MARSHALL - Daniel Defoe As Satirist

Daniel Defoe as Satirist
Author(s): Ashley Marshall

Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 2007), pp. 553-576
Published by: University of California Press
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Daniel Defoe as Satirist

Ashley Marshall
scholars think of daniel defoe primarily as a novelist, secondarily as

a journalist and a topical commentator on politics and economics. During his lifetime, however, he was widely known as a satirist, especially as the famous author of
The True-Born Englishman, the signature he used in many of his subsequent publications. Defoe wrote some fifty satirical or partly satirical texts over a period of nearly
four decades,1 but because these works do not correspond very closely to Augustancentered views of eighteenth-century satire, they have never received much attention
from modern criticscertainly far less than his novels. Even the substantial biographies by Paula Backscheider, Maximillian E. Novak, and John Richetti do not treat
Defoe as a satirist in any sustained or serious way.2
We severely distort our sense of Defoe as a thinker and writer if we ignore
the satires that he produced over most of his adult life. Furthermore, although Defoes
satires take up a variety of subjects and are highly topical, they also reveal a remarkable
degree of consistency and commitment. Defoe has been called that most chameleonlike of writers,3 and is often regarded by literary critics as a hired pen, dashing off party
propaganda with a purely mercenary motive. His satiric output, however, calls into
For invaluable advice I am grateful to Clement Hawes, Kathryn Hume, Robert D. Hume, Joan Landes,
Geoffrey M. Sill, David Wallace Spielman, and Ryan J. Stark. For their help with the Appendix, I am indebted to W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank.
1. In the revised list of attributions suggested by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, satire occupies a
surprisingly prominent place, but whether one accepts their drastically reduced canon (as I do) or
rejects it, the fact remains that Defoes corpus includes a substantial number of satires. For the revised
canon, see Furbank and Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London, 1998). Their bibliography de-attributes 252 texts, reducing by roughly half the canon proposed by John Robert Moore;
for Moores canon, see Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe, 2d ed. (Hampden, Conn., 1971).
2. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, 1989); Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions
(Oxford, 2001); Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (Malden, Mass., and Oxford, 2005).
3. Katherine A. Armstrong, Defoe: Writer as Agent (Victoria, B.C., 1996), 9. Lennard J. Davis goes
so far as to call Defoe a professional liar whose writings are filled with disguise, lies, indirection, forgery, deceit, and duplicity; Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983), 155.
huntington library quarterly | vol. 70, no. 4
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Pp. 553576. 2007 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved.
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ashley marshall
question his long-standing notoriety as an inconsistent, unprincipled scribbler. Defoe

the satirist is a man of conviction.
Defoes Reputation as a Satirist
Defoes first known satire appeared in 1691 and his last in 1727, a span of thirty-six
yearsroughly three decades longer than his novel-writing career. A quick glance at
the dates of his satiric compositions shows that Defoe was an active satirist throughout
much of his writing life. (For a list of his satirical works, see the Appendix to this article.) If we are to understand his importance as a satirist, we need to consider the extent to which he was recognized as such in his own day. How was Daniel Defoe
conceived of by contemporaries? Which of his works were read as satirical, and what
impact did they have?
Defoes earliest satires were anonymous, including his fourth effort in the genre
and his first major achievement in it, The True-Born Englishman (1701). The poem apparently sold in tremendous numbers, and it went through twenty-two known editions in his lifetime (it was also pirated). A flood of responses followed, and though
the satire originally appeared anonymously, Defoe was publicly identified as the author at least as early as 1703 (by William Pittis in The True-Born-Hugonot: or, Daniel
de Foe. A Satyr). While we cannot calculate precisely how many people made the connection, Defoes contemporaries identified him as The True-Born Englishmana
phrase he frequently used as a nom de plume, especially for satirical works. The disclosure meant that these other texts were also publicly linked with him. The TrueBorn Englishman became something of a celebrity, and so, to some extent, did
Defoe. The Shortest Way scandal, which brought arrest and confinement in the pillory,4 did its part to make him more of an icon. By 1705, he was aware of his own eminence: in the preface to The Dyet of Poland, joking about the attribution of that piece,
he says, Hawkers, they tell me, will according to Custom, Cry it about street in the famous Name of Daniel de Foe.5
Defoe definitely had a reputation as a satirist in his own time, and the frequent
reprinting of his satirical works offers evidence of a sizeable readership. His modern
reputation as a Merchant-Writer addressing hoi polloi, however, is misleading.
Richetti says, for example, that The True-Born Englishman was very much popular
4. Before he stood in the pillory, Defoe wrote and distributed A Hymn to the Pillory, which takes
as its theme the rights and grandeur of authorship and its power to turn even the pillory to advantage.
By a brilliant succession of conceits, the pillory is made to stand for all the institutions of society
(Furbank and Owens, introduction to The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings [London and
New York, 1997], xx). As Moore observed, Defoe may be the only person in history whose experience
in the pillory furthered rather than tarnished his eminence (Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World
[1958; reprint ed., 1966], 104).
5. Reproduced in facsimile in Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural by Daniel Defoe,
vol. 1, ed. W. R. Owens (London, 2003), 34180; quotation at 344. I cite Defoes satires from the eightvolume Pickering and Chatto edition (20035; Furbank and Owens, general editors) whenever
possible. A Letter to Mr. Bisset and A Sharp Rebuke from one of the People called Quakers to Henry
Sacheverell are not yet available in the Pickering and Chatto volumes. For these works, I refer to the
first edition (as available on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). For all of the texts, I note the
edition used upon first mention, and subsequently cite page or line numbers in the text.

daniel defoe as satirist
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poetry, near-doggerel directed at untutored understandings, ready to be hawked in the

streets like a tabloid newspaper6but this poem was reprinted in very pricey collections that were successfully marketed to affluent readers. The dissemination history of
Defoes satires does not suggest that he wrote primarily for a lower-end audience. A
brief survey of the earliest collections of Defoes works will provide some sense of dissemination.7 The first compilation was printed in 1703 under the title A True Collection
of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man. Though Defoes name did
not appear, his portrait did, and by that time his identity seems to have been generally
known. The anthology contained several early satires (including The Mock Mourners,
Reformation of Manners, The Spanish Descent, and The Shortest Way, in addition to the
signature piece), and did well enough to prompt another edition. A Second Volume of
the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman was published in 1705, including, among other texts, the following satires: A New Discovery of an Old Intreague,
More Reformation, An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born Englishman, A Hymn to the
Pillory, The Pacificator, and The Dissenter Misrepresented and Represented. He signed
the preface D. F. (for Daniel Foe). These two collections, then, linked a number of
previously unidentified satires to The True-Born Englishman, and by extension to
Defoe himself. The Second Volume cost six shillingsa substantial sum8but, again,
sold well enough to justify further editions.
These two volumes were reprinted again in 1710 (also priced at six shillings), and
subsequent editions were published (with some variations) in 1711, 1713, and 1714 (the
last advertised as The Works of Mr. D. De Foe, two vols.). In 1721, yet another volume
appeared, entitled The Genuine Works of Mr. Daniel DFoe, Author of the True-born
English-Man, a Satyr. This collection included forty works and sold for a staggering
twelve shillings. Despite the topicality of the works they comprised, furthermore, these
editions had a relatively long shelf life. Such were his hopes of marketing his work that
his longest satire, Jure Divino (1706), was published by subscription for fifteen shillings
(he signed the preface D. F., and the title page as The True-Born Englishman; a 1707
poem named him as the author). Pirated versions appeared for a third of that price,
and then in twelve parts for a penny each. Exactly how much money Defoe made from
these editions is impossible to calculate, but several points are clear. Defoes early
satires were popular enough to sell long after their occasion; they sold sufficiently
well to warrant further editions; his readership does not appear to have been limited to
the masses, but instead extended to those well-off enough to pay remarkably high
prices for their books; and throughout the first two decades of the eighteenth century,
Defoe was very publicly identified as a satirist.
6. Richetti, Life of Defoe, 70, 61.

