by Daniel Defoe
If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,
I’ll take any Latin author he shall name, and with it one French and one Italian, and I’ll translate them into English and after that re-translate them crosswise: the English into French, the French into Italian, and the Italian into Latin. And this I challenge him to perform with him, who does it soonest and best for 20 each book; and by this he shall have an opportunity to show the world how much Defoe the hosier is inferior in learning to Mr. Tutchin the gentleman.28
If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,
Defoe was evidently angry and upset, but this moment of self-exposure was just another gift to his enemies, who went on to tease him even more about his lack of classical learning: ‘Friend Daniel,’ laughed the author of The Republican Bullies, ‘the next time you write any thing in Vindication of your great Skill in the Latin Tongue, let your Quotations come up to your Pretensions, and not make a Jest of your self.’29
If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,
As was mentioned earlier in the introduction, Defoe intended The Storm to be a politically unengaged production, which would lend no overt support to the views of any particular religious or political group. Yet Defoe was by nature a taker of sides, and he could never remain as convincingly neutral as he would have us believe, although he does a much better job of curbing his opinions in the course of The Storm than he does in the other two associated pieces. For he felt, overall, that whatever its natural causes may have been, and despite the randomness of the suffering that it caused, as a judgement on his divided nation, the storm had been richly deserved. ‘The Storms above reprove the Storms below,’ as he wrote in An Essay on the Late Storm, the last of the three storm pieces to be published, and it is clear from comments made in the course of all three that he viewed the storm as an act of divine retribution against the antics of the High Church faction (p. 211): “Tis plain Heaven has suited his Punishment to the Offence, has Punish’d the Stormy Temper of this Party of Men with Storms of his Vengeance, Storms on their Navies, Storms on their Houses, Storms on their Confederates, and I question not will at last with Storms in their Consciences’ (p. 198).
Defoe, newly out of prison and under the protection of Robert Harley, the moderate, if Machiavellian, Tory Speaker of the House of Commons, was keen to point the finger of blame at the enemies who had caused him so much trouble over the previous twelve months, and whose cynicism and treachery were, he felt, at least partly responsible for the terrors unleashed by the storm. His reproaches, however, differed in emphasis across each of the works reprinted here. In The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm, for example, which was the first to appear, in February 1704, its pretended disguise as a piece of biblical commentary is soon abandoned, and it turns instead into what Defoe happily admits is a ‘Discourse…wholly Civil and Political’, in which all the usual suspects, Jacobites, non-jurors and High-Church Tories, are rounded up for vilification by name (p. 186); yet when he exclaims, as he does in the course of The Storm, against ‘Interest, Parties, Strife, Faction, and particular Malice, with all the scurvy Circumstances attending such things’, he is careful to mention no names or labels, although it is obvious who he has in mind (p. 64). And he is also very careful, in the midst of all this political point-scoring, to praise Queen Anne, ‘a Mild, Gentle, Just and Protestant Queen’, who he wisely exempts from the fanaticism which he holds responsible for the various storms and ‘Ecclesiastick Tempests’, both political and meteorological, which continued to batter the land (p. 212).
In fact the 1703 storm arrived during an early phase of what was to become known as the War of the Spanish Succession, a twelve-year slog around the fields of western Europe in an attempt to prevent a threatened alliance between the crowns of France and Spain. Its immediate cause was the death, in November 1700, of Charles II of Spain, whose will gifted his throne to the seventeen-year-old Philip, Duke of Anjou, the grandson of the French King, Louis XIV. William III and his Dutch advisors were horrified by this development, and they wanted to see the powerful southern alliance opposed by military force. William signed a treaty, known as the Grand Alliance, with the leaders of the Dutch United Provinces and the Emperor of Austria, all of whom shared the aim of curbing the growing power of the French, who had marched into the Spanish Netherlands in February 1701 and taken control of the fortresses facing the Channel.
The death of William III in 1702, however, had led to the political rise of a group of Tories who disliked the Dutch, were opposed to the idea of the Grand Alliance and intended, while they were at it, to reverse as many of William’s other policies as possible, especially his policy of tolerance towards the Dissenters. It was they who had been the target of The Shortest-Way, and they who had been instrumental in the harassment of its author. Defoe, who strongly supported the war against France, felt that these Tories cared only about settling domestic scores against their enemies at home, and were doing all they could to undermine the position of the English military commander, the Duke of Marlborough, whom they regarded as William’s creation. Defoe’s frustration is plain to see in the pages of The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm, where he openly accuses Marlborough’s critics of preferring the defeat of ‘the whole Navy of England’ to the defeat of a single piece of commons legislation (p. 198). Given the storm’s recent destruction of so many vessels of the sovereign fleet, as well as the good-behaviour clause that had been added to Defoe’s sentence, this was a sensitive area to get into, but Defoe remained unrepentant in his accusations: ‘These are the People who Cry out of the Danger from the Dissenters, but are not concerned at our Danger from the French…God may Thunder from Heaven with Storms upon Storms, Ruin our Fleets, Drown our Sailors and Blow us back from the best contriv’d Expeditions in the World, but they will never believe the case affects them, never look into their own Conduct to see if they have not help’d to bring these heavy Strokes upon the Nation’ (p. 198).
