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
items Defoe claimed are not pieces
literary critics have had any interest in; most of the major texts, from our
point of view, are missing from this list. But these 67 together do
represent a genuinely solid foundation. We have grounds for believing that
these are definitive attributions; we cannot be one hundred per cent sure
about any other titles. An important fact about the "claimed" items: 37 of
them appeared before 1705; 53 were in print by the end of 1710; and none was
published after 1715.
28 To put the point
differently: Defoe did not acknowledge authorship
of a single new piece after the 1715
Appeal to Honour and
Justice. This means that a huge proportion of the works about which
we can be certain were produced by the end of the first decade of the
eighteenth century.
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
of a work as "probable"? The argument in favor of including
them is that, were we to de-attribute every item for which we have no
definite external evidence, much of "Defoe" would
evaporate. Granting that at some point the number of striking parallels
might become highly
persuasive, however, parallels do
not
prove anything. A reader of the
Review might be in agreement with its position and reproduce some
ideas or passages elsewhere. One can pick up phrases from others, or try to
imitate another’s style; stealing phrases and sentences and paragraphs was
hardly unusual for eighteenth-century journalists and pamphleteers.
We cannot disprove Defoe’s authorship in the
"deduced-content" cases, but the most we can say with any confidence
is that such pieces correspond with his style and opinions.
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.
