mock Mourners | claimed by D | 1702 | TC (1703) | TBE | |||||||
| 33 | A New Test of the Church of England's Loyalty | claimed by D | 1702 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 34 | Reformation of Manners | claimed by D | 1702 | TC (1703) | ||||||||
| 35 | An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity | claimed by D | 1702 | TC (1703) | 1704: TBE15 | |||||||
| 36(P) | The Opinion of a Known Dissenter on the Bill for Preventing Occasional Conformity | deduced-content | 1703 [1702?] | J. Nutt | Moore | arguments similar to other works; repeats phrase and passages from 35; repeats phrase from 9 | ||||||
| 37 | The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters | claimed by D | 1702 | TC (1703) | repr.: TBE | several16 | D arrested | |||||
| 38 | The Spanish Descent | claimed by D | 1702 | TC (1703) | TBE | |||||||
| 39 | A Brief Explanation of ... The Shortest Way with the Dissenters | claimed by D | [1703] | TC (1703) | repr. with 37 | |||||||
| 40(P) | A Dialogue between a Dissenter and the Observator | contemporary attribution | 1703 | How17 (1703) | Moore | clever "strategies on Defoe's personal behalf" | ||||||
| 41 | More Reformation18 | claimed by D | 1703 | SV (1705) | TBE | |||||||
| 42 | The Shortest Way to Peace and Union | claimed by D | 1703 | TC (1703) | SW; TBE | |||||||
| 43 | A Hymn to the Pillory | claimed by D | 1703 | SV (1705) | Thomas Brown, 170319 | |||||||
| 44(P) | The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated | late attribution | 1703 | Chalmers20 | consonant with D's arguments and polemical tendencies | |||||||
| 45(P) | A Hymn to the Funeral Sermon | contemporary attribution | [1703] | 170321 | Moore | in style of 43 | ||||||
| 46 | An Enquiry into the Case of Mr. Asgil's General Translation | signed | 1704 [1703] | Nutt | preface: D.F.22 | TBE | ||||||
| 47 | A Challenge of Peace, Address'd to the Whole Nation | claimed by D | 1703 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 48(F) | Some Remarks on the First Chapter in Dr. Davenant's Essays | deduced-content | 1704 [1703] | A. Baldwin | Wilson | similar to 31, which is quoted at length and by same author | ||||||
| 49 | Peace without Union | claimed by D | 1703 | 4th ed. preface: De Foe | SV (1705) | |||||||
| 50 | The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 51(P) | An Essay on the Regulation of the Press | deduced-context | 1704 | Chalmers | D acknowledges "several Tracts" on the subject; arguments similar to Review | |||||||
| 52 | A Serious Inquiry into this Grand Question | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 53(P) | The Lay-Man's Sermon upon the Late Storm | deduced-content | 1704 | Wilson | remark on a theme D is preoccupied with; favorite allusion | |||||||
| 54 | Royal Religion | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 55 | To the Honourable, the C[ommon]s of England | deduced-context | [1704] | pub. privately | Downie23 | |||||||
| 56 | The Address | contemporary attribution | 1704 | 1703–424 | first line quoted in 60 | |||||||
| 57 | More Short-Ways with the Dissenters | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 58 | A New Test of the Church of England's Honesty | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | 1705: TBE | |||||||
| 59(P) | The Storm: or, a Collection of the ... Late Dreadful Tempest | late attribution | 1704 | J. Nutt for G. Sawbridge | Chalmers | quotes four lines of verse from 60 | ||||||
| 60 | An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born-English-Man | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | Hymn to Pillory | ten lines quoted in Review | ||||||
| 61 | A Hymn to Victory | claimed by D | 1704 | J. Nutt | dedication signed | SV (1705) | 1704: TBE | |||||
| 62 | Giving Alms no Charity | claimed by D | 1704 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 63 | Queries upon the Bill against Occasional Conformity | contemporary attribution | [1704] | 170525 | Trent (CHEL) | |||||||
| 64 | The Dissenter Misrepresented and Represented | claimed by D | [1704?]26 | SV (1705) | ||||||||
| 65 | The Double Welcome | claimed by D | 1705 | B. Bragg | SV (1705) | |||||||
| 66 | The Consolidator | signed | 1705 | Benj. Bragg | TBE | frequent use of lunar fantasy in the Review | ||||||
| 67 | The Experiment: or, The Short est Way with the Dissenters Exemplified | claimed by D | 1705 | B. Bragg | several27 | claimed in Review | ||||||
| 68 | Advice to All Parties | signed | 1705 | Benj. Bragg | TBE | Chalmers | ||||||
| 69 | The Dyet of Poland | claimed by D | 1705 | preface allusion | Chalmers | claimed in Letters (P.19) | ||||||
| 70 | The Paralel [sic] | claimed by D | 1705 | Dublin | SV (1705) | |||||||
| 71 | The High-Church Legion 28 | claimed by D | 1705 | 170529 | Chalmers | probable reference in Letters (p.93); see note to 101(P) | ||||||
| 72(P) | A Hint to the Blackwell-Hall Factors | deduced-content | 1705 | Moore | "Defoesque character"; a favorite allusion30 | |||||||
| 73(P) | Party-Tyranny | deduced-context | 1705 [1706?] | Wilson | discussion of "Party-Tyranny" in Review; adaptation of lines of 17; favorite sentiment | |||||||
| 74 | A Hymn to Peace | signed | 1706 | John Nutt | TBE | Chalmers | ||||||
| 75 | A Reply to ... L[or]d H[aversham]’s Vindication of his Speech | signed | 1706 | Review | Chalmers | |||||||
| 76 | Remarks on the Letter to the Author of the State-Memorial | deduced-context | 1706 | Trent (Nation) | probable reference in Letters (p. 115); favorite Butler quotation31 | |||||||
| 77 | Remarks on the Bill to Prevent Frauds Committed by Bankrupts | contemporary attribution | 1706 | 170632 | Wilson | thematically similar to Review; refers to author's part in promoting bill acknowledged in Review | ||||||
| 78 | An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union, pt. I | claimed by D | 1706 | acknowledged in Review | ||||||||
| 79 | An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union, pt. II | claimed by D | 1706 | acknowledged in Review | ||||||||
| 80(P) | A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal33 | late attribution | 1706 | B. Bragg | Chalmers | |||||||
| 81 | Jure Divino | claimed by D | 1706 | TBE | several34 | discussed in Review | ||||||
| 82 | An Essay, at Removing National Prejudices, pt. III | claimed by D | 1706 | [Edinb.] | the two first parts | acknowledged in Review | ||||||
| 83 | A Fourth Essay, at Removing National Prejudices | claimed by D | 1706 | [Edinb.] | acknowledged in Review | |||||||
| 84 | The Vision, A Poem | claimed by D | [1706] | [Edinb.] | 170635 | Trent (CHEL) | holograph exists; implicitly claimed in a letter36 | |||||
| 85 | Observations on the Fifth Article of the Treaty of Union | deduced-context | [1706] | [Edinb.] | Wodrow37 | probable reference in a letter38 | ||||||
| 86 | A Reply to the Scots Answer, to the British Vision | deduced-context | [1706] | [Edinb.] | Trent(CHEL) | vague reference in Letters (p. 162) | ||||||
| 87 | Caledonia, &c. | signed | 1706 | Edinb. | dedication signed | 1707 London repr. advert, in Review | ||||||
| 88 | A Short Letter to the Glasgow-Men | claimed by D | [1706] | [Edinb.] | unambiguously claimed in a letter39 | |||||||
| 89(P) | An Enquiry into the Disposal of the Equivalent | contemporary attribution | [1706?] | [Edinb.] | Wodrow40 | Trent (CHEL) | passage and remarks similar to Review | |||||
| 90 | A Fifth Essay, at Removing National Prejudices | claimed by D | 1707 | [Edinb.] | acknowledged in Review | |||||||
| 91 | Two Great Questions Considered ... a Sixth Essay at Removing National Prejudices | deduced-context | 1707 | [Edinb.] | vague reference in a letter41 | |||||||
| 92 | The Dissenters in England Vindicated | deduced-context | [1707] | [Edinb.] | Chalmers | self-exposure in a related pamphlet?; apparently claimed in a letter42 | ||||||
| 93 | Passion and Prejudice | deduced-context | 1707 | Edinb. | Moore | quotes letters signed "D.E"; see note to 92 | ||||||
| 94 | A Short View of the ... Protestant Religion in Britain | deduced-context | 1707 | Edinb. | Toland, 171743 | Chalmers | see note to 92 | |||||
| 95 | A Voice from the South | deduced-context | [1707] | [Edinb.] | repr. in Review | |||||||
| 96(P) | An Historical Account of the Bitter Sufferings ... of the Episcopal Church in Scotland | deduced-context | 1707 | Edinb. | Wodrow, 1711?44 | Chalmers (supposed) | argumentation "strongly suggests" D | |||||