7. Furbank and Owens have provided the fullest account of the publishing history of Defoes works
in Critical Bibliography, 36. For the edition dates and prices, I am indebted to them.
8. According to the Economic History website (<http://www.eh.net>), six shillings in 1705 is the
equivalent of roughly forty-two pounds in 2005. That estimate is in fact very conservative, likely to be
low by a factor of two or three. On the difficulty of calculating the modern equivalents of eighteenthcentury prices, see Robert D. Hume, The Economics of Culture in London, 16601740, Huntington
Library Quarterly 69 (2006): 487533.

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ashley marshall
Defoes Satiric Purpose

A basic question presents itself: what did Defoe imagine himself accomplishing in his
satires? He seems ever the journalist, concerned with the Kentish petition, the Scottish union, and the War of Spanish Succession. His attention to subjects we think of as
nonliterarymost are classified in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online under
Politics, Religion and Philosophy, or Social Sciences rather than Language and
Literaturesuggests one reason that he is excluded from literary histories of satire.
The occasional nature of his work and the long-standing charge of political inconsistency have further discouraged critics from looking for any enduring concerns in his
topical compositions. Defoes aims as a satirist have never really been considered.9
If we look at the totality of Defoes satiric works and take them seriously on their
own terms, what do we find? He wrote so many satiric pieces over such a long period of
time that a detailed description of relevant texts would require more space than an article affords, and my aim here is not sustained analysis of individual texts.10 I want primarily to suggest that despite his copious output, and despite the variousness of the
specific topics he addresses, a few principal themes dominate his satirical publications
and seem fundamental to his sense of the world and of himself as a writer. Although
scholars have generally assumed that Defoes political and economic concerns prevail
over his moral and theological commitments,11 in his satires the reverse is manifestly
true: his anxieties about Protestantism underlie and are inseparable from his satiric
judgments on everyday affairs.
Politics, society, morality, and theology are constantly overlapping categories
for Defoe. His works reveal his fundamental belief that the humdrum events of an individuals daily life are connected to the political events of the nation, and these are
linked with the broader international stage, and all of these are in turn united in the
right order of a Christian cosmos. Individual manners affect the health of a nation for
Defoe, and conversations about statecraft necessarily occur within a sacred context.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will treat the principal recurrent themes individually. Other categories are indeed possible, but my object is merely to establish, in
Defoes extensive satiric output, the coherence and consistency among many of his
texts. Central to both his politics and his religion is his sense of Catholicism as antithetical to Protestantism, a topic that emerges in most of his satires. A second prominent theme involves dissent and toleration, and a third deals with social mores and
Christian conduct.
9. The title of the eight-volume Pickering and Chatto edition of Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the
Supernatural (London, 20035) stresses Defoes satiric practice in a virtually unprecedented way.
10. Furbank and Owens provide short synopses of Defoes texts in their Critical Bibliography.
11. See, for example, Novak, Defoe: Master of Fictions, 122, and Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe and the
Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric, ELH 64 (1997): 87186. Schonhorn criticizes the slippage, in discussions
of Defoes Jacobitism, from a political preference construed as treasonous . . . to a party ideology reflecting a legitimate political program, to a distinctive religious faith (p. 871), concluding that Defoes
anti-Jacobitism is non-ideological, always phrased in the language of politics, not religion (p. 882).

557
Anti-Catholicism. The most consistent theme in Defoes satires is his categorical

condemnation of Catholicism. Defoe fought for Charles IIs illegitimate Protestant son
in Monmouths rebellion (1685),12 and his antipathy to Catholic ruleabsolute in both
political and theological termsnever subsided. The fear of usurpation by an ousted
Stuart king lurking across the Channel was not dispelled in his lifetime (the failed
Jacobite uprising of 1745 took place fourteen years after his death). Most of his satires
include at least an attack en passant on some aspect of this threat, and the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism underlies his political commentaryincluding
works like the long popular True-Born Englishman as well as the more ephemeral and
heavily topical satires.
Defoe identifies William as antithetical to James Stuart, and the Revolution of
1688 as but one historical instance of the fundamental contrast between Protestant
good and Catholic evil. In his first known satire, A New Discovery of an Old Intreague
(1691), he lampoons a group of Jacobite petitioners creating unrest under the heroking. Manuel Schonhorn concludes that this text functions as more a comment on
London politics than an attack on Jacobites,13 but that explanation requires us to discount the works profound theological concerns. Under James II, for example, England became a Protstant Body with a Popish Head, and Defoe evocatively depicts
James as Antichrist.14 The figure of a Popish Antichrist is literal rather than metaphorical, and in the satirical Political History of the Devil (1726) James again appears as
an agent of the Prince of Darkness. Defoes discussion of the Devil in the Review and
elsewhere seems, in John Mullans phrasing, more than an easy idiom.15 Catholicism
embodies political and theological perversion, and England is saved from the
Catholic threat by William.16
Defoes praise of William is part of a wholesale denunciation of the kings (Jacobite) enemies, especially in The True-Born Englishman (1701) and The Mock Mourners
(1702). The former centers on this antithesis: Defoe celebrates William as the true
gospel of statesmanship,17 and as the glorious alternative to James who, in being
forced off the throne, was punishd only, not betrayd (p. 768).18 The latter poem is less
scathing than didactic, as Defoe attempts to nudge the English populace in the right direction. Defoe labels it a Satyr, and, as in The True-Born Englishman, he encourages his
readers to be grateful for what Williams arrival made possiblenothing less than the
Protestant way of life. The failure of the English to appreciate William is tantamount to
12. For more on Defoes participation in Monmouths rebellion, see Novak, Defoe: Master of
Fictions, 8385.
13. Schonhorn, Defoe and the Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric, 87172.
14. Reproduced in facsimile in Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 1:3556.
15. Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, vol. 6, ed. Mullan (London, 2005), 4.
16. In A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (London, 2006), Furbank and Owens observe that at
times Defoe suggests that William is another Messiah, his saving of England resembling Christs
salvation of mankind (p. 11).
17. Ibid.

