The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel, by Michael Prince
By James Johnson (History), August 2020
Professor Michael Prince of Boston University’s Department of English frames his superb new book The Shortest Way with Defoe with the historical observation that the rise of the novel coincided with the popular spread of deism. Church and state authorities viewed this strain of religious skepticism, which affirmed a supreme deity that was at once omnipotent and indifferent to human affairs, with particular alarm. Laws in England and abroad silenced its expression. A twenty-one year-old medical student at the University of Edinburgh was tried and hanged in 1697 for sharing deist convictions with classmates. Penalties also came in ruthless condemnation from pulpits and venomous pens. The deist Thomas Woolston, found guilty of violating England’s Blasphemy Act for having questioned the miracles of Jesus, was declared insane and sentenced to prison. A critic called his writing “empty, frothy, foul, insolent, impious, and infamous.”
Daniel Defoe was a brick-maker and aspiring writer when Charles Leslie, one of England’s harshest religious polemicists, published The Short and Easie Method with Deists. The book warned that deists were blasphemers and that by denying the truths of religion they risked being “subdu’d and Hew’d down.” Given such publicized cases, the menace of the phrase was clear. Any direct defense of deists would expose its author to prosecution. Still, there were plenty who found Leslie’s zeal dismaying. Defoe saw his opportunity and published a pamphlet in response that Prince identifies as an essential first step toward what was to become Robinson Crusoe. In Prince’s account, deism and the novel’s birth are intrinsically bound tied together, and Defoe’s tangle with Leslie was decisive.
The tone Defoe took in attacking Charles Leslie was ingenuous and approving–as if written by a high church authority–with the intent of exposing his cruelty by making it explicit. Defoe called his work The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. A typical passage piously calls for the preventive killing of snakes and toads as a charity to one’s neighbors, “not for the Evil they have done, but the Evil they may do.” The mockery was evident, and the defenders of religious tradition were quick to call its author a villain. Defoe was put on trial for libel and sentenced to the pillory. For Prince, the literary significance of the episode surpasses its religious details. He cites Defoe’s accusers to make the point. In denouncing “Mr. Foe,” one of them condemns the “barbarous Irony” employed among heathen Romans in their cutting attacks on the early Christians.
Barbarous irony: an authorial voice that dissolves into the narrative, a mask that hides or disguises its bearer’s intentions, the tone that ventriloquizes the enemy the better to show his absurdity or evil, a first-person impersonation. These are among the many revealing phrases Prince uses to describe the tone the Defoe continued to refine after his Shortest Way. “An Irony is a nipping jest,” Prince quotes from an early work in definition, “or a speech that hath the honey of pleasantnesse in its mouth, and a sting of rebuke in its taile.” In fiercely contentious settings, irony can be vicious; in the novel, with literal truth at a distance, inhabiting an alien voice populates an inner world. As Prince chronicles, Defoe’s route to Robinson Crusoe was not direct. The novel’s vivid depiction of the Crusoe’s bitter isolation and the humane rendering of his friendship with the Native islander Friday was an achievement far beyond his skirmish with the Leslie. In the nearly two decades separating the works, Defoe wrote essays, poems, satires, works of journalism, and prose fiction, not all of it successful. Prince mines this material for the writer’s methods and convictions. “Failure never gets enough credit,” he observes. A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, he adds, is “a purposeful mess.”
Prince makes the most of these misfires. Among the extraordinary passages he considers are accounts of how thoughts come to consciousness in what Defoe calls the “admirable Engine” of the brain. Unlike the epistemology of John Locke, whose straightforward empiricism sees sensations neatly inscribed as ideas on the inner slate, Defoe’s cognition is a chaotic tangle scarcely known or controlled by its possessor. Thoughts present themselves with no clear evidence of their accuracy: “it is no uncommon thing for the Person to be intirely deceived by himself, not knowing the brat of his own Begetting, nor be able to distinguish between Reality and Representation.” This passage comes from an early fiction in which the narrator learns from a philosopher on the moon. In this and other works, Prince identifies elements of what would become Defoe’s “cosmopolitan” style, a narrative that is picaresque rather than organic and episodic instead of progressive or Providential.
Prince’s analysis of A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris points to related features. Here Defoe’s impetus for writing a set of letters was in part patently commercial. An earlier collection called Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, likely written by an Italian named Marana, had been widely read in England and Defoe hoped–unsuccessfully, as it turned out–to benefit from its appeal. The project further schooled the writer in literary ventriloquism. As with Montesquieu’s renowned Persian Letters, Defoe’s epistolary narrator described the foreignness of Western practices and beliefs and defended Islam. Defoe’s Turkish Spy was cosmopolitan in ways similar to his account of the lunar voyage and gave him the authorial space to sound religious beliefs he did not necessarily hold. These, too, are among the stylistic foundations of Robinson Crusoe.
Prince quotes Louisa May Alcott in evoking how most modern readers view Robinson Crusoe: as one of “the dear old stories that all children love so well.” (True. I remember a junior-high paperback with thin greenish pages.) Prince returns to Defoe’s first readers, many of whom found in the novel blasphemy and subversion. In calling this novel “Defoe’s deist masterpiece,” Prince is closer to these early critics than he is to contemporary scholars. Consensus about the novel today reads Crusoe’s journey as a spiritual allegory, from defeat and near-death to self-knowledge, repentance, and salvation under the sure protection of Providence. Prince’s careful reading exposes the tears in this fabric, most particularly in the claims its narrator makes about Providence. In fact, it is inconstant in the novel, interchangeable by turns with accident, impulse, premonition, and intuition. Providence is more controlled by a self-serving narrative, as Prince writes, than controlling it.
Other major themes and moments in the novel undermine Christian symbolism. In contrast with critics who have used textual clues to call Crusoe Christlike as a kind of Jonah, who was swallowed by the whale and “resurrected” to live again, Prince instead sees counter-allegory. Jonah was defiant and remained ill-tempered and irreverent. Prince offers a dazzling reading of Crusoe’s terrifying discovery of a single fresh human footprint in the sand. That this episode has generated such unending critical commentary is for Prince part of its meaning. The print, he asserts, is a “shimmering sign” among many others in a novel that insistently resists allegory, Christian or otherwise.
In Prince’s view, Robinson Crusoe presents a powerful case for deism, although Defoe was not himself a deist. In print he grouped deists with libertines and freethinkers as purveyors of wickedness. For Prince, this is an indication of mastery in the new literary form he had helped to create. That a critic of deism, who had stood in the pillory for having mocked a tormentor of deists, could write a deist masterpiece is evidence of the unfettered freedom of the novelist. What had begun as “barbarous Irony” gains the suppleness and fluency in Robinson Crusoe to enchant believers and skeptics alike. Such enchantment was part of its newfound power. In his book’s closing pages, Prince likens Defoe’s art to an image the author himself conjured in a merry retelling of the Devil’s seduction of Eve in Eden: “the Cunning Men tell us still, that if you can come at a Woman when she is in deep sleep, and Whisper to her close to her Ear, she will certainly Dream of the Thing you say to her, and so will a Man too.”
In The Shortest Way, Michael Prince offers sharp insight into an art that retains the power to enchant. The novel still whispers in our ear as we read. Prince’s book, a compelling account of the rhetorical and temperamental elements of one writer’s path to the form, is both anatomy and analysis. It is smart, elegant, and highly imaginative, with a fitting prose style that is at once erudite and engaging.