Abstract
In August 1719 Defoe published the second volume of his Crusoe trilogy, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. As explained in the previous chapter, all three volumes must primarily be understood as part of Defoe’s energetic response to a series of challenges to orthodox Christianity but they also reveal his views on a host of social and economic issues. Crusoe’s experiences had led him to become a devout, even militant Christian, one who fully embraced the providential power of God and the redemptive powers of his Son. They had also made him rich enough to buy a farm on his return to England and become a ‘meer country gentleman’, one finally capable of appreciating that ‘middle station of life’ which his father had recommended all those years ago. Defoe thus began the Farther Adventures by having to explain why, after thirty-five years of misadventure Crusoe should want to leave the prosperous, happy, and settled life he had enjoyed for the last seven years. ‘One blow from unforeseen Providence’, the death of his wife, Crusoe grieved, had ‘unhing’d’ him.
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Notes
[Defoe], The Farther Adventures of Robiusou Crusoe (1719), pp. 8–9. See Robinson Crusoe, pp. 28–9 for a similar appraisal of the condition of life in the lower, middling, and upper ranks of society. In the first volume, all providential signs were intended to countermand Crusoe’s wanderlust; in the second, Crusoe rationalized his wanderlust as a challenge which Providence demanded he embrace, one of several reasons why some critics accused Defoe of using Providence to suit his narrative purposes.
Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 338. The most important historical studies include John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (1960); P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (1967); Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History; Craig Muldrew, The Econoniy of Obligation: the Culture of CreAit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998); Julian Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, HJ, 33 (1990): 305–22. For emphasis given by literary scholars, see Novak, Defoe, pp. 575–6; Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994); Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge, 1998); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: a Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge, 1998); James Thompson, Novels of Value: Eighteenth-century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC 1996); Gary Hentzi, ‘“An Itch of Gaming”: the South Sea Bubble and the Novels of Daniel Defoe’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 17 (1993): 32–45; Robert Markley, ‘“So Inexhaustible a Treasure of Gold”: Defoe, Capitalism, and the Romance of the South Seas’, Eigfrteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994): 148–67.
See [Defoe], The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721), hereafter cited as Moll Flanders; [Defoe], The Fortunate Mistress (1724), hereafter cited as Roxana; John F. O’Brien, ‘The Character of Credit: Defoe’s “Lady Credit”, The Fortunate Mistress, and the Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, ELH, 63 (1996): 603–31.
See, for example, Novak’s point about the formation of congers, or publishing groups in this period, in Defoe, pp. 566–7.
Whereas this chapter focuses on Defoe’s views about commerce and historical change during his own lifetime, Chapter 8 examines Defoe’s views about commerce in the ancient and modern world, and especially in England since the reign of Henry VII. Defoe’s ideas about the relationship between commerce and religion are discussed in Chapter 9.
For Defoe’s views on public credit, stockjobbing, and the South Sea Bubble in particular during this period see his pamphlets The Anatomy of Exchange Alley: or, a System of Stock-Jobbing (1719); The Chimera: or, the French way of Paying National Debts, laid open (1720); The Case of Mr Law, Truly Stated (1721). Defoe was also largely responsible for The Director, a twice-weekly periodical which he took over soon after its inception on 5 October 1720. It ran until 16 January 1721. For Defoe’s contribution to the debate on calicoes, see his The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers truly represented (1719); A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes and the Woollen and Silk Manufacture (1719); The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Consider’d (1720). Commissioned by the London Company of Weavers, Defoe published eighty-six issues of The Manufacturer, a periodical which ran from 30 October 1719 to 9 March 1721.
[Defoe], The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers (1719), p. 19 and passim.
Ibid., p. 37. See also [Defoe] A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes and the Woollen and Silk Manufacture (1719), Introduction, p. 24 and passim.
Andrew Morton, Every-Body’s Business, is No-Body’s Business (1725). During the 1720s Defoe published several pamphlets in the guise of the curmudgeonly persona of ‘Andrew Morton’.
Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. G. D. H. Cole (2 vols, 1968), pp. 280–2, 488.