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the most profound irreverence: the English have been Securd by Heavns regard, and
Williams toil, but they are To both Ungrateful, and to both Untrue (lines 95859).
Inseparable from Defoes domestic politics is an urgent international vision,
central to his thinking both during Williams reign and long after thr kings death.19 In
a thirty-seven-stanza ballad called A New Satyr on the Parliament (1701), he directly
reviles Parliament, particularly for its failure to support the Protestant Dutch and to restrain Catholic France. In The Address (1704), another satirical ballad, he similarly reproaches the Tory-dominated House of Commons, not least for their flirtations with
the Pretender.20 Defoe condemns France for political error, to be sure, but the more
serious charge is doctrinal: in The Spanish Descent (1702) he inveighs against the
French, who mock their Maker with Religious Lyes (line 362).21 The twin enemies of
popery and despotism are indivisible but not identical, and Protestantism is never, for
Defoe, a solely political position. This theme appears again in a set of ironical pamphlets of 1713 on the Hanoverian succession, including And What if the Pretender
Should Come? (discussed below) as well as in An Account of the Great and Generous Actions of James Butler (1715) and The Danger of Court Differences (1717). The commitment is consistent, and so too is his allegiance to the toleration of dissent.
Dissent and Toleration. A Protestant dissenter, Defoe campaigns for liberty of
conscience (for Protestants only, to be sure). In avowing the sanctity of conscience he
vilifies the intolerant High Churchmen as well as those Dissenters who practice Occasional Conformity. As with his anti-Catholicism, Defoes antagonism toward religious
persecution and Occasional Conformity appears in virtually all of his works. Much ink
has been spilled on the supposed misfiring of The Shortest Way, in which Defoe mimics the incendiary rhetoric of the conservative clerical antagonists of the dissenters,
such as the notorious Anglican firebrands, Dr. Henry Sacheverell and Charles
Leslie,22 to uncertain rhetorical and satirical ends. These and other high-flyers
sought to suppress nonconformity entirely, and the debates surrounding this issue also
provoke the satiric animus for a number of Defoes little studied works, such as The Dissenter Misrepresented and Represented (1704), To the Honourable, the CS of England
Assembled in Pt (1704), The Consolidator (1705),23 A Letter to Mr. Bisset (1709),
19. Although Novak generally marginalizes the importance of Defoes Protestantism to his politics, he does observe the writers involvement with the Protestant cause on an international level
(Defoe: Master of Fictions, 55). J. G. A. Pocock discusses Defoes concern about Englands role in international affairs, especially with regard to Defoes defense of Williams policy of having a standing army;
see The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
(1975; reprint ed., Princeton, N.J., 2003), esp. 42627 and 43334.
20. Furbank and Owens, Critical Bibliography, 51. As a result of this satire and Legions Humble
Address to the Lords (also 1704), the authorities attempted to capture Defoe, but he managed to avoid
being arrested; Furbank and Owens, Political Biography, 40.
21. Reproduced in facsimile in Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 1:193205. As
Furbank and Owens have argued, The Spanish Descent has topical resonance as a satire on the High
Admiral Sir George Rooke and his bungled expedition to Cadiz; Political Biography, 39.
22. Richetti, Life of Defoe, 21.
23. The Consolidator (1705) attacks the High Church position, and, more generally, has been described as a dark and doubtful journey, a jeremiad on the corruption of church and state (Defoe,
Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, vol. 3, ed. Geoffrey M. Sill [London, 2003], 2). For a

559
A New Test of the Sense of the Nation (1710), and the ironical squib The Speech of the
Stone Chimney-Piece (1711). In the years preceding the Hanoverian accession, Defoe
frequently uses his satire to attack what he perceives as the pernicious agenda of the
Sacheverellites and the equally odious forsaking of conscience by the Occasional
Conformists. His belief in conscience as a guiding force in individual life dominates
much of his satirical writing. The satires pertaining to dissent deal most broadly with
hypocrisy and pretense, vices he attacks in his more wide-ranging satires on manners.
Such iniquity, for Defoe, represents nothing less than an affront to God.
English Manners. Reformation of Manners became a battle cry in postRevolution England, beginning under William and Mary and intensifying under
Anne. Efforts to move away from the lewdness associated with the Carolean court inspired widespread exhortations to morality and manners. Defoe criticized the societies founded for reformation, judging that such groups missed their mark in
chastising the poor rather than the gentry,24 but he supported the spirit behind them
and took up his pen against impiety. His Reformation of Manners (1702) and More Reformation (1703) include sweeping indictments of English incivility. In the former, the
poet claims to expose the Shams of Reformation (line 2), the charade of public moderation that only thinly disguises private indulgences. In The Conduct of Christians
Made the Sport of Infidels (1717), the Turkish letter-writer similarly disparages the
British Christians who profess religion but lack the moral restraint to practice it in any
meaningful way. The scathing attack on the indecency of nominal Christians is
wide-ranging, but these seemingly general poems on English manners always have, in
D. N. DeLunas phrasing, urgently topical preoccupations,25 and they are in fact of a
piece with the rest of Defoes satires. The example of The True-Born Englishman most
clearly reveals the congruence of his major satiric themes: in Defoes account of the
current state of affairs, bad manners endanger the Protestant state. Rudeness
especially in the form of anti-Williamite ingratitudemakes men Rebels to God, and
to Good Nature too (line 960). A committed Protestant in early-eighteenth-century
England, Defoe does not make that charge lightly.
Defoe connects bad manners with the failure to take seriously the claims of individual conscience, both of which indicate a society that is irreverent and so in grave
trouble. He recognizes the degree to which society at large has lost its sense of the sacred, making possible (for example) the increasing currency of deism and atheism.
These positions, with Socinianism, recur as bugbears in several of Defoes works, and
though he devotes no entire satire to attacking them, their advocates appear as frequent targets of his unmitigated scorn. Applying reason improperly, such men allow
religion to be Bullyd by Philosophy (Reformation of Manners, line 396). Defoe
specifically rebukes John Toland in several poems, including A New Satyr on Parliament and The Reformation of Manners, where Toland is described as poyson[ing]
full description of the satiric argument of The Consolidator, see also Furbank and Owens, Political
Biography, 4244.
24. See Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 1:2829.
25. DeLuna, Yales Poetasting Defoe, 16501850 4 (1998): 34562 at 352.

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Souls with his infected Breath (line 416).26 In An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born
Englishman (1704), he laments that in the absence of satire, Atheists may, unmolested,
now Blaspheme, committing the ultimate sin as they banter the Supreme (lines
44243).27 As Rodney M. Baine has observed, Defoe was striving in an age of sensuous epistemology to reestablish the reality of an unseen world,28 and throughout his
careeras in the late-life Political History of the Devilhe satirizes those who discredit
the supernatural.
Defoes satiric output shows remarkable thematic unitybut he does not always
write satire in the same way. The two most heavily studied of his satires demonstrate
this variation in technique: The Shortest Way depends upon indirection, but in The
True-Born Englishman Defoe really does take the shortest way, making his point impossible to misread. He produces direct and indirect satires throughout his writing life,
and I will argue that he used both methods toward the same end. By direct satires, I
mean those texts in which Defoe uses invective or other straightforward means to express an argument that matches his own opinion. The indirect satiresin which he
forcefully dramatizes a position with which he does not agree, practicing what Furbank has called the art of mendacity29require more of the reader. In his direct
satires, however, Defoe explicitly tells his readers what he wants them to take from the
text, and his obvious preoccupation with a few major themes in these works provides
yet more help in determining his aims as a satirist.
Defoes Direct Satires
Many of Defoes satires are exceedingly direct. He states his moral in plain, clear language, and he does so over and over. He makes no secret of the effect he wants his
satires to have, or of the audience he imagines himself addressing. In the direct satires,
Defoe explainsoften at lengthexactly what he is trying to accomplish.
Defoe the satirist wants to make people feel bad. But who are those people, and
bad in what sense? In More Reformation, Defoe deals in some detail with Shame,
which he identifies as the sister sin to Pride. The trouble with shame, he explains, is
that it allows people to substitute public repentance, embarrassment, or even modification for a more meaningful and lasting improvement. The experience of guilt becomes a public performance rather than a private effort: when men are caused to
blush at their sins, they only exchange publick Crimes for private Vice, / And
wheres the Reformation pray of this? (lines 24647).30 The words shame and
26. In Defoe and the Idea of Fiction 17131719 (Newark, Del., 1983), Geoffrey M. Sill discusses at
length the antagonism between Defoe and Toland, the latter of whom was regarded as a threat by the
entire Dissenting community (see pp. 13036; quotation at 130). For more on Defoes critique of freethinking, see Novak, Defoe, the Occult, and the Deist Offensive, in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Deism,
Masonry, and the Enlightenment (Newark, Del., 1987): 93108.
28. Baine, Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens, Ga., 1968), 335.
29. Furbank, Defoes Minutes of Mesnager: The Art of Mendacity, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16
(2003): 112.