| 97 | Dyers News Examined as to his ... Memorial against the Review | deduced-context | [1707] | [Edinb.] | Trent (CHEL) | paragraphs repr. in Review | ||||||
| 98 | De Foe’s Answers, to Dyer’s Scandalous News Letter | signed | [1707] | [Edinb.] | in title | Lee | ||||||
| 99(P) | Reflections on the Prohibition Act | deduced-content | 1708 | Crossley | arguments similar to those in Review and 254 | |||||||
| 100(P) | An Answer to a Paper Concerning Mr. De Foe | contemporary attribution | 1708 | Edinb. | 170945 | Wilson | ||||||
| 101(P) | A Memorial to the Nobility of Scotland | deduced-context | 1708 | Edinb. | Moore | probable reference in a letter46 | ||||||
| 102 | The Scot’s Narrative Examin’d | contemporary attribution | 1709 | I70947 | Wilson | arguments similar to Review | ||||||
| 103(P) | A Letter to Mr. Bisset | deduced-content | 1709 | J. Baker | Moore | typical of D’s polemical strategies; favorite allusion | ||||||
| 104 | The History of the Union of Great Britain | claimed by D | 1709 [1710?] | Edinb. | 171248 | referred to in Review as in progress | ||||||
| 105 | Advertisement from Daniel De Foe, to Mr. Clark | signed | [1710] | [Edinb.] | in title | signed "D.F." | ||||||
| 106(P) | A Letter from Captain Tom to the Mobb | deduced-content | 1710 | J. Baker | Wilson: not improbable | close to D's "attitude towards the 'Mob' in the Review at this time" | ||||||
| 107(P) | Greenshields out of Prison and Toleration Settled in Scotland | deduced-content | 1710 | N. Cliff | Trent (Biblio) | similar approach to that in the Review and in 102 | ||||||
| 108 | An Essay upon Publick Credit | claimed by D | 1710 | Chalmers (supposed) | claimed in a letter49 | |||||||
| 109(P) | Counter Queries | deduced-content | [1710] | Healey | "reminiscent of" a letter (Letters, p. 286) | |||||||
| 110 | An Essay upon Loans | claimed by D | 1710 | Wilson | named in a letter50 | |||||||
| 111(P) | A Word against a New Election | deduced-content | 1710 | Chalmers (supposed) | echoes passage from Letters (p. 266); favorite allusion | |||||||
| 112(P) | A New Test of the Sence of the Nation | deduced-content | 1710 | Chalmers (supposed) | Wilson | two passages similar to Review | ||||||
| 113(P) | Queries to the New Hereditary Right-Men | deduced-content | 1710 | Moore | similar discussion in Review; praises a work (not by D) here and in Review | |||||||
| 114(P) | A Letter to the Whigs | deduced-content | 1711 | Trent (CHEL) | pp. 7–16 "more or less identical with" 115(P); probably by same author | |||||||
| 115(P) | A Spectators Address to the Whigs | deduced-content | 1711 | Trent (Nation) | see 114(P); reflections similar to Review; favorite Butler quotation | |||||||
| 116(P) | Captain Tom’s Remembrance to his Old Friends the Mobb | deduced-content | [1711] | Halkett and Laing51 | consonant with D's thinking in Review, but not as consonant as 106(P)52 | |||||||
| 117(P) | The Secret History of the October Club | contemporary attribution53 | 1711 | Pittis, 171154 | Lee | several close similarities to Review | ||||||
| 118(P) | The British Visions: or, Isaac Bickerstaff, Sen. Being Twelve Prophecies ... | deduced-context | 1711 | J. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | D knowledgeable and corresponding about it55 | ||||||
| 119(P) | The Succession of Spain Consider’d | deduced-content | 1711 | J. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | makes claim made on other occasions; remark and analysis similar to Review | ||||||
| 120(P) | A Seasonable Caution to the General Assembly | contemporary attribution | 1711 | [Edinb.?] | Wodrow56 | Trent (Biblio) | thematically consonant with Review; probable reference in letter57 | |||||
| 121(P) | Eleven Opinions about Mr. H[arle]y | deduced-content | 1711 | J. Baker | Wilson | "one or two" favorite allusions; consonant with D’s thinking | ||||||
| 122(P) | Atalantis Major | deduced-context | 1711 | false imprint | Lee | ambiguous reference in a letter;58 consonant with D’s thinking | ||||||
| 123(P) | An Essay upon the Trade to Africa | deduced-content | 1711 | Crossley | arguments also in Review; biographical evidence59 | |||||||
| 124(P) | The Secret History of the October-Club, pt. II | deduced-context | 1711 | J. Baker | continues 117 (P); favorite allusion; known pre-occupations; advert, in Review | |||||||
| 125(P) | The Representation Examined | deduced-context | 1711 | A. Baldwin | Moore | discusses "Representation" in Review; consonant with D’s thinking; advert, in Review | ||||||
| 126 | An Essay on the South-Sea Trade | signed | 1712 [1711] | J. Baker | Review | |||||||
| 127(P) | The True State of the Case between the Government and the Creditors of the Navy | deduced-content | 1711 | J. Baker | Crossley | arguments close to 126; approach similar to Review | ||||||
| 128(P) | Reasons why this Nation Ought to Put a Speedy End to this ... War | deduced-content | 1711 | J. Baker | several close resemblances to and echoes of Review60 | |||||||
| 129 | An Essay at a Plain Exposition of that... Phrase A Good Peace | claimed by D | 1711 | J. Baker | Review | claimed in Review | ||||||
| 130 | The Felonious Treaty | signed | 1711 | J. Baker | Review | |||||||
| 131(P) | An Essay on the History of Parties | deduced-content | 1711 | J. Baker | Wilson | several suggestive pieces of internal evidence61 | ||||||
| 132(P) | [A Speech of a Stone Chimney-Piece] | deduced-context | [1711] | not pub. | Moore | extract pub. in Review; fuller version in 139(P); possible reference in Review | ||||||
| 133(P) | The Conduct of Parties in England | deduced-content | 1712 | Wilson | line of argument similar to and echoes from Review | |||||||
| 134(P) | The Case of the Poor Skippers and Keel-Men of Newcastle | claimed by D | [1712?] | Moore | current preoccupation; D offers to write this in a letter62 | |||||||
| 135(P) | A Farther Case Relating to the Poor Keel-men of Newcastle | deduced-context | [1712?] | Moore | see 134(P) | |||||||
| 136(P) | Imperial Gratitude | deduced-content | 1712 | Moore | close parallels and "Verbally similar discussion" in Review | |||||||
| 137(P) | The Highland Visions | deduced-context | 1712 | J. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | accepted if 118(P) is | ||||||
| 138(P) | Wise as Serpents | deduced-content | 1712 | J. Baker | Crossley | favorite allusion; similar to Review; likely by same author as 139(P) | ||||||
| 139(P) | The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain 63 | deduced-content | 1712 | J. Baker | Wilson | features D's own career and works; verbatim extract from 104 | ||||||
| 140(P) | Reasons against Fighting 64 | deduced-context | 1712 | Lee | probable reference in a letter;65 favorite allusion; phrase used in Review | |||||||
| 141(P) | A Further Search into the Conduct of the Allies | deduced-context | 1712 | John Morphew | Crossley | probable reference in a letter; see note for 140(P) | ||||||
| 142(P) | The Validity of the Renunciations of Former Powers | deduced-content | 1712 | J. Morphew | Trent (Nation) | consonant with D’s thinking; favorite allusion; favorite topic | ||||||
| 143(P) | An Enquiry into the Danger ... of a War with the Dutch | deduced-content | 1712 | J. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | consonant with D’s views and style; approval of Review; see note for 140(P) | ||||||
| 144 | A Seasonable Warning... against the Insinuations of Papists and Jacobites | claimed by D | 1712 | J. Baker | Chalmers | claimed in Appeal to Honour and Justice | ||||||
| 145(P) | A Brief Account of the Present State of the African Trade | deduced-content | 1713 | J. Baker | Crossley | consonant with argument in Review | ||||||
| 146 | Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover | claimed by D | 1713 | J. Baker | D prosecuted; acknowledged authorship | |||||||
| 147(P) | The Second-Sighted Highlander: or, Predictions and Foretold Events | deduced-context | [1713] | J. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | possibly claimed in the Review; successor to 118(P) and 137(P) | ||||||
| 148 | And What if the Pretender should come? | claimed by D | 1713 | J. Baker | D prosecuted | |||||||
| 149 | An Answer to a Question that No Body thinks of, viz. But what if the Queen should die? | claimed by D | 1713 | J. Baker | D prosecuted | |||||||
| 150(P) | An Essay on the Treaty of Commerce with France | deduced-content | 1713 | J. Baker | Wilson | "general thrust" of arguments like Review | ||||||