The fleet, which had not had a particularly successful campaign during the summer of 1703, had only just returned from the Mediterranean when the storm came thundering up the Channel. Defoe, who was already profoundly unimpressed by the conduct of the admirals at sea, was appalled by their further failure to have had the main fleet secured in inshore harbours, rather than leaving it moored and vulnerable on the notorious Goodwin Sands:
But O ye Mighty Ships of War!
What in Winter did you there?
Wild November should our ships restore
To Chatham, Portsmouth, and the Nore (p. 207),
and he went further, in the Lay-Man’s Sermon, suggesting that the commanders of what remained of the fleet ought to be removed from their posts, claiming that God ‘will never bless us till they are dismist’ (p. 195). Like many others at the time, he was worried that the uncertain progress of the war so far had given comfort to the High Church Tories, who wanted to see an end to the campaigns in Europe as well as an end to moderate government at home. It was not until the following summer, with the capture of Gibraltar and the victory at Blenheim, that any kind of popular support for the war would be heard. Until then, according to the historian G. M. Trevelyan, the only significant battle of the war was the one fought (and lost) against the great November storm, which he described, with characteristic elegance, as ‘no mortal foe’.30
In fact the storm inflicted a double defeat upon the battered English navy, for not only did it destroy a number of valuable ships but it also felled many of the timber oaks needed to replace them. Such a serious loss of trees was an emotive subject, and The Storm has almost as many references to fa
llen oaks as it does to flying tiles. Defoe claims to have counted 17,000 of them during one short trip through Kent, until he got too tired to carry on counting, ‘tho I have great reason to believe I did not observe one half of the Quantity’, and he was also saddened by the loss of so many apple trees, since ‘we shall want Liquor to make our Hearts merry’ (p. 97). He was not alone in his feelings for the battered trees. The diarist John Evelyn, whose country estate in Wotton, Surrey, lost 2,000 oaks during the night of the storm, was grief-struck by the sight which greeted him the following morning: ‘Methinks I still hear, and am sure feel the dismal Groans of our Forests,’ he wrote, ‘so many thousand of goodly Oaks subverted by that late dreadful Hurricane; prostrating the Trees, and crushing all that grew under them, lying in ghastly Postures, like whole Regiments fallen in Battle.’31 Evelyn had made a lifetime study of trees and forests, and had published a famous volume in 1664 entitled Sylva: A Discourse of Forest Trees. He reissued the book in an updated edition in 1706, using The Storm as one of his sources for the new material, and he dedicated it to the cause of replanting oaks on behalf of the Royal Navy, as well as devoting it to the sylvan memory of all those lost trees of England.
Defoe’s writing career describes an apparent evolution from his early pamphlets and political tracts into the later novels, travel-books and full-length commentaries upon which his reputation as a writer now stands. Yet throughout this long career Defoe maintained a complex and innovative relationship to the written word, and The Storm, in the course of which he describes himself variously as author, editor and the mere ‘Collector of these Sheets’, as well as ‘The Ages Humble Servant’, is a particularly good example of this complexity at work. In fact, as a transitional work between the early pamphlets and the later novels it is a valuable indication of his ambitions as a writer as well as of his preoccupations as a social and political observer, for however much we might suspect him of having written most, if not all, of ‘these Sheets’ himself, he nevertheless sought genuinely to offer equal weight to all manner of eyewitnesses, whether clergyman, farmer, widow or sailor. There is a real attempt, despite his obvious continuing anger at his enemies, to universalize the experience of the storm. He makes the point that its impact was worse than that of the Great Fire of 1666, for ‘that Desolation was confin’d to a small Space, the loss fell on the wealthiest part of the People; but this loss is Universal, and its extent general, not a House, not a Family that had anything to lose, but have lost something by this Storm, the Sea, the Land, the Houses, the Churches, the Corn, the Trees, the Rivers, all have felt the fury of the Winds’, as if England might at last have found some kind of social unity through its recent exposure to catastrophe (p. 109). And The Storm, written as it was for a general audience, and with some of that audience’s own words dispensed throughout its pages, was a sincere attempt to represent and commemorate in written form this experience of temporary unity.