561
blush recur frequently in Defoes direct satires, and suggest what he does and does
not seek to elicit from his readers: he wants them to be disappointed in themselves.
Satirists are often taken to task for their willingness to humiliate their targets, but
Defoe seems entirely uninterested in making his victims look bad for an audiences
viewing pleasurehe publicly exposes only individuals such as Sacheverell and Leslie,
who practice deception at a public level. Except in those very particular circumstances,
he wants to make his victims feel bad, intensely but privately, and so he focuses not on
public reputation but on the guilty conscience. In The Spanish Descent (as in A New
Satyr on Parliament), for example, he specifically invites the offenders to feel the pangs
of their secret Guilts: the blameworthy, he predicts, will purge their Coffers and
their Consciences, / Cursing their Ill-got Trifles, but in vain: / For still the Guilt, and still
the Fears remain (lines 208, 21618). Defoes satires are often homiletic: somewhat in
the fashion of writers of sermons, he appeals to private scruples rather than outward
dignity. He also calls upon individuals to take responsibility for their own actions, insisting that individual deeds (and misdeeds) have personal, public, and even sacred
dimensions.
Individual behavior matters, Defoe suggests, in ways that the individual may or
may not comprehend. The themes of The True-Born Englishman, for example, resonate
simultaneously on several levels: manners cannot be separated from the welfare of
English Protestantism, and personal sins endanger more than ones mortal soul. Appended to that poem is a speech by Charles Duncomb, in which the Tory m.p. boastfully
catalogues his many transgressions. The scale shifts from the individual to the communal when Duncomb explains that he took advantage of his personal benefactor first, and
then of his second benefactor, the Publick Trust (line 1,118). A sinner on one level becomes a sinner on another, and decency works in the same way: Tis Personal Virtue
only, Defoe asserts in the final line, that makes us great. This is exactly the opposite of
what Mandeville would argue in The Grumbling Hive (1705), and given Defoes relentless insistence on a link between the individual and the collective, we have every reason
to take seriously his argument that private vice jeopardizes the public interest.
Most readers of satire appreciate it chiefly as it exposes the sins of others; as Swift
knew perhaps better than anyone, the guilty reader rarely recognizes the description of
his own guilt. The relationship between writer and reader is particularly important in
satire: the writer has an agenda and wants to produce a result, and this is entirely true
for Defoe. Just as he appears uninterested in satire for the sake of mere humiliation (a
frivolous enterprise, he would say), he likewise seems very little concerned with
writing satire in an attempt to reform the morally reprehensiblethat is, those incapable of shame. The distinction is crucial: Defoe writes not to scorn or reform his enemies, but to school like-minded readers, both in their own ways and in the ways of
their adversaries.
Defoe imagines a properly attuned readersomething like Miltons fit audi31
ence. I will return later to the importance of Protestantism in making sense of his less
31. For more on Miltons fit audience in theological (rather than narrowly political) terms, see Ryan
J. Stark, Paradise Lost as Incomplete Argument, forthcoming in 16501850.

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explicit satires, but for now the key point is that he wrote for a reader sensitive to the
claims of conscience. Defoe does not hope to reach those who are impervious to moral
reproach (whether delivered from an external source or generated by their own sense
of right and wrong), as he explains to personified Satyr in More Reformation:
For when to Beasts and Devils men descend,
Reformings past, and Satyrs at an end.
No decent Language can their crimes rehearse,
They lye below the Dignity of Verse.
But if among thy Lines he would have place,
Petition him to Counterfeit some Grace,
Let him like something of a Christian sin,
Then thout ha some pretence to bring him in.
(Lines 63037)
In Defoes understanding of satire, the right reader is he who sins like something of a
Christian, a reader who is, in other words, capable of self-reproach. This passage is his
most developed commentary on audience, but in general his ubiquitous entreaties to
the guilty conscience assume a reader receptive to such appeals. The properly attuned
reader will understand satire as Defoe doesthat is, as the exposure of a true distinction between good and bad. Spiritually misguided individuals cannot be expected to
acknowledge this lesson, and of these morally insensitive readers Defoe can only say, I
must do as Providence does, let you alone to your own Wills (Preface, A New Discovery of an Old Intreague). For Defoe, satire is useful precisely for the fundamental differentiation it makes between right and wrong; and he directs his appeals only to
like-minded readers who can perceive these distinctions and reflect on their own
moral lapses.
In his direct satires, Defoe is manifestly concerned with making these distinctionsor, rather, with making these distinctions known. Protestantism and Catholicism represent one fundamentally antithetical relationship, but the principal pair of
irreconcilable opposites is good and evil.
Antipathies in Nature may agree,
Darkness and Light, Discord and Harmony;
The distant Poles, in spight of space may kiss;
Water capitulate, and Fire make Peace:
But Good and Evil never can agree,
Eternal Discords there, Eternal Contrariety.
(Reformation of Manners, lines 91318)
Defoes insistence on Eternal Contrariety between good and evil provides more than
a moral justification for his satire. This is not, in other words, mere cant. Ever the occasional writer, Defoe is not merely expounding abstractions. In an Age of Plot and
Deceit, of Contradiction and Paradox, one cannot always know Friends from Ene-