| 151(P) | Union and No Union | contemporary attribution | 1713 | John Baker | Wodrow66 | Crossley | deals with D’s concerns at the time; "Defoe-like quality" | |||||
| 152(P) | Considerations upon the Eighth and Ninth Articles of the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation | deduced-content | 1713 | J. Baker | Lee | consonant with Mercator and with proposal in Letters (p. 420) | ||||||
| 153(P) | A View of the Real Dangers of the Succession | deduced-content | 1713 | J. Baker | Lee | similar to 3 remarks in Review | ||||||
| 154(P) | A General History of Trade | late attribution | 1713 | J. Baker | Chalmers | many echoes of D’s works; anecdote and discussion similar to Review | ||||||
| 155(P) | Memoirs of Count Tariff | deduced-context | 1713 | John Morphew | Trent (Nation) | grand praise and lengthy quotation in Mercator;67 favorite allusion | ||||||
| 156(P) | Reasons Concerning the Immediate Demolishing of Dunkirk | deduced-content | 1713 | John Morphew | Trent (Biblio) | argument similar to Mercator; reference close to one in Review68 | ||||||
| 157 | Some Thoughts upon the Subject of Commerce with France | signed | 1713 | J. Baker | Review | |||||||
| 158 | A Letter to the Dissenters | claimed by D | 1713 | John Morphew | Old-mixon,171469 | Wilson: tentative | claimed by name in a letter70 | |||||
| 159(P) | A Letter to the Whigs, Expostulating with them upon their Present Conduct | deduced-content | E. Smith | Crossley | "closeness in drift" to letters to Harley at same time; "striking verbal echo" of a letter | |||||||
| 160(P) | The Scots Nation and Union Vindicated | deduced-content | 1714 | J. Baker for A. Bell | Lee | Defoean style; favorite allusion; refers to same MS here and in Review | ||||||
| 161 | Reasons for Im[peaching] the L[or]d H[igh] T[reasure]r71 | contemporary attribution | [1714] | J. Moore | Dunton, 171472 | Lee | ||||||
| 162(P) | A Brief Survey of the Legal Liberties of the Dissenters | deduced-content | 1714 | J. Baker | Crossley | wordplay similar to 1706 discussion in Review; favorite allusion | ||||||
| 163(P) | The Weakest Go to the Wall | deduced-context | 1714 | J. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | possible reference in Letters (p. 441); parallels to works and letters; favorite allusion | ||||||
| 164(P) | Advice to the People of Great Britain | contemporary attribution | 1714 | J. Baker | Boyer, 171773 | Lee | corresponds closely with D’s views; see note to 161 | |||||
| 165 | The Secret History of the White-Staff | contemporary attribution | 1714 | J. Baker | several74 | probable reference in Letters;75 see note to 161 | ||||||
| 166 | The Secret History of the White Staff, pt. II | deduced-context | 1714 | J. Baker | continuation of 165 | |||||||
| 167 | The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff | contemporary attribution | 1715 | S. Keimer | Pittis (?), 171576 | Trent (Nation) | claims (as in Appeal) that he did not write 165 but made amendments77 | |||||
| 168 | The Secret History of the White Staff, pt. Ill | deduced-context | 1715 | J. Baker | a continuation of 165 | |||||||
| 169 | The Family Instructor | contemporary attribution | 1715 | Eman. Matthews and Jo. Button | 171878 | Cibber/Shiels | Button a friend of D’s | |||||
| 170 | A Friendly Epistle by way of Reproof | contemporary attribution | 1715 | S. Keimer | Gildon, 171979 | Wilson | see note to 161 | |||||
| 171 | An Appeal to Honour and Justice | claimed by D | 1715 | J. Baker | TP: Daniel De Foe | Chalmers | clearly autobiographical | |||||
| 172 | A Sharp Rebuke from one of the People called Quakers | contemporary attribution | 1715 | S. Keimer | Gildon, 1719 | Wilson | same charges against Sacheverell as made elsewhere | |||||
| 173(P) | The Second-Sighted Highlander | deduced-context | 1715 | J. Baker | Crossley | related to 118(P), 137(P). 147(P) | ||||||
| 174 | A Seasonable Expostulation with ... James Butler | contemporary attribution | 1715 | S. Keimer | Gildon, 1719 | Wilson | ||||||
| 175(P) | An Account of the Conduct of Robert Earl of Oxford | contemporary attribution | 1715 | Boyer, 171780 | Trent (Nation) | quotation identical to Review; reference similar to Review; see note to 161 | ||||||
| 176(P) | A Hymn to the Mob | deduced-context | 1715 | S. Popping, J. Fox, et al. | Wilson | wants to write a "Hymn to the Rabble"; similar style to 43; echoes of other works | ||||||
| 177(P) | A View of the Present Management of the Court of France | deduced-content | 1715 | J. Baker | Trent (Biblio) | favorite saying; highly distinctive discussion81 | ||||||
| 178(P) | An Account of the Great and Generous Actions of James Butler | deduced-content | [1715] | J. Moore | Lee | favorite allusion; favorite remark | ||||||
| 179(P) | A View of the Scots Rebellion | deduced-content | 1715 | R. Burleigh | Lee | similar description and one instance of similar phrasing to Review | ||||||
| 180 | A Trumpet Blown in the North | deduced-content | 1716 [1715] | S. Keimer | Lee | Keimer "connects it with the 'Quaker's' previous writings"; favorite story | ||||||
| 181(P) | Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country | deduced-content | 1716 | R. Burleigh | Trent (Nation) | two favorite allusions, one of them used in 81 and often in Review | ||||||
| 182(P) | Some Considerations on a Law for Triennial Parliaments | deduced-context | 1716 | J. Baker, T. Warner | Crossley82 | D claims to have written a tract of this sort; favorite allusion83 | ||||||
| 183(P) | An Essay upon Buying and Selling of Speeches | deduced-content | 1716 | J. Baker, T. Warner | Trent (Nation) | reflects known hostility; favorite allusion; Marvell quotation also in Review | ||||||
| 184(P) | The Layman’s Vindication of the Church of England | deduced-content | 1716 | J. Baker for A. and W. Bell | Trent (CHEL) | wordplay parallel to 228; consonant with D’s thinking | ||||||
| 185 | Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S— House | contemporary attribution | 1717 [1716] | J. More | Boyer, 171784 | Trent (Nation)85 | description similar to 69; remark about Harley used frequently byD | |||||
| 186(P) | The Danger of Court Differences | deduced-content | 1717 | J. Baker, T. Warner | Crossley | variant on Dryden line;86 phrase used elsewhere; an axiom paralleled in Review | ||||||
| 187(P) | The Quarrel of the School-Boys at Athens | deduced-context | 1717 | J. Roberts | Trent (CHEL) | praised in Mercurius Politicus; MP quotes extra verses; remark recalls 185 | ||||||
| 188(P) | An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and En[n]obling Foreigners ...87 | contemporary attribution | 1717 | Boyer, 171788 | Trent (Nation) | |||||||
| 189 | Fair Payment No Spunge | contemporary attribution | 1717 | J. Brotherton, W. Meddows, J. Roberts | 171789 | Crossley90 | favorite maxim; praised in Mercurius Politicus | |||||
| 190(P) | What if the Swedes should Come? | deduced-content | 1717 | J. Roberts | Wilson | several different kinds of internal evidence91 | ||||||
| 191(P) | The Question Fairly Stated, whether Now is not the Time to do Justice to the Friends of the Government ... | contemporary attribution | 1717 | J. Roberts, J. Harrison, A. Dodd | 171792 | Crossley | reproduces "some dozen paragraphs" from 70 without acknowledgment; favorite simile; favorite allusion | |||||
| 192(P) | Memoirs of the Church of Scotland | deduced-content | 1717 | Eman. Matthews and T. Warner | Wodrow93 | Stace | consonant with D’s thinking; advert, in 204 | |||||
| 193(P) | A Farther Argument against Ennobling Foreigners | deduced-context | 1717 | E. Moore | complains that 188(P) has been wrongly attrib. to D;94 epigraph adapted from 20(P); see note to 188(P) | |||||||
| 194 | Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager | contemporary attribution | l7l7 | S. Baker | Oldmixon (1732)95 | Wilson 96 | reference to 128(F);97 see note to 161 | |||||
| 195 | A Declaration of Truth to Benjamin Hoadly | contemporary attribution | 1717 | E. More | Gildon, 171998 | Wilson | ||||||
| 196(P) | The Conduct of Christians made the Sport of Infidels | deduced-context | l7l7 | S. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | praised in Mercurius Politicus; two favorite themes; reference also in 209 | ||||||
| 197(P) | The Old Whig and Modern Whig Revived | deduced-content | l7l7 | S. Baker | Trent (CHEL) | consonant with D’s thinking and style; two favorite verse quotations | ||||||