Defoe always liked to introduce the sound of multiple voices on the page, just as he liked to introduce the complexity of multiple points of view, and one of the technical distinctions of The Storm is the way in which these effects are used to suggest the crowded simultaneity of the events it describes. As Paula R. Backscheider has pointed out, ‘The Storm has sections that show simultaneous events vertically and horizontally; in one moment we may know events in a single house, in adjacent houses, in several parts of town, and in neighboring towns. The book locates events so closely together that the sequence seems to be a single event, each discrete part so integral to the whole that it is indistinguishable from the whole except in memory.’32 In contrast to A Journal of the Plague Year, the main events of which take place over several months, the action of The Storm is concentrated instead into a single night of destruction and its aftermath. This is what gives the book such a powerful sense of immediacy and crisis, and, as the picture of a shared catastrophe unfolds before us, Defoe has us listen not only to the sounds of the high wind rising but also to the voices of the eyewitnesses, who clamour for a chance to add their stories and words to the account. Whether these voices were his own creations, or rewritten versions of other people’s testimonies, as accounts of loss and survival they exhibit the same kind of narrative power that characterizes the later tales of Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders, whose various sufferings, whether in storms at sea or in Newgate Prison, echo many of the circumstances from which Defoe’s first book, The Storm, was derived. And the making of this first book, in which many layers of separately narrated but chronologically parallel narratives are presented, required a new creative balance between direct quotation and circumstantial invention, which is something that Defoe pioneered in its pages. By the time he came to write the novels, some fifteen to twenty years later, he had developed this new narrative technique to perfection.
NOTES
1. London Gazette 3975 (13-16 December 1703).
2. Richard Chapman, The Necessity of Repentance Asserted: In Order to Avert those Judgements which the Present War, and Strange Unseasonableness of the Weather at Present, Seem to Threaten this Nation with. In a Sermon Preached on Wednesday the 26th May, 1703 (London: M. Wotton, 1703).
3. Hubert Lamb and Knud Frydendahl, Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 62.
4. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 140.
5. The Observator 73 (30 December 1702-2 January 1703).
6. In a letter to the Earl of Nottingham, written on 9 January 1703, in The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 1.
7. London Gazette 3879 (n-14 January 1703).
8. Cited in Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 180.
9. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, pp. 1-2.
10. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 183.
11. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 185.
12. Cited in Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 189.
13. Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, p. 182.
14. Cited in Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 191.
15. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, pp. 194-7.
16. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, p. 11.
17. Daily Courant 409 (2 December 1703); London Gazette 3972 (2-6 December 1703).
18. See Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 64.
19. Cited in Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 102.
20. A Letter from a Gentleman in London, to his Friend in the Country; containing an Account of the Dismal Effects of the Terrible Storm of Wind, or, rather, Hurricane, that began in London the 27th November 1703 (London, 29 November 1703). Guildhall Library, London.
21. Jack Lindsay, The Monster City: Defoe’s London, 1688-1730 (London: Granada, 1978).
22. See Mark Schorer, ‘A Study in Defoe: Moral Vision and Structural Form’, Thought 25 (1950), p. 282.
23. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 39.
24. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Cynthia Wall (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 60.
25. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 10.
26. ‘A Calculation of the Credibility of Human Testimony’, Philosophical Transactions 21 (1699), pp. 359-65.
27. The Republican Bullies; Or, a sham Battel between two of a side, in a Dialogue between Mr. Review and the Observator, lately fall’n out about keeping the Queen’s Peace (London: J. Nutt, 1705), p. 2.
28. The Best of Defoe’s Review: An Anthology, ed. William L. Payne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), pp. 14-15.
29. The Republican Bullies, p. 7.
30. George Macaulay Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1930), I, p. 308.
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sp; 31. John Evelyn, Silva: Or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, fourth edn (London: Robert Scott, Richard Chiswell, George Sawbridge and Benjamin Tooke, 1706), p. 341.
32. Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition & Innovation (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), pp. 86-7.
Further Reading
Alkon, Paul K., Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979). Contains a critically acute discussion of the temporal structure of The Storm.
Backscheider, Paula R., Daniel Defoe: Ambition & Innovation (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986). Focuses on the technical achievements of Defoe’s major narratives.
—,Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). An excellent and thoroughly researched biography.
Brayne, Martin, The Greatest Storm (Stroud: Sutton, 2002). A valuable in-depth study of the 1703 storm and its aftermath.
Defoe, Daniel, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens (London: Penguin Books, 1997). Contains the full texts of The True-Born Englishman, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters and A Hymn to the Pillory.
Furbank, P.N. and W.R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). A cogent discussion of the changing nature of Defoe’s posthumous reputation.
—,Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998). The latest and most convincing attempt to solve the ongoing attributions problem, as well as an unparalleled single source of information on everything published by Defoe.
Heller, Keith, Man’s Storm: A Story of London’s Parish Watch, 1703 (London: Collins, 1985). Entertaining historical crime novel set during the night of the storm, in which Defoe makes a cameo appearance.
Hill, George, Hurricane Force: The Story of the Storm of October 1987 (London: Collins, 1988). An illustrated account of the 1987 storm which takes Defoe’s earlier study as its template.