563
mies.32 Satire, as Defoe understands it, can impart the crucial clarification, exposing
the most pernicious enemy of true Christiansthe wolf in sheeps clothing.
Defoe pronounces his satiric purpose most clearly in the preface to A New Discovery of an Old Intreague, his first satire: The End of Satyr, he contends, ought to be
exposing Falshood. As a platitude often expressed by satirists, this declaration might
sound merely self-righteous, but his later satires seem to work toward precisely this
stated end. Defoe appears committed to using satire as a way of delineating negative
and positive contraries, formally as well as thematically. In The Reformation of Manners, for example, he offers a catalogue of contrasts, emphasizing substantial incongruity by way of formal alternation:
Vertues a Native Rectitude of Mind,
Vice the Degeneracy of Human-kind,
Vertue is Wisdom Solid and Divine,
Vice is all Fool without, and Knave within.
(Lines 87982)
Defoe continues this pattern at length (culminating in the passage on the Eternal
Contrariety), and it reappears in More Reformation. The point here is not the subject
but the formal pattern: The equal Object equally will last, / That of a Christ to come,
this of a Jesus past (lines 38283). The that/this alternation continues, again, for several lines, and Defoes emphasis on contraposition suggests his awareness of, as well as
his desire to train his readers in, these antithetical relationships.
The theme has more than formal resonance: drastically incompatible contraries
become dangerous when their incompatibility is not heeded or, rather, is willfully disregarded. He who tries to connect two Extreams which never can be mixd earns
Defoes solemn indignation (More Reformation, line 187), and none is more offensive
on this subject than the Occasional Conformist, whose direct opposite is the incorruptible Man of Conscience. Occasional Conformists become, in Defoes withering
rendition, Ambo-Dexters in Religion, contemptibly practicing both dissent and conformity (Reformation of Manners, lines 823, 817). Their inner belief conflicts with the
outward show, and they circumvent this incompatibility by describing external professions as purely civil (rather than religious) acts. Defoe thinks otherwise, contending
instead that the ostensible reconciliation of irreconcilable contraries signals only the
absence of real conviction: the Occasional Conformists who Alternate Oaths and
Sacraments can take, / Alternate Sacraments and Oaths can break (More Reformation,
lines 33233). This theme emerges again in The Dyet of Poland (1705), in which Defoe
distrusts the Polish (English) because Mysterious Contraries they reconcile. He lists
several examples of these blind Impossibilities, describing the people as humbly
high, Profoundly Empty, Debauchdly Civil and Prophanely Good (lines 1930). He
repeatedly calls attention to antithetical relationships, and expresses alarm about those
who collapse or ignore insuperable differences. Why?
32. Letter to Mr. Bisset (London, 1709), 10.

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Defoes relentless exposure of contraries has to do with another ide fixe: the
theme of knowing ones enemies. In a duplicitous age, he understands that the tooinnocent reader can be easily misled by a seemingly harmless speaker (or worse, a
seemingly benevolent one)and his emphatic differentiation between truth and falsehood must be understood with that in mind. In a polemical tract called A Sharp Rebuke from one of the People called Quakers to Henry Sacheverell (1715), Defoes Quaker
accuses Sacheverell of being too fluent in Subtilty and Equivocation, delivering thyself in deceitful Words, that thy People might be deceived thereby; speaking Sentences
of doubtful Interpretation, that so thou mayst reserve the Meaning thereof, as might
best serve thy wicked Purposes.33 The key word here is Subtilty, the most dangerous
form of understatement. As for Milton, who describes the serpent as the subtlest beast
of all the field (Paradise Lost, 7.495), so for Defoe subtlety represents a nefarious and
even diabolical form of obfuscation.34 Subtilty is antithetical to truth.
Throughout his satiric career, Defoe worries about the danger of dishonesty.
He appears to have been, as Furbank and Owens observe, perennially fascinated by
credulity and the ease with which it could be played upon.35 As a satirist, he takes
up the pen in order to undo the damage done in an Age of Plot and Deceit, keen to
reveal the difference between truth and falsehood, and to expose those who fool
others through cunning verbal maneuvers. Defoe preaches against scheming and
chicaneryagainst, in other words, the sort of behavior of which he himself is so often
accused. This satiric agenda seems to be at odds with his modern reputation. The
Shortest Way is evidence enough of his ability to present forcefully a position he does
not support. More generally, Lennard J. Davis has argued that for Defoe, writing
carried a quality of deception and inauthenticity, and was infused with disguise,
trickery, framing, and fabrication.36 Defoes denunciation of duplicity seems especially problematic, then, given his abilityand apparent willingnessto lie.
How do we explain the incongruity? To answer this question, I want to look
more closely at the indirect satiresworks like The Shortest Way, in which Defoe
seems to mislead his readers, articulating a position in such a way as to expose it. Satire
uses fiction, of course, but Defoe often uses fiction that masquerades as truthand
this sort of invention has unsettled readers and critics. I will argue that Defoe uses indirection in a very particular way, and that only after we have fully considered his
satiric commentary upon liars can we understand what is in effect satiric lying.
Dissimulation as Satiric Method
Was the author of The Shortest Way a liar, a failed ironist, a too-successful impersonator, or a satirist with Swiftian ambitions but without Swiftian genius? The answer is
that he was none of the above. The Shortest Way has generated almost as much controversy among Defoes modern readers as it did among his contemporaries. A contrived
33. A Sharp Rebuke from one of the People called Quakers to Henry Sacheverell (London, 1715), 8.
34. Defoe links subtilty with diabolical cunning in several texts, including the satires Memoirs of
Count Tariff, The Quarrel of the School-Boys at Athens, and The Political History of the Devil.
35. Furbank and Owens, Political Biography, 145.
36. Davis, Factual Fictions, 168.

565
piece of bigotry,37 the text is an ironic impersonation of the High Church position in a
way that makes it absurdly and dangerously extreme. About that much scholars agree.
But they have wavered between defining The Shortest Way as non-satirical and judging
it a failed satire,38 and Bonamy Dobres 1949 tentative assessment remains relevant:
Is it possible to classify it? Purposeful parody, yes: but of what sort? Can
you call irony what is so nearly burlesque? If it is ironical, it is irony carried so far that it ceases to be itself. Yet what are you to call it? For it isnt
satire, which attacks frontally; it isnt invective, except perhaps inversely,
which might reconstitute a branch of the ironic; nor is it sardonic.39
Dobres irresolution is standard, and critics such as Novak and Richetti have attempted
to find more suitable labelsthe text is a hoax or a parody, for example40but the
judgment is fundamentally unchanged. The work is widely recognized as an unmitigated disaster or a misfire,41 and discussion of it is almost always formulated in negative terms.
My objective here is to consider The Shortest Way in relationship to Defoes
other satiric works, both direct and indirect. I contend that he uses lying as a purposeful satiric method, although his aims in doing so have not been properly understood. I also want to suggest that his satiric dissimulation supplements rather than
conflicts with the edifying agenda established in his direct satires, and that his practice
of this kind of indirection appears in works other than The Shortest Way.
Defoe imagines a fit reader and uses satire primarily to promote truth and expose falsehood. Recognizing these essential elements, so apparent in his direct satires,
allows us better to comprehend his satiric dissimulation. The most detailed discussion
of The Shortest Way and its readers is undertaken by J. A. Downie, who emphasizes that
the Dissenters were a significant part of Defoes intended audience. On that point I
agree entirely, though I wish to consider the matter in theological as well as political
terms.42 Defoes right readers, as I have suggested, must be receptive to the claims of
conscience. They must be Christians. More specifically, they must be Protestants
37. Michael Seidel, Crisis Rhetoric and Satiric Power, New Literary History 20 (1988): 16586
at 174. For fuller discussions of Defoes strategy, see Novak, Defoes Shortest Way with the Dissenters:
Hoax, Parody, Paradox, Fiction, Irony, and Satire, Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966): 40217,
esp. 40613; L. S. Horsley, Contemporary Reactions to Defoes Shortest Way with the Dissenters,
SEL 16 (1976): 40720 at 411; Backscheider, No Defense: Defoe in 1703, PMLA 103 (1988): 27484
at 275; and, most recently, Richetti, Life of Defoe, 4546.
38. Bonamy Dobre has argued against calling The Shortest Way a satire; Some Aspects of Defoes
Prose, in James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa, eds., Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to
George Sherburn (Oxford, 1949): 17184 at 175. Ian Watt argues that it is a failed satire, concluding that
Defoes only conscious exercise in irony, in fact, was indeed a masterpiece, but a masterpiece not of
irony but of impersonation (The Rise of the Novel [Berkeley, Calif., 1957], 126).
39. Dobre, Some Aspects of Defoes Prose, 175.
40. Novak, Defoes Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 40217; Richetti, Life of Defoe, 21.
42. Downie, Defoes Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Irony, Intention, and Reader-Response,
Prose Studies 9 (1986): 12039 at 12526.