| 198(P) | A Continuation of Letters written by a Turkish Spy at Paris | deduced-content | 1718 | W. Taylor | Crossley | parallels to D works; favorite allusion; story and quote also in 210; quote also in 201 | ||||||
| 199 | The Family Instructor, vol. II | deduced-context | 1718 | Eman. Matthews | continuation of 169 | |||||||
| 200(P) | A Friendly Rebuke to one Parson Benjamin | deduced-content | 1719 | E. Moore | Lee | similar to 195; consonant with D’s thinking; favorite quotation | ||||||
| 201 | The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe | contemporary attribution | 1719 | W. Taylor | Gildon, 171999 | |||||||
| 202(P) | The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley | deduced-content | 1719 | E. Smith | Lee | several suggestive pieces of internal evidence100 | ||||||
| 203(P) | The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers truly Represented | deduced-content | 1719 | W. Boreham | Crossley | similar style and approach to 254; favorite anecdote | ||||||
| 204 | The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe | contemporary attribution | 1719 | W. Taylor | Gildon, 1719 101 | Chalmers | "sequel" to 201; often pub. with it | |||||
| 205 | A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes | deduced-context | 1719 | W. Boreham | Lee | author of 254 links it with this work; intro repr. in Mercurius Politicus; lengthy quotes in MP | ||||||
| 206(P) | The Chimera: or, the French way of Paying National Debts, laid open | deduced-content | 1720 [1719] | T. Warner | Lee | favorite saying; favorite conceit; possible lifetime attribution102 | ||||||
| 207(P) | The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Consider’d | deduced-content | 1720 | W. Boreham | Crossley | arguments similar to 254; quotation from 205 | ||||||
| 208(P) | Memoirs of a Cavalier | late attribution | [1720] | W. Taylor, T. Warner, et al. | Noble, 1784 | Wilson | reference similar to Review; Defoean plan; claimed to possess relevant document103 | |||||
| 209 | The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton | late attribution | 1720 | J. Brotherton, T. Warner, et al. | 1767104 | extant copy with "emendations in a hand closely resembling" D’s105 | ||||||
| 210 | Serious Reflections during the Life ... of Robinson Crusoe | deduced-context | 1720 | W. Taylor | Chalmers | "sequel" to 201 | ||||||
| 211(P) | Brief Observations on Trade and Manufactures | deduced-content | 1721 | Trent (CHEL) | D made similar arguments to Harley; favorite allusion; remark consonant with 233 | |||||||
| 212(P) | The Case of Mr Law, Truly Stated | deduced-content | 1721 | A. Moore | Trent (Biblio) | verse quotation also in Review in 1705106 | ||||||
| 213 | The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders | late attribution | 1721 [1722] | W. Chetwood, T. Edling | Noble, 1776 | |||||||
| 214(P) | Due Preparations for the Plague | deduced-content | 1722 | E. Matthews, J. Batley | Crossley107 | style and theme similar to 216; favorite allusion | ||||||
| 215 | Religious Courtship | late attribution | 1722 | E. Matthews, W. Meadows, et al. | Cibber/ Shiels | style and approach very close to 169 | ||||||
| 216 | A Journal of the Plague year | late attribution | 1722 | E. Nutt, J. Roberts, et al. | Cibber/xsShiels | |||||||
| 217 | The History and Remarkable Life of ... Col. Jacque | contemporary attribution | 1723 [1722] | J. Brotherton, T. Payne, et al. | 4th ed. (1738) | |||||||
| 218 | The Fortunate Mistress: or, a History of the Fortunes of... Lady Roxana | late attribution | 1724 | T. Warner, W. Meadows, et al. | Noble, 1775 | |||||||
| 219 | The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d | contemporary attribution | 1724 | S. Harding, W. Lewis, et al. | 1725108 | Chalmers | couplet adapted from 17; favorite anecdote and saying | |||||
| 220 | A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain 109 | late attribution | 1724 | G. Strahan, W. Mears, et al. | "7th ed." (1769) | |||||||
| 221 | A New Voyage Round the World | late attribution | 1725 [1724] | A. Bettesworth, W. Mearsxs | 1786–87110 | |||||||
| 222 | Every-Body’s Business, is No-Body’s Business | signed | 1725 | T. Warner, A. Dodd, E. Nutt | Moreton111 | Chalmers (supposed) | ||||||
| 223 | A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. II | deduced-context | 1725 | G. Strahan, W. Mears, et al. | continuation of 220 | |||||||
| 224 | The Complete English Tradesman | contemporary attribution | 1726 [1725] | Charles Rivington | 1738 ed.; Cibber/Shiels | |||||||
| 225(P) | A General History of Discoveries and Improvements | deduced-content | [1725-6] | J. Roberts | Crossley | consonant with other works; quote used here and in 210; proposal akin to one in a letter | ||||||
| 226(P) | A Brief Case of the Distillers | deduced-content | 1726 | T. Warner | Crossley | two close parallels in Review | ||||||
| 227 | An Essay upon Literature | late attribution | 1726 | Tho. Bowles, John Clark, John Bowles | I759?112 | Wilson | passage similar to 233; one favorite saying | |||||
| 228 | The Political History of the Devil | late attribution | 1726 | T. Warner | Gibber/ Shiels | "abounds in favourite allusions and quotations," including from 17 and 81 | ||||||
| 229(P) | Mere Mature Delineated | deduced-content | 1726 | T. Warner | Wilson | several suggestive pieces of internal evidence113 | ||||||
| 230 | A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. III | deduced-context | 1727 [1726] | G. Strahan, W. Mears, J. Stagg | continuation of 220 | |||||||
| 231 | A Supplement to the Complete English Tradesman | deduced-context | 1727 [1726] | Charles Rivington | supplement to 224 | |||||||
| 232 | The Protestant Monastery 114 | signed | 1727 [1726] | W. Meadows, J. Roberts, et al. | Moreton | Chalmers (supposed) | ||||||
| 233 | A System of Magick | signed | 1727 [1726] | J. Roberts | 2nd ed.: Moreton | Cibber/ Shiels | ||||||
| 234(P) | The Evident Approach of a War | deduced-content | 1727 | J. Roberts, A. Dodd | Lee | one favorite allusion; one passage similar to Review; author refers to 236(P) | ||||||
| 235(P) | Conjugal Lewdness | late attribution | 1727 | T. Warner | Chalmers | several significant parallels; two favorite quotations; favorite saying | ||||||
| 236(P) | The Evident Advantages to Great Britain and its Allies from the Approaching War | deduced-content115 | 1727 | J. Roberts, A. Dodd | Crossley | continuation of 234(P) by the same author; suggestion parallel to Review | ||||||
| 237(P) | A Brief Deduction of the ... British Woollen Manufacture | deduced-content | 1727 | J. Roberts, A. Dodd | Crossley | account closely connects to that given in the Review | ||||||
| 238 | An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions | signed | 1727 | J. Roberts | 1729 repr.: Moreton | Cibber/Shiels | see note to 222 | |||||
| 239 | The Compleat English Tradesman, vol. II | deduced-context | 1727 | Charles Rivington | continuation of 224 | |||||||
| 240 | A New Family Instructor | signed | 1727 | T. Warner | Family Instructor | related to 169 | ||||||
| 241 | Parochial Tyranny | signed | [1727] | J. Roberts | Moreton | Chalmers (supposed) | see note to 222 | |||||
| 242 (P) | Some Considerations on the Reasonableness and Necessity of Encreasing ... the Seamen ... | deduced-context | 1728 | J. Roberts | Crossley | similar to argument in Review (1705) and to 1705 proposal made to the House of Lords 116 | ||||||
| 243 | Augusta Triumphans | signed | 1728 | for J. Roberts; by E. Nutt et al. | 2nd ed.: Moreton | Chalmers (supposed) | see note to 222 | |||||
| 244 | A Plan of the English Commerce | contemporary attribution | 1728 | Charles Rivington | 1737 ed.; Cibber/Shiels | |||||||
| 245 | Second Thoughts are Best | signed | 1729 [1728] | for W. Meadows; by J. Roberts | Moreton | Chalmers (supposed) | expands on 243 (opening pages almost verbatim); see note to 222 | |||||
| 246 | An Humble Proposal to the People of England, for the Encrease of their Trade | signed | 1729 | Charles Rivington | Compleat Tradesman | connected to 244 | ||||||
| 247 (P) | The Advantages of Peace and Commerce | deduced-content | 1729 | for J. Brotherton and Tho. Cox; by A. Dodd | Crossley | various favorite themes; one favorite saying | ||||||
| 248(P) | Some Objections Humbly Offered ... relating to the ... Relief of Prisoners | deduced-content | 1729 | R. Walker, E. Nutt | Crossley | one argument similar to Review (of 1707 and 1709); passage similar to 224117 | ||||||
| 249(P) | A Brief State of the Inland or Home Trade, of England | deduced-content | 1730 | Tho. Warner | Crossley | several passages similar to 224; one favorite saying | ||||||