Roberts published some works by authors of other persuasions, including Francis Atterbury and William Wake. Nevertheless, he was involved as printer or bookseller with a remarkable list of freethinkers in these years: John Asgill, The Succession of the House of Hanover Vindicated (1714); Thomas Chubb, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715); idem, Two Enquiries (1717); Thomas Gordon, The Character of an Independent Whig (1719); Thomas Morgan, The Grounds and Principles of Christian Communion Consider’d (1720); idem, A Refutation of the False Principles (1722); Matthew Tindal, The Defection Consider’d (1717); idem, A Defence of our Present Happy Establishment (1722); John Toland, The State-Anatomy of Great Britain (1717); idem, Nazarenus (1718); idem, Tetradymus (1720); John Trenchard, A Collection of Cato’s Political Letters (1721); William
Whiston, A Vindicatiou of the Sibylline Oracles (1715); idem, The Cause of the Deluge Demonstrated (1716); idem, Mr. Whiston’s Account of Dr. Sacheverell’s Proceedings (1719); Thomas Woolston, The Exact Fitness of the Time, in which Christ was Manifested in the Flesh (1722). Roberts also published titles on the Salters’ Hall controversy.
[Defoe], A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes (1719); [John Asgill], A Brief Answer to A Brief State of the Question (1719). For Defoe’s earlier views on Asgill, see Chapter 3.
[Defoe], An Appendix, In Return to Mr. Asgill’s Tract, Entitled A BriefAnswer, &c. in A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes (3rd edn, 1720), pp. 41–2. It was rumoured that Asgill was also the author of the periodical, The British Merchant, with which Defoe engaged.
[Defoe], Tour, p. 81. Scholars determined to use episodes like the South Sea Bubble to condemn credit economies in general would do well to examine the far greater instability of economies lacking mechanisms of credit.
[Defoe], The Complete English Tradesman (1726 [for 1725]), p. 409.
See Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 99–100, 107; Jacob, Newtoniaus, p. 221.
David Blewett (ed.), Daniel Defoe, Roxana: the Fortunate Mistress (New York,1987), pp. 207–12, 301–3. For the view that the novel reflected a ‘reconceptualization of money from treasure to capital’ see Thompson, Models of Value, p. 2 and passim.
For an insightful reading of other aspects of finance and its cultural meanings in Roxana, see D. Christopher Gabbard, ‘The Dutch Wives’ Good Husbandry: Defoe’s Roxana and Financial Literacy’, ECS, 37 (2004): 237–51.
[Defoe], The Anatomy of Exchange Alley … by a Jobber (1719), pp. 3, 15, 26–7. The financiers Defoe cited by their initials were Jacob Sawbridge, Sir George Caswell, and Elias Turner.
Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact frour Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge, 1997).
[Defoe], The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bulbring (1890), p. xiii; [Defoe], A System of Magick (1726), pp. 235–6.
Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eightenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001).
Andrew Cambers and Michelle Wolfe, ‘Reading, Family Religion, and Evangelical Identity in Late Stuart England’, HI, 47 (2004): 875–96.
See, for example, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977). For a critique of Stone’s use of Defoe’s Family Instructors, see
Laura A. Curtis, ‘A Case Study of Defoe’s Domestic Conduct Manuals Suggested by The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,10 (1981): 409–28.
[Defoe], The Family Instructor (1715), pp. 1–2, 258, 260–1.
[Defoe], The Family Instructor In Two Parts … Vol. II (1718), pp. iii-iv.
[Defoe], Religious Courtship (1722), p. 290.
For two among many sharply differing approaches to this text, see Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley, 1989) and Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictiona!ity in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 3.
Hoppit, Land of Liberty?, pp. 316, 439; Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, pp. 8–13, 269–301.
For the importance of the guide literature tradition in Defoe’s works, see Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim, p. 45 and idem, Before Novels: the Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-century English Fiction (New York, 1990).
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© 2007 Katherine Clark
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Clark, K. (2007). The Perils of Consumption and the Decline of Family Government. In: Daniel Defoe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599529_8
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