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even dissenting or Low Church Protestants. Defoe staunchly supports liberty of conscience; he insists on the categorical difference between Protestantism and Catholicism; and, most crucially, he addresses only those individuals who would agree with
him on both counts. This conception of his satiric role is central to our understanding
of The Shortest Way.
What did Defoe require of his reader in The Shortest Way? Scholars have assumed that he overestimated the audiences ability to read with proper care,43 but to
focus on intellectual competence or analytic attentiveness is to misunderstand the nature of Defoes demands.44 The task is not to read like a critic. As in his description of
the proper target of satire as he who sins like something of a Christian, so too the
proper reader is he who reads from the appropriate theological standpoint. This
perspective is especially important when Defoe (posing as a high-flyer) concludes
his pamphlet, in Richettis words, with a wild-eyed lumping of dissenters and
Catholics.45 The only separation between Dissent and Catholicism, the speaker
judges, is a few modes and accidents, mere trifles. The properly attuned reader
would not in any way entertain this conclusion. Defoes speaker asks, Whats the Difference betwixt [Dissent], and being subjected to the Power of the Church of Rome,
from whence we have reformd? If one be an extreme on one Hand, and one on another,
tis equally destructive to the Truth.46 Such a position ignores the Eternal Contrariety between good and evil and also distorts the nature of the opposition between two
vastly different systems of belief. The near literal identification of the Churchs fellow
Protestants and the inimical Catholics should disturb the theologically attuned reader,
who knows the vital importance of doctrinal distinction.47
The key question for modern scholars has been whether readers should have
been able to detect Defoes irony given this sort of signal. I argue that whether or not
they could or would is beside Defoes point. This is not author-centered satire. What
the reader is meant to find in the pamphlet is not necessarily a Dissenters ironic attack
on the High Church, but instead the threat inherent in the High Church position. Critics have recognized that Defoe is trying to expose this menace, of course, but they have
not recognized that the pamphlets success as satire has little to do with Defoes real
opinions being readily discovered. If Defoes primary goal were to expose the Church
to public indignity, then he would need his irony to be perceptible. But if he writes instead to train his fellow Dissenters, to improve their facility for moral discernment,
43. See, for example, Horsley, Contemporary Reactions, 419, and Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical
Reintroduction (Lexington, Ky., 1994), 15455.
44. While Leopold Damrosch misunderstands the nature of the connection between Defoe and
his reader (and thus can conclude that Defoes ambiguity is for the most part insuperable), he is right to
suggest that Defoe is not much concerned with a really suspicious skeptic; he is concerned rather with
giving the credulous reader reasons for believing what he already wants to believe; Defoe as Ambiguous Impersonator, Modern Philology 71 (1973): 15359 at 155.
46. Reproduced in facsimile in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 3,
ed. W. R.Owens (London, 2000): 95109; quotation at 109.
47. Backscheider rightly points out that the Dissenters reaction surprised Defoe, who considered them the. . . in-group for whom the satire would speak and to whom meaning and method would
be immediately clear (Defoe: His Life, 100).

567
then distinguishable irony seems less important. The Shortest Way should not be approached in Swiftian fashion, with the aim of identifying the real authorial position
behind the persona, but in terms of judgment of content. What Defoe most crucially
seeks to communicate is a capacity for reading with conviction and heightened perspicacity. Like-minded readers (principled Dissenters with whom he sympathizes) are
encouraged to see through the deception of their enemies. Satiric lying represents
Defoes efforts not to deceive, but to undeceive.
Modern scholars have devoted so much attention to the uproar caused by
The Shortest Way that we can hardly think of that work without thinking of its consequences for Defoe. Immediately after its publication, Robert Harley had Sidney
Godolphin investigate the authorship, at which point Defoe was not a suspect; Godolphin delegated the job to the Earl of Nottingham, who arrested Edward Bellamy, who
in turn confessed that he had taken the manuscript to the printer, George Croome.
Defoe was named as the author in the Observator for 30 December2 January 1703.48
When the author of The Shortest Way was identified as a Dissenter, circumstances became dire: the Church felt it had been parodied, the government worried that the satire
would be a catalyst for a nonconformist uprising, and the Dissenters themselves were
unsure what to believe or whom to trust. The wariness on the part of his target audience would, I suspect, have been welcomed by Defoebut he obviously failed to foresee how others might react to his pamphlet.
Scholars have assumed (either implicitly or explicitly) that The Shortest Way
represents a turning point for its author, not only in his personal life but also in his
satiric practices. Never again, L. S. Horsley concludes, did he risk so thoroughgoing
an irony.49 In later works, however, Defoe does indeed use a similarly indirect
method; though these works never evoked the furor incited by their predecessor, we
should consider correspondences in approach as well as disparities in outcome. Two of
the clearest and most sustained examplesA Letter to Mr. Bisset (1709), And What if
the Pretender Should Come? (1713)have been largely ignored by those who have commented on The Shortest Way. Critical attention to the former, another attack on the
high-flyers, has been virtually nil. The latter has received some notice as part of a triumvirate of ironical tracts on the Hanoverian succession for which Defoe was arrested
in 1713 (though with little sensation), but its method has not been much considered.50
In A Letter to Mr. Bisset, Defoe ironically admonishes the titular recipient for his
criticisms of Sacheverells sermon, which had been, says the author, admirably honest
and sincere. Sacheverell should be applauded for having translated the real position of
the Church into plain English, or, in other words, for successfully accomplishing what
the writer of The Shortest Way had set out to do. The letter-writer praises Sacheverell
for telling the bitter truth: it would be much better for all Sides, he contends, if highflyers like Sacheverell would speak out plainly, and without Disguise (p. 5). He cites a
recent historical example to explain how this political concealment has endangered
48. Novak, Defoe: Master of Fictions, 17881.
49. Horsley, Contemporary Reactions, 420.
50. As in the case of The Shortest Way, the authorities had no patience with irony in responding to
these sarcastic endorsements of the Pretenders return (Furbank and Owens, Political Biography, 127).