| Periodicals | ||||||||||||
| 250 | The Review 118 | claimed by D | Feb 1704-June 1713 | several119 | claimed by D120 | |||||||
| 250a | An Answer to the L[or]d H[aver]-sham’s Speech | claimed by D | 1705 | TP: Daniel D’Foe | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 250b | An Essay on the Great Battle at Ramellies | claimed by D | [1706] | repr. from Review | ||||||||
| 250c | A Sermon Preach’d by Mr. Daniel Defoe | claimed by D | 1706 | title | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 250d | Daniel Defoe’s Hymn for the Thanksgiving | claimed by D | 1706 | title | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 250e | The Trade of Britain Stated | claimed by D | [1707] | [Edinb.] | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 250f | One of Mr. Foe’s Weekly Reviews | claimed by D | [1707] | [Edinb.?] | title | repr. from Review | ||||||
| 250g | New Fashion’d Advice about Choosing a Parliament ... taken out of Daniel De Foe’s Reviews | claimed by D | 1708 | Edinb. | title | repr. from Review | ||||||
| 250h | Scotland in Danger | claimed by D | 1708 | Edinb. | repr. from Review; see note to 101 (P) | |||||||
| 250i | A Commendatory Sermon Preach’d November the 4th, 1709 | claimed by D | [1709] | J. Dutton | TP: Daniel de Foe | repr. from Review | ||||||
| 250j | A Vindication of Dr. Henry Sacheverell | claimed by D | [1710] | TP: D. D’F. | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 250k | News from the Moon | claimed by D | [1721] | [Boston] | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 250l | The Banbury Convert: Or, Daniel De Foe’s Address to Her Majesty | claimed by D | 1710 | J. Baker | title | repr. from Review | ||||||
| 250m | The State of the British Nation | claimed by D | [1711] | Dublin | repr. from Review | |||||||
| 251 | The Master Mercury | contemporary attribution | Aug-Sept 1704 | Luttrell, 1704121 | MS ascription; favorite quotation; "Defoean" theme and style; refers to Review | |||||||
| 252 | Mercator | contemporary attribution | May 1713-July 1714 | Benj. Tooke, John Barber | Boyer, 1713122 | possible claim in a letter; by same author as The Manufacturer (see 254)123 | ||||||
| 253(P) | The Monitor | contemporary attribution | Apr-Aug 1714 | John Morphew | 1714124 | Trent (CHEL) | several suggestive pieces of internal evidence125 | |||||
| 254 | The Manufacturer | deduced-context | Oct 1719-Mar 1721 | W. Boreham | D commissioned by the London Company of Weavers; by author of 252126 | |||||||
| 255(P) | The Commentator | contemporary attribution | Jan-Sep 1720 | J. Roberts | 1720127 | Moore | several suggestive pieces of internal evidence128 | |||||
| 256(P) | The Director | deduced-content | Oct 1720-Jan 1721 | for W. Boreham; by A. Dodd | Lee | several favorite quotations and allusions; similar polemical style to Review | ||||||
| Contributions to Books and Periodicals | ||||||||||||
| 257 | To the Athenian Society 129 | signed | [1692] | for James Dowley | ode: D.F. | Dunton130 | ||||||
| 258 | Preface to De Laune’s Plea ... With a Preface by the Author of the Review | signed | 1706 | William and Joseph Marshall | signed D. Foe | advert, in Review | ||||||
| 259 | Statement in St. James’s Post, repr. in Mercurius Politicus | signed | 1717 | signed D.F. | ||||||||
| 260 | Letter in Weekly Journal signed "Sir Andrew Politick" | contemporary attribution | 1718 | 1718131 | ||||||||
| 261 | Letter in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal signed "Andrew Moreton" | signed | 1728 | Moreton | ||||||||
| 262 | Essay in first number of Universal Spectator | contemporary attribution | 1728 | Henry Baker132 | ||||||||
| Translations and Compilations | ||||||||||||
| 263 | An Appendix to the Review | deduced-context | 1705 | includes Review indices; advert, in Review | ||||||||
| 264 | A Collection of the ... Addresses in ... King James’s Time | deduced-context | [1710] | D seems to promise to write this in the Review | ||||||||
| Works Left in Manuscript | ||||||||||||
| 266 | Meditacons | claimed by D | [1681] | MS in D’s hand, signed with his name and initials | ||||||||
| 267 | Historicall Colleccons | claimed by D | [1682] | MS in D’s hand | ||||||||
| 268 | Humanum est Errare[:] Mistakes On all Sides | claimed by D | [1704?] | partially in D’s hand133 | ||||||||
| 269 | Par—n Pl—ton of Barwick | contemporary attribution | [1709?] | 00000 | 1709134 | |||||||
| 270 | The Compleat English Gentleman | claimed by D | [1728–29?] | claimed in Letters (p. 473) | ||||||||
| 271 | Of Royall Educacion | claimed by D | [1698?-1727?] | included with MS of 270 |
A "second edition" of the True Collection appeared in 1705 (including the same items as the first). This Collection and the Second Volume were reissued in two parts as A True Collection ... The Third Edition in 1710, and again in 1711 as the two-volume Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman. Forty items were reprinted in the two-volume The Genuine Works of Daniel D’Foe, Author of The True-born English-Man ([1721]), perhaps an unauthorized collection (and an expensive one at 12 shillings). All of the items included in these collections were printed either in the original True Collection or in the Second Volume.
The How collection was unauthorized, and Defoe excluded 11 (P) and 40(F) from his True Collection.
Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 6, ed. Frank H. Ellis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Ellis says that "The evidence for Defoe's authorship ... lies mainly in his quotation of the poem in" issues of the Review (48).
Four stanzas were also "quoted in Cursory Remarks upon Some Late Disloyal Proceedings in Several Cabals (1699)," a volume not associated with Defoe (CB, 16).
Animadversions on the Succession to the Crown of England, Consider'd (1701), 1. Also in two 1703 pamphlets (CB, 26).
Furbank and Owens observe that this item was "widely attributed" to Defoe by contemporaries (including Tutchin), though Defoe (almost certainly disingenuously) denied authorship (CB, 27).
This is probably the piece James Drake attributes to "Legion" in The Source of our Present Fears Discover'd (1703), 32.
This pamphlet was "widely attributed" to Defoe, including by Pittis (?) in The True-Born Hugonot, p. 10 (CB, 29).
Ralph, History of England: During the Reigns of K. William, Q. Anne, and K. George I, 2 vols. (1744–46), 2:999.
Reprinted in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 4 vols. (1748), 3:114–124, attributed to "T.G." (Thomas Gordon?).
Extracts adapted and reprinted in The Modern Addresses Vindicated ... by D. De Foe (1710), which has sometimes been mistakenly attributed to Defoe (CB, 32).
See for example The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters ... with its Author's Brief Explication Consider'd, his Name Expos'd... and The Fox with his Firebrand Unkennell'd and Insnar'd (both 1703).
"Defoe's authorship is made clear in an 'advertisement' on the verso of the title-page" of the first edition (CB, 41).
The author of Remarks on the Author of the Hymn to the Pillory assumes that this item was written by Defoe (CB, 43).
Furbank and Owens note that, in addition to the preface being signed "D.F.," one part of item 46 is signed "Daniel de Foe" (CB, 44).
23. "An Unknown Defoe Broadsheet on the Regulation of the Press?", The Library, 5 th ser., 33 (1978): 51–58. Downie explains that an anonymous informer sent this piece to Harley and attributed it to Defoe.
An anonymous writer attributed this poem to "our Legionite" in the preface to The Whig's Scandalous Address Answered Stanza by Stanza (1703). John Dyer's News-Letter in October 1704 implied Defoe's authorship. Furbank and Owens point out, however, that in a 1710 letter, Defoe "reproaches Dyer for having reported him as fled from justice, when in fact he was on a journey, and there was not 'the least Charge Against me for being Concern'd in it' (Letters, p. 269)" (CB, 51–52). Elsewhere, they explain that they "are inclined to think that Defoe was its author, on the (admittedly slender) grounds that the first line from it is quoted in An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born Englishman ... and that Sammen who dispersed it was evidently a friend of Defoe's." See their "New Light on John Pierce, Defoe's Agent in Scotland," Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 6 (1998): 134–143, at 136.
