Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Who Wrote What?: The Question of Attribution 2 Whither the Defoe Canon? Maximillian E. Novak Let me say at the beginning that it is valuable to have such thoughtful scholars as P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens working on the Defoe canon. On the other hand, I must confess that with a very few exceptions (such as the deletions made previously by Pat Rogers, Henry Snyder, and Rodney Baine) I do not believe in any of dieir "de-attributions." Defoe did not sign his name to many of his works. From the very beginning, then, those identifying works as by Defoe, from Abel Boyer to John Robert Moore, have had to try to separate out from a mass of anonymous works those likely to have been written by Defoe. Aldiough anyone unfamiliar with the difficulties of dealing with anonymous works in die period may believe that scholars such as James Crossley, William Lee, and W.P. Trent ascribed every anonymous pamphlet to Defoe, this is far from being true. Pecuniary motives may have lain behind the attempts of nineteendi-century booksellers to raise the price of a work by ascribing it to Defoe, but this was certainly not true of most scholars. Among them, Trent was a truly distinguished scholar, chair of the Columbia English Department for many years, the founder of the Columbia edition of Milton, and the editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature. Furbank and Owens's The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988) may be seen in retrospect as a power move. They attempted to discredit all ofthe ascriptions on the grounds that none ofthose who had come before were such good scholars as they. Although they write as if they were pronouncing the final word on the canon, they have to be read as just anodier opinion alongside Lee, Trent, and Moore, all of whom were widely read in the literature of Defoe and his contemporaries. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 1, October 1996 90 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION What Furbank and Owens promised, at the start, was the use of new technology . They were associated with concordances of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. And they wrote about stylometrics as a tool for determining authorship . But they rejected the latter mediod as inconclusive, and appear to have abandoned any real analysis of language. When I made concordances of Defoe 's Shortest Way and Sacheverell's Political Union, which he was parodying, I found tremendous differences in the choice of words. But diey do none of this, except for Furbank's occasional observation on possible Gallicisms in some of die works as an indication that they were translations. They do not speculate on who might have done the translation. The question remains, then: In what can diey claim superiority to scholars such as George Aiddn, who, in editing Defoe's fiction at the end of die nineteenm century, added a number of works involving criminal biography, or die very cautious Arthur Secord, who, for example , did not doubt mat one of Furbank and Owens's de-attributed works, Memoirs ofthe life ofDaniel Williams, was by Defoe? They make no use of the ECSTC, which provides us for the first time with publishing material not available to Trent and Moore, and, while diey are most adamant about attacking works published by James Roberts, they pretend to see no significance in Defoe's obvious allegiance to William Boreham. Trent even thought that Defoe might have been a kind of "literary advisor" to Boreham. They imply that Defoe was far from unique. Someone writing for Boreham whose style and subject matter seem to duplicate Defoe's interests and mannerisms might well be someone else. They depend on what they think of as "biographical" information for judging whether Defoe might have written a work, though why they are better biographers than Moore or Paula Backscheider (who ignored some of their early de-attributions in her biography) is not clear. And they throw out works because they consider them unworthy of Defoe, though diere are some issues of the Review which, while they are undoubtedly his, seem to have been composed with only half a mind to what he was...