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the Dissenters: under Charles II, nonconformists had suffered under subtle policies of
gradual Encroachments, but James II had instead stated plainly what he meant, what
he aimd at, and what indeed all his Ancestors had aimd atnamely, the eradication of
dissent through violent means. Had James followed Charless approach, the Dissenters
would have been undone, but luckily he took the contrary MethodLike the Reverend Dr Sacheverel, and, when the whole Plot was revealed, it ceased to be a Plot
(p. 8). The level of irony in this satire does not match that of The Shortest Way, to be
sure; Defoes impersonation is nowhere near as complete. Nevertheless, the difference
between this satire and The Shortest Way is one of degree, not of kind: he once again
uses sustained irony to present a position he is in fact trying to undercut, inviting his
readers to apply their scruples, seriously and relentlessly, to the seemingly innocuous
arguments sponsored by the most insidious dissemblers.
An ironical endorsement of Catholic rule in England, And What if the Pretender
Should Come? also operates by indirection. Among recent critics, Richetti has had the
most to say about this text, in which Defoe is out to shock his readers by the rigor of
his logic and to expose the disastrous implications of not seeing the High-Church or
High-Flying position for what it is and what it implies. Defoes persona in this piece, as
in The Shortest Way, adopts the High Church stance. The ventriloquistic energy of
this satire, Richetti contends, perhaps lends the speaker too much fluency in his
high-flying rhetoric, and the satire becomes somewhat unstable and liable to sound
more persuasive than Defoe wants it to be.51 As in the scholarly assessments of The
Shortest Way, the focus here is on Defoes too-thorough impersonation of his antagonists. And, as in analyses of the earlier text, that focus seems misplaced. The internal
prompt for the attuned reader resembles that of the earlier mock advocacy of the highflying position. Here, as in The Shortest Way, Defoe tries to provoke like-minded readers to react against the arguments failure to make theological distinctions. Defoes
speaker suggests that, far from fearing French power, the English should seize the opportunity to ally themselves with that country by installing the Catholic Pretender. If
England cannot defeat France, then it should become that powers fast Friend.52 The
case is made at some length, but the underlying thesis is that a Catholic king could answer many practical concerns for the English people: the political criteria, in this ironical account, eclipse any theological anxieties about Catholicism. The right reader
would again object to such a conclusion, asserting instead a doctrinal distinction that
trumps political fears (to say nothing of acknowledging the very real political fear of
absolutism). I agree with Geoffrey M. Sill that Defoe would find criticizing the Pretender a waste of time and satiric energy,53 but we oversimplify the pamphlet if we do
not recognize that Defoes aims here have more to do with those he supports than with
those he opposesthis agenda is crucial to our understanding not only of his individual satires but also of his broader concerns as a satirist. Here and elsewhere, his in51. Richetti, Life of Defoe, 137, 138.
52. Reproduced in facsimile in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, ed. Furbank
(London, 2000): 187206; quotation at 195.
53. Sill, Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 75.

569
direction corresponds in surprising ways to the satiric program outlined so explicitly

in his direct satires.
For Defoe the satirist, writing for like-minded readers, indirection complements directionhis satiric lying is an extension of his satiric attacks on liars. Defoe
enjoins his audience in the direct satires not to believe everything they hear, and so acknowledges that straightforward instruction cannot stand alone in a world where
open expression cannot be trusted. Rampant duplicity means that humankind cannot
discern their Evil, / Without a naked Vision of the Devil (More Reformation, lines
200201). Throughout his direct satires, he renders that naked Vision, vigorously and
repeatedly underlining the vicious ways of a fallen world, for the sake not of correcting
the truly depraved but of confounding themthat is, for the sake of thwarting their
plans to afflict or misguide the virtuous. But the guile of others is only part of the problem, and the wicked succeed because their dupes fail to discern and make the correct
choice between Eternal Contrarieties. The sheep, in other words, too often take
sheeps clothing at face value. Defoe writes, then, not primarily to rebuke or even to humiliate the enemynot for the entertainment but for the edification of the good. That
mission statement is no mere abstraction: it makes plain Defoes ultimate objective as a
satirist, one who writes in the here and now and expects that writing to matter.
Defoes use of dissimulation as a satiric method is not unique. As a parallel I
would point to the satiric practice of Kierkegaard, whose central worry was how to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom. As David J. Gouwens explains, Kierkegaard
addresses primarily those persons attempting to be human beings, and, perhaps,
Christians. Kierkegaard the satirist knew well that religious capacities cannot be directly communicated,54 and so relied often on indirection, a method that by necessity
involves deception. The reader must be deceived in order to learn the skills of undeceiving himself and in order to deepen his own ethical and religious capacities, and
Kierkegaard accomplished such deceptions through memorable pseudonymous
charactersthe unscrupulous Seducer, the volatile Aesthete, the heavy-handed Judge
Wilhelm, and so forth. The need for both moral instruction and moral training
through well-meaning deception is as central for Defoe as for Kierkegaard. Defoes direct satires supply indispensable knowledge; his indirect satires supplement this instruction, indispensably communicating the necessary capability readers require to
discriminate between truth and falsehood.55
This dual satiric program helps explain why Defoe writes indirect satire when
and as he does. The majority of his satires are straightforward: however they vary in
specific detail and technique, they all convey literally the position he actually holds.
Defoe employs direct satire all his writing life, concerned in these works about the
themes I outlined above. He wrote fewer indirect satires by far, and they do not cover
the same range of issues: these works deal almost exclusively with either Dissent (as in
The Shortest Way, A Letter to Mr. Bisset, and The Consolidator) or Jacobitism (as in And
What if the Pretender Should Come? and Reasons against the Succession of the House of
54. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge, 1996), 13, 14.
55. For the helpful distinction between the communication of knowledge and the communication of a capability, I am indebted to Gouwens (ibid., 14).

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Hanover [1713]). The use of indirection for these two topics is not coincidental: Defoe
identifies in the arguments around these issues the most dangerous sort of deception.
On the matters of Dissent and Catholic rule, the stakes are exceptionally high, and
Defoes adversaries exceptionally devious. His direct satires provide an ongoing tutorial on gullibility, duplicity, feigned benevolence, Protestant virtue, and Catholic vice.
His indirect satires are timely tests meant to supplement those lessonsnot to exist independently of them, and certainly not to replace or to work against them. Defoe is
deeply concerned about his people (sometimes the English, sometimes the Whigs,
sometimes the Protestants, and sometimes the Dissenters) not recognizing their
enemy. He tells the truth about lying in his direct satires, and he lies to lead his readers
to truth in his indirect satires. Defoe has a serious and sophisticated satiric agenda, in
theory and in practicebut it is not the agenda of his more famous satiric counterparts.
Defoes Non-Augustan Satire
Defoe did not know that he lived in the Age of Swift and Pope. Although modern accounts of early-eighteenth-century satire are dominated by these two figures, Defoes
contemporaries would not have recognized them as the definitive writers of the
period. Satiric practice in England was far more varied than that of the so-called
Augustans, from whom our notions of early-eighteenth-century satire are largely
derived. The case of Defoe presents us with a problem: his considerable satiric output
challenges us to acknowledge the incompleteness of our theoriesand to rethink them.
Studies of early-eighteenth-century satire rarely discuss Defoes contribution at
any length, despite the fact that he was perhaps the most prolific and certainly among
the most prominent satirists of that period. (And, given the prices at which some of his
works were sold, one must grant a readership beyond the hardscrabble London mob:
Defoe sold penny ballads to the masses; he sold Jure Divino for fifteen shillings to
another group entirely.) If Defoes name comes up in modern accounts of satire in this
period, the reference is almost always en passant. David Worcester mentions him three
times, and Ian Jack and James Sutherland only twice each; Gilbert Highet does not cite
Defoe at all. Ronald Paulson and Claude Rawson each refer once to The Shortest Way
without comment, and Dustin Griffin includes only one sentence on that text (the lone
example of Defoes satiric works that he mentions). Most recently, Fredric V. Bogel alludes only to the Journal of the Plague Year, and Michael Seidel and Charles A. Knight
treat only The True-Born Englishman among Defoes satires (Knight merely to highlight the use of national stereotypes in that poem).56 The neglect is unfortunate but not
entirely surprising: Defoes reputation as a middle-class moralist, along with his lack
of concern for classicizing canons of taste,57 seems to have justified the exclusion.
56. Worcester, The Art of Satire (New York, 1940); Jack, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in
English Poetry, 16601750 (Oxford, 1952); Sutherland, English Satire (Cambridge, 1962); Highet, The
Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, N.J., 1962); Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, 1967); Rawson,
Satire and Sentiment 16601830 (New Haven, Conn., 1994); Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction;
Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001);
Seidel, Satire, lampoon, libel, slander, in Steven N. Zwicker, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 16501740 (Cambridge, 1998): 3357; Knight, The Literature of Satire (Cambridge, 2004).
57. Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 58, 45.