The author of Stockings out at Heel (1705) attributes this piece to "A Dislocated Hosier" (CB, 58).
"No independently published edition of this work has been found" (CB, 59). The item was first published in SV.
Charles Leslie and others attributed this to Defoe by 1708 (when he openly acknowledged authorship); see CB, 62.
Defoe does not claim this piece by name, but his advertising it in the Review as by the author of The True-Born Englishman provides a tacit admission of authorship.
Furbank and Owens also point out that "Defoe later [in 1711] became a vociferous champion for the firm of Brooke and Hellier, when they tried to break into the retail trade in Portugese wine" (CB, 67).
Furbank and Owens refer to another work that includes the same Buder quotation, concluding in that instance that "Although this line is sometimes quoted by Defoe ... there is little reason to think that he was the author" of the work at issue (CB, 64).
Rodney M. Baine quotes a 1734 essay in The Universal Spectator, whose author suggests that the same person was responsible for both this item and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions. "This reference," Baine concludes, "gives us our first evidence that Defoe wrote A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal" See Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 93.
Jure Divino Toss'd in a Blanket: or, Daniel De Foe's Memorial (in POAS, 1707) and elsewhere (see CB, 76).
See Frank H. Ellis, "Notes for an Edition of Defoe's Verse," The Review of English Studies, n.s., 32 (1981): 398–407. What Defoe says in his 28 November 1706 letter to Harley is "I Gould not Refrain sending you a peice of my Ld Beilhavens Poetry in Answer to the Ballad" (Letters, 162).
Robert Wodrow (1679–1734), an eighteenth-century collector of books and manuscripts, often wrote what he believed to be the author's name on title pages of pieces he acquired; Furbank and Owens do not accept all of the pieces that were first attributed by Wodrow. See Defoe De-Attributions, xv-xvi, and CB, xiv. Because these annotations were made over a period of time, I have not given a precise date of his ascription of the relevant items.
What Defoe writes to Harley is this: "They go to morrow on the 5th Article. They have been Debateing it last sitting, and here is a mighty popular Objection against on Account of their shipping. The Enclosed will Explain it more particularly, which I Wrot at the Desire of the E's of Abercorn, Sutherland, and some Members of the Commons, to prepare them against to morrows Debate" (Letters, 154). That the "Enclosed" is item 85 is highly likely, but the allusion is not as unambiguous as (for example) in the case of 134(P).
On 9 December 1706, Defoe writes to Harley, "I am printing a Single sheet Entituled a Letter to the Glasgow men," and on 12 December he says, "The paper I mentioned in my last About the Glasgow men I send you Enclosed. Tis a plain but Course Expostulation and they Flatter me it has done a great Deal of service here" (Letters, 169, 170).
What Defoe says to Harley (17 January 1707) is this: "Since the papers I lately sent you I have printed here Two Essayes. One I Enclose you here; The Other shall be sent The Next post" (Letters, 194). Furbank and Owens, following Healey, believe the "One" to be item 90, and the "Other" to be item 91.
Pamphlets nos. 92, 93, and 94 are part of a controversy with the Rev. James Webster. Furbank and Owens: "The second of the three pamphlets addressed to Webster makes it plain that the author is, and is known by Webster to be, Defoe" (CB, 84). In a 27 January 1707 letter to Harley, Defoe says, "I sent you the last letter The Attempt of One Webster, a minister, against the Dissenters, I here Send my Answer to him" (Letters, 196).
I have labeled item no. 94 "deduced-context" instead of "contemporary attribution" because in this case the contextual evidence (for which see previous note) is more persuasive than the contemporary attribution. A second edition appeared the same year under the title The Dissenters Vindicated; or, A Short View of the Present State of the Protestant Religion in Britain. Toland attributes The Dissenters Vindicated to Defoe in his Second Part of the State Anatomy (1717), p. 46.
"It seems likely that Robert Wodrow was referring to it in a letter ... of 13 March 1711, where he remarked that 'the foolish plea of persecution' by Episcopal pamphleteers 'is fully answered by ... Defoe' (CB, 87).
45. Just Reprimand to Daniel De Foe, the author (Defoe's target, James Clark) "takes it for granted that [the piece] is by Defoe himself" (CB, 90).
The letter is dated 29 June 1708, and printed in Furbank and Owens, "Defoe as Secret Agent." What Defoe says to Godolphin is this: "Enclosed I send your Ldpp the printed paper I promised (in my Last but one) should Come last post, but Could not be ready; your Ldpp will see by it The steps I am Taking. It would be a most usefull Encouragement to kno' if your Ldpp approves Thi, and My Design of Dispersing it over the wholl Island, in a Method I noted to your Ldpp was formally Done in the Case of the reply to the Memoriall. It is but a short piece, but I am perswaded it may be usefull, and I shall Follow it with Another, and perhaps a Third, to expose the Conjunction of These men with the Enemies of the Government. I have sent this up this post to be printed in England; your Ldpp will perceive I have Disguised the Stile, and I am perswaded no body will so much as guess it is mine" (150). Furbank and Owens suggest that the "reply to the Memoriall" to which Defoe refers is likely to be The High-Church Legion, and the "Another" he anticipates is probably Scotland in Danger, item no. 250h (see notes 37 and 38).
The pamphlet was attributed to "the Author of the Reviews" in the Edinburgh edition of the Review (CB, 92). Also see the note to no. 85 for Wodrow's ascription of it to Defoe.
In a 5 September 1710 letter to Harley, Defoe boasts, "I am Vain of Saying Sir The first Step I Took has been Successfull and has done More Service Than I Expected, in which The Town does me too much Honour, in Supposeing it well Enough done to be your Own. I Mean the Essay Upon Credit" (Letters, 276-277). The Essay is attributed to Harley in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 2:1–9. So is no. no (2:10–18).
In a 5 September 1710 letter to Harley, Defoe says, "If you Think it proper, I would Offer Another Piece of The Same kind [as An Essay upon Publiek Credit]; which I would Call an Essay Upon Loans" (Letters, 277). Item no. no appeared later the same month.
The reference is in volume six of Samuel Halkett and John Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, as enlarged by James Kennedy, W. A. Smith, and A. F. Johnson (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1932), p. 304 (under the tide "Captain Tom's ballad; or, Captain Tom's lamentation for his mob's tribulation").
Furbank and Owens admit that "With a fraction more hesitation, since there are no 'Captain Tom' allusions in the Review at this time, and the style is more demotic ... one can apply the same argument in support of Defoe's authorship as with item 106(P)" (CB, 104–105).
Defoe denied his authorship of this piece, attributing it to someone else. "Nevertheless," Furbank and Owens conclude, "internal evidence strongly suggests his authorship" (CB, 106).
The bookseller Joseph Button wrote to Defoe about this pamphlet c. 25 December 1710: "When you do Bickerstaff I wou'd not ha' you fright all people as you say you will" (Letters, 305).
"Robert Wodrow, in a letter to his wife of 10 May 1711, writes that he is enclosing 'a pamphlet, "Counsel to the Assembly" by Defoe"' (CB, 109).
In a 3 March 1711 letter to Harley, Defoe asks "whether if a Small pamphlett ... were written to Allay the feares and Lessen the Surprize of the people There, to Dispose Them to Consider Calmly of Things, and a Little Encourage Them–whether you may not Think it Usefull at Such a Juncture as This" (Letters, 320).
Defoe refers to this pamphlet as a "Vile Ill Natur'd Pamphlet" and "a Bitter Invective" not by him: "It is Certainly Written by Some English man, and I have Some Guess at the Man, but dare not be positive" (Letters, 306–307). Furbank and Owens (not unwisely) disbelieve him, "above all because [Atalantis Major] corresponds so closely to what he had written earlier to Harley" (CB, 111).
"Defoe was friendly with Dalby Thomas, a governor of the African Company, and was widely believed to be a hired advocate for the company" (CB, 112).
Furbank and Owens also observe that this pamphlet refers to "a writer of much penetration who continually warned the Whigs of the danger of running down credit ... almost certainly an allusion to Defoe." The piece does criticize the Review, but they conclude that such criticism "can probably be taken as a ruse" (CB, 117).
"The tone and complex line of argument as regards Occasional Conformity are very close to those of Defoe's known writings on the subject"; a favorite allusion; reference that suggests "that the author has the backing of fellow Dissenters" (CB, 119). It was also advertised in the Review.
In a 14 February 1712 letter to Harley, Defoe says, "I Reproach my Self with The Answer I gave your Ldpp when you were pleased to Ask me if I had any thing Perticular to Offer, Because I Fully purposed to have Represented a Perticular Case of the Poor keel men of New Castle. ... There is So Much Justice ... in The Case That I Perswade my Self your Ldpp will be pleased with Appearing in behalf of a Thousand Families of poor and Injured Men, who None but God and your Ldpp can Now Deliver; If your Ldpp pleases to give me Leav I would Gladly Lay an Abstract of The Case before you" (Letters, 369).
Although this attribution is deduced from content, and regarded as merely "highly 'probable'" by Furbank and Owens, the detailed reference to Defoe and his career seem to me virtually to constitute a claimed authorship.
In "Defoe and the Dutch Alliance: Some Attributions Examined," BJECS 9 (1986): 169–182, Furbank and Owens argue that, of the six pamphlets on 1710–1712 Anglo-Dutch peace negotiations attributed to Defoe by earlier bibliographers, only three are legitimate: 140(P), 141(P), and 143(P). They contend that the Enquiry's "telling rhetorical organization" is "suggestive of Defoe," and that the argument corresponds "with Defoe's position in the Review," which leads them to conclude that "the attribution is correct, and that the pamphlet is by Defoe" (176). Given the certitude reflected in this verdict, one might wonder why they label the pamphlet merely "probable" in the Bibliography. The case for Defoe's authorship of Reasons against Fighting and A Further Search is strengthened, Furbank and Owens argue, by circumstantial evidence. In a letter to Harley, Defoe seems to promise to write a pamphlet that fits the description of Reasons against Fighting, and there is a similarly suggestive epistolary reference to a work that might be A Further Search. The style of A Further Search, moreover, "has here and there an edge and neat turn of phrase-making that seem reasonably Defoean" (180).
The reference is in a 5 June 1712 letter to Harley, where Defoe says that he is enclosing "books," presumably nos. 140(P) and 141 (P), though the references are vague. Of the first, he explains, "It is written without Doores, and for The Use of Those Cheifly, who kno' Nothing but without Doores. I hope it May be Usefull to Undeciev an abused people, and Let Them see How The wholl Nation was Forming into One Tribe of Issachar, and Taught to Couch Under The Tyranny of Our Neighbours." He goes on to explain that he is sending "another book ... in Answer to The Dutch Memorialls." He insists that he is "farr from Exciting the people against The Dutch, and believ it is not the Governments View to Injure or Break with The Dutch; but it Seems Necessary ... to have the Dutch Friends and Not Masters" (Letters, 376, 377).
Furbank and Owens say that, "since the persona of 'Count Tariff' was directly associated with Mercator by Addison," this praise "is strongly suggestive of Defoe's authorship" (CB, 140).
As further "evidence," Furbank and Owens explain that Defoe had, in a letter to Harley, encouraged him "to get Steele expelled from Parliament." They conclude that "Out of these circumstantial facts a 'probable' attribution seems to emerge" (CB, 141).
To Harley, Defoe writes, "I have also Compil'd a Letter to The Dissenters, of which I had a hint from your Ldpp" (Letters, 424).
The attribution of items 161, 164(P), 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 175(P), and 194 are addressed in more detail in Furbank and Owens, "The Lost Property Office: Some Defoe Attributions Reconsidered," PBSA 86 (1992): 245–67. Furbank and Owens sort 24 "Harley" pamphlets attributed to Defoe by Moore into "Defoe's," "probably Defoe's," and unlikely to be Defoe's. They list no. 161 as merely "probable" in this article, and (without explanation) upgrade it to "definite" in CB.
Some people attributed this to Harley; both Harley and Defoe (in an Appeal to Honour and Justice) denied authorship (CB, 148). Either we disbelieve Defoe's passionate defense of himself or we deprive him of authorship.
Defoe explains "why I have not Persued what I was upon for Vindicateing your Ldpps person and Conduct and Exposeing your Enemyes as I had proposed to your Ldpp and which was actually in the Press and part of it Printed off" (Letters, 444). Furbank and Owens conclude that "it is hard to doubt that this was the promised pamphlet he referred to in a letter to Harley of 3 August 1714" (CB, 148–49).
Furbank and Owens argue that "it is difficult not to conclude that he wrote [this pamphlet] and that it is a work of fiction" (CB, 151).
In The Life And Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D[aniel] De F[oe], Gildon has "Defoe" say, "I have written against my old Teachers in the Shape and Form of a Quaker, as in a Pamphlet to T. B. a Dealer in many Words; and in the same Form I have attack'd the B...of B..., one who is equally hated by them" (xv). The "Pamphlet to T. B." is evidently item no. 170, the full tide of which is A Friendly Epistle by way of Reproof from one of the People called Quakers, to Thomas Bradbury, a Dealer in many Words. Nos. 172 and 174 are related to 170 (the title pages of both announce that the work is "By the same Friend that wrote to Thomas Bradbury), which is presumably why Furbank and Owens use Gildon to support the attribution of these items as well as of no. 170. The same is true for no. 195, attributed on the title page to "a Ministring Friend, who writ to Tho. Bradbury, a Dealer in many Words." Items 172, 174, and 195 are labeled "contemporary attribution" here because Gildon clearly associated Defoe with a group of related pamphlets.
Furbank and Owens suggest that "the discriminating and provocative tribute to the genius of Louis XIV ... seems particularly characteristic and has many parallels in the Review" (CB, 160).
James Crossley, "Defoe's Pamphlet on the Septennial Bill," Notes and Queries, 1st ser., 5 (1852): 577–579.
Defoe's claim appears in an article in the St. James's Post, reprinted in Mercurius Politicus (July 1717). Furbank and Owens explain that "Boyer, in the Political State for April 1716, accuses Defoe of writing an attack on the bill to extend the life of Parliament... and mentions the present tract as one of seven written in favour of the bill and therefore as not by Defoe" (CB, 164).
Furbank and Owens listed this item as a doubtful attribution in Defoe De-Attributions (pp. 95–96), but "new light on Defoe's political stance at this period now inclines us to accept it as probable" (CB, 171). They also accept the successor to this pamphlet, no. 193(P) (p. 100 in Defoe De-Attributions).
Boyer, Political State for June 1717. As Furbank and Owens point out, "Toland, who was an old enemy of Defoe, went along with the attribution, gleefully exploiting the chance to score off him" (CB, 170). "Toland, in The Second Part of the State-Anatomy, answered [this pamphlet], making merciless fun of the paradox of the author of The True-Born Englishman (of all people) extolling the English nobility and whipping up prejudice against foreigners" (CB, 176). Defoe flatly denies authorship of this piece in 193(P), but perhaps disingenuously.
The author of The Conduct of Robert Walpole Esq. reports that "Fair Payment no Spunge ... was also said to be written by the Order of the first Contrivers: Some said it was written by the aforesaid Paterson; others, who pretended to speak from better Information, said it was done by Daniel de Foe" (p. 59; quoted in CB, 172).
James Crossley, "'Inquiry into the State of the Union, by the Wednesday Club in Friday Street,"' Notes and Queries, 1st ser., 7 (1853): 576.
The piece expresses sentiments similar to those in no. 189; includes a remark also found in nos. 7 and 8; its title may recall no. 148; there are possible reference to no. 148; a "classic Defoe formulation" and a "very Defoean homily." Also, "the absurd prejudice of supposing that anyone who finds things to praise in an enemy must be a traitor [is] frequently echoed in the Review" (CB, 173).
A Presbyterian Getting on Horse-Back, 3–4. From Furbank and Owens's point of view, however, the author of this piece is half wrong: the author says that no. 191(P) must be by the same author as The Repeal of the Act against Occasional Conformity Considered, and "I should suspect De Foe to be the Author." Furbank and Owens do not attribute The Repeal of the Act to Defoe (CB, 174), which means that we cannot count this contemporary's testimony as reliable external evidence.
"Wodrow, in the preface to his The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1721–22), discusses this work and says that it is generally believed to be by the author of the History of the Union. He makes a more explicit attribution to Defoe in a letter to James Fraser (undated, but about November 1720)" (CB, 175).
"The present tract's denial that Defoe wrote [188(P)] ... carries little conviction in the face of so much external evidence" (CB, 177). The external evidence to which they refer is presumably the Boyer and Toland attributions of no. 188(P) to Defoe (both hostile).
Oldmixon, A Reply to the Late Bishop Atterbury's Vindication, 7. Boyer's statements in the Political State (June 1717) implies that this tract is Defoe's. Defoe replied to Boyer (in a letter signed "D.F." in St James's Post, reprinted in Mercurius Politicus, July 1717), challenging him to "produce some Proof" that he had written it. The Post Boy advertisement attributes it to someone else (CB, 178).
As Furbank and Owens point out, however, Wilson admitted "that there was probably 'no solid foundation' for the attribution" (CB, 179).
"Despite his disclaimers and the Post Boy advertisement the ascription to Defoe is convincing, and one passage in particular helps support the theory that he wrote it and constitutes a complicated private joke" (CB, 178).
This piece includes lengthy quotations from no. 20 and cites no. 23; it includes a favorite "dog-Latin tag" of Defoe's; and its approach is similar to Defoe's known writings (CB, 187).
Furbank and Owens do not mention that Gildon attributed this to Defoe in the "postscript" to The Life And Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D[aniel] De F[oe]: "Having just run thro' the first Volume and clos'd my Letter, I was told that the second Volume was at last come out" (29).
"There could be thought to be the hint of an attribution to Defoe in a passage from a pamphlet Considerations on the Consequences of the French settling Colonies on the Mississippi excerpted in the Political State for April 1720: '... all your heavy Fellows, who pass for wise ... have thought it the shortest Way [our italics] to tell us gravely it will certainly come to nothing, and to treat it as a meer Chimaera' [our italics]" (CB, 191). They point out that passages from The Chimera (206(P)) had been reprinted in the Political State the previous January.
As Furbank and Owens point out, "Defoe claimed more than once to have ... a manuscript by an English gentleman who served under Gustavus Adolphus" (CB, 194).
Furbank and Owens suggest that Noble's 1784 edition of Captain Singleton "is, perhaps, the first ascription of it to Defoe" (CB, 196). I have found additional evidence suggested a significantly earlier first attribution: a 17 67 edition of Captain Singleton sold by Francis Noble (and others) is advertised as "Published originally from the Captain's Manuscript, by the celebrated Daniel Defoe." See The London Chronicle, 23–25 June 1767. The tide page of this edition (labeled the "third") says 1768, but the advertisement announces it as appearing on that day.
The connection with Defoe is, however, tenuous. The appearance of this verse passage in the Review is sixteen years earlier than the publication of The Case of Mr Law, and the same passage is quoted at p. 22 of A Letter from a Gentleman at the Bath, to his Friend in London (1722), a work never associated with Defoe.
This attribution was made by Crossley in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine 10 (1838): 370–371.
Furbank and Owens point out that "Several passages from the Tour are reproduced without acknowledgment in ... Atlas Maritimus (1728)" (CB, 210–211)—an illustration of the fact that the appearance of passages from a "Defoe" work does not constitute solid evidence for an item's authorship.
J. R. Forster, History of Voyages ... Made in the North (1786); Noble's edition of Daniel De Foe's Voyage Round the World (1787).
Furbank and Owens argue that Defoe was suspected of being Moreton in his lifetime, citing the anonymous Villany Exploded (1728) as an example (CB, 214). I have, however, found no other association of Defoe with Moreton in his lifetime. In the "Cibber" list of 1753, Shiels includes nos. 233 (as "History of Magic") and 238, the latter as "under the name of Moreton," but does not attribute the other Moreton pamphlets to Defoe (see p. 323). Chalmers (1790) included 233 and 238 as Defoe's (pp. 82, 83), but he regarded the other "Moreton" works (nos. 222, 232, 241, 243, and 245) as merely "supposed to be De Foe's" (see p. 86). Nos. 233 and 238 are not in fact part of the Moreton series, as Furbank and Owens point out, but 238 was reissued (as The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos'd) with "Andrew Moreton" on the title page, and a second edition of 233 also includes that name (CB, 213).
As Furbank and Owens point out, Trent "cites a manuscript note [dated 1759] in one of his copies: 'I was told by Mr. Bowles, print-seller ... that it was composed by Daniel Defoe"' (CB, 220).
The piece includes a favorite allusion; a reference that appears in no. 227; a claim also made in no. 223; and a line of verse also in no. 233.
Furbank and Owen note that an abridgment entitled Chickens feed Capons (1731 [for 1730]) reproduced some of no. 232, though they doubt Defoe's participation in or authorization of it.
Items included in the Critical Bibliography chiefly because they are continuations of earlier "Defoe" works are labeled here "deduced-context." 236(P) is "deduced from content" because both it and the work to which it is connected are attributed on the grounds of internal evidence.
A 30 January 1705 letter to "The Select Committee of the House of Lords" is printed in Letters (pp. 73-77). The author of no. 242(P), Furbank and Owens explain, gives "an approving account of a similar long and intricate proposal 'laid before a Committee of Parliament' some years ago" (CB, 234).
Furbank and Owens retain Some Objections as a "probable" attribution, while de-attributing two other pamphlets on imprisonment for debt (all three were treated as certain by Moore). See "Defoe and Imprisonment for Debt: Some Attributions Reviewed," The Review of English Studies, n.s., 37 (1986): 495-502.
Furbank and Owens point out that "There was much anonymous verse, in the main most probably by Defoe himself" in the Review [CB, 244). They also explain that "Occasionally, Defoe reprinted previously published pamphlets in the Review. ... More usually, though, articles from or issues of the Review were reprinted as pamphlets. It is often difficult to tell whether this was done with Defoe's authorisation or not" (245).
On which see J. A. Downie, "Mr. Review and His Scribbling Friends: Defoe and the Critics, 1705-1706," Huntington Library Quarterly 41 (1978): 345-366.
As, for example, in the Review for 30 January 1707, where he insists "no Person whatsoever has or ever had any Concern in writing the said Paper Entitled the REVIEW, than the known Author D. F. "... and that "wherever the Author may be, the Papers are wrote with his own Hand."
Narcissus Luttrell reports that "de Foe is ordered to be taken into custody for reflecting on admiral Rooke, in his Master Mercury" (quoted in CB, 249).
Boyer's ascription is in the Political State for May 1713. Furbank and Owens point out that "Various suggestions were made as to the authorship of Mercator" (CB, 250).
In the Review,Furbank and Owens report, Defoe "speaks as if the Mercator were by another author," and in An Appeal to Honour and Justice, he admits to having some part in it, but insists that he "neither was the Author of it, had the Property of it, the Printing of it, or the Profit by it." In a cryptic passage in a 21 May 1714 letter to Harley, Defoe seems to claim sole authorship (see Letters, 441).
The Flying-Post for 26-29 June 1714 includes criticism of the Monitor: ...you are to remember, that if D.F. be the Author (as 'tis generally suppos'd) he is famous for Irony ..." (CB, 252).
One issue includes a story for which there are "several analogues ... in known Defoe writings"; another issue includes a discussion of Steele very similar to one in a letter to Harley. A passage in yet another issue "corresponds closely, and at one point word-for-word, with a letter of Defoe's to Harley on the same subject" (CB, 252-253).
A passage in the 5 August 1720 Commentator (255(P)) attributes The Manufacturer to "Daniel" (CB, 254).
"An attack on [The Commentator] in the Weekly Medley for 16-23 January 1720 ('composed equally of Ignorance and Malice, and like a common FOE to all ingenious and learned men') might be hinting at Defoe as author" (CB, 255).
This paper includes several parallels to other Defoe writings: an anecdote used in no. 216 and another used in the Review; a quotation from no. 34; a comment very similar to one in no. 267 and the Review; a bit of wordplay paralleled in no. 224; a discussion akin to one in the Review; a Rochester quotation also found in the Review; and a discussion of credit that "is very much in Defoe's style upon this favourite topic." One issue includes an epigraph similar to the opening lines of no. 271 (CB, 256).
"The letter was declared treasonable, as a result of which Mist's offices were raided and searched and the staff taken into custody; and under questioning Mist testified that the letter was the work of Defoe, as did the bookseller Thomas Warner and a certain Jonathan Marshall, who said it had been delivered to him by Defoe's gardener" (CB, 259–60).
"The Universal Spectator was edited by Defoe's son-in-law Henry Baker, and in his set of copies of this journal ... Baker has written Defoe's name against this essay" (CB, 260).
See J. A. Downie, "'Mistakes on all Sides': A New Defoe Manuscript," The Review of English Studies, n.s., 27 (1976): 431-437.
The piece is known "from a transcript, headed 'De-Foe's Satyr' by George Staniland ... in a letter to an unknown recipient, dated 11 May 1709" (CB, 266).
Moore, "The Canon of Defoe's Writings," The Library, 5th ser., 11 (1956): 155–169, at 169, 163. The third epigraph is from a letter from Defoe to Godolphin (29 June 1708), printed in W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, "Defoe as Secret Agent: Three Unpublished Letters," The Scriblerian 25 (1993): 145–53, at 150.
|
BEYOND FURBANK AND OWENS: A NEW CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE
FOR THE "DEFOE" CANON
| |