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More important, perhaps, is the fact that his example would complicate, muddle up,
and challenge rather than confirm the ways in which early-eighteenth-century satire is
usually discussed. Some Defoe scholars have objected to the omissionbut in doing
so they have typically confused the issue by emphasizing his most literary efforts and
his ties to the periods satiric luminaries.58
Both attacks on Defoe and defenses of him issue from the same set of assumptions about his aspirations. D. N. DeLuna contests the image of Yales Poetasting
Defoe, for instance, and criticizes in particular the distortions of Frank H. Ellis, the
editor of the relevant volumes of Poems on Affairs of State, for singling out the Reformation poems as evidence of how Augustan Defoe is.59 She faults Ellis for his patronizing condescension toward The Pacificator, a poem she regards as an arresting,
verbally intricate performance in mock-panegyric satirea feat only later matched by
A Tale of a Tub and the Epistle to Augustus and The Dunciad.60 Her battle against Ellis
has everything to do with her attempt to demonstrate Defoes artistic concerns and
capabilitiesher desire to prove him worthy of inclusion in our Augustan-centered
literary pantheon. Her claim that Defoe sought eminence as a published state affairs
poet in a line of wit extending on from Butler, Marvell, and Dryden,61 however, is no
less problematic than the judgment it challenges. Defoe wrote on state affairs, but that
he fancied himself the next Dryden seems highly improbable.62 Backscheider likewise
stresses Defoes debts to and kinship with the more major literary figures.63 She highlights the ways in which Defoe resembles Pope, and then notes the differences between
the two in manifestly negative terms: the limitation of Jure Divino, for example,
comes from a fact of Defoes entire artistic lifenamely, that he never learned to use
current events with restraint and artistic objectivity.64 Defoe becomes, in these renditions, a topical author who wrote for bread, but also a high-minded and ambitious literary would-be whose artistry either never developed properly or has been unjustly
overlooked. But both the attack on Defoe for failing to become Pope and the defense of
58. John M. McVeagh calls attention to Defoes borrowings from Rochester (and, to a lesser extent,
Butler) in Rochester and Defoe: A Study in Influence, SEL 14 (1974): 32741. In The Verse Essay,
John Locke, and Defoes Jure Divino (ELH 55 [1988]: 99124), Backscheider explains that Jure Divino
has more literary ties . . . than appear at first sight, citing among Defoes literary debts the model of
Cowleys Davideis (pp. 99, 10510).
59. Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 16601714, vol. 6, ed. Ellis (New Haven,
Conn., 1970), 399.
60. DeLuna, Modern Panegyrick and Defoes Dunciad, SEL 35 (1995): 41935 at 421.
61. DeLuna, Yales Poetasting Defoe, 349.
62. DeLunas triumvirate of satiric predecessors, moreover, includes writers who differ radically
not only in satiric practice but also in political and theological worldview. While Defoe may have borrowed from any or all of them, judging him to be their satiric successor seems to miss most of his point
in writing satire.
63. See, for example, The Verse Essay, John Locke, and Defoes Jure Divino, where Backscheider
concludes that Defoes poetic aspirations, like Cowleys, Miltons, Drydens, and Popes, drew him to
the ambitious poetic form (p. 111).
64. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington, Ky., 1986), 37. She argues
that, Defoe is close to the traditional satiric themes and stances that Alexander Pope would exploit in
his late poetry, and that the two writers both point out that Satyr shames men who ignore law and
religion (p. 28).

572
ashley marshall
his merits in a high-culture tradition are misguided. Defoe did not fail to replicate
Dryden or to become Pope; he did not try to do those things. He did not care to be what
modern scholars think of as an Augustan, and we should neither try to make him one
nor deride him for falling short in what he never attempted.
Defoe certainly had literary capability, but he does not appear to have had what
we think of as literary concerns, at least in the realm of satire; he does not seem to have
imagined himself either drawing upon or contributing to a tradition of artists. The exception might appear to be The Pacificator (1700), a mock-heroic description of the
battle between the Men of Sense and the Men of Wit. But, despite Richettis argument
that Defoe intended The Pacificator to participate in the war between wit and sense,65
the poem disdains literary wars more than it seeks to engage in them. The joke of the
mock-heroic is to expose the discrepancy between the seriousness with which these
writers take themselves and the actual triviality of their enterprises, but they are worse
than frivolous: the skirmishing literati weaken the state, and Defoe comments on their
battle not with a desire for inclusion, but rather with the distance and condescension of
an outsider keen to preserve that status. He perceived climacterics everywhere in his
England, and he believed in a writers public responsibilitiesand we should consider
this poem alongside his other satires with that in mind. The urgency with which he
elsewhere writes on English affairs is related to his earnest attack here, as he disparages
the literati who (engaged in imagined crusades) stand aloof from those crises in which
their positive involvement could matter.
Defoe certainly saw the essential importance of quotidian eventsthe separation of topical and fundamental would likely not have made sense to him. But,
however seriously he took his topical compositions, he does not appear to have meant
them as culture-for-posterity. Defoe would not have written a satire anything like
Mac Flecknoe or The Dunciad. He used satire to address the everyday and the immediate. Dryden undoubtedly composed Absalom and Achitophel for the moment, and that
satire is primarily a party documentbut its author was Englands Poet Laureate and
was distinctly aware of that role. If we insist on seeing Defoe as an aspirant to literary
fameas a would-be Dryden, Swift, or Popethen we distort our sense of his objectives and commitments, in life and in writing.
The clichs about Defoe have been much repeated: he is a hired pen, unscrupulous and acquisitive, at best inconsistent and at worst a ruthlessly mercenary liar.66
Critics acknowledge his lifelong Protestantism, but suppose that its principles figure
only very minimally in his writing, and that his economic and political concerns
trump any deeper convictions. His Christian sensibility, in Novaks reading, is replaced, for the most part, by a progressive and secular vision, and Schonhorn describes Defoe as one for whom interest will always fight for dominance over
66. Paul Alkon describes Defoes labyrinthine life as literary masquerade marked by a series of
devious personal enterprises; review article, Defoes Fiction; Defoes Perpetual Seekers: A Study of the
Major Fiction; The Elusive Daniel Defoe, Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1986): 22026 at 220.

573
conscience, loyalty and love of country.67 In general, scholars have tended to assume
that Defoe writes as will most profit him, and either changes his convictions as convenient or has none. His attitude toward writing has almost always been seen as casual and
variable, but his satires contradict his modern reputation. Defoe the satirist took up his
pen to address those issues about which he worried most: Protestantism and the
Protestant succession, dissent and liberty of conscience, and the practical and moral
necessities of good manners. His commitment to the positive values set forth in his
satires appears not to have changed much over the course of his career. Defoe the
satirist is neither detached moralist nor amoral opportunist. He takes his role seriously,
he writes from deep and consistent convictions, and his satiresfar more than the
fiction for which he is most famousreflect his fundamental and lasting sense of
purpose as a writer.68
the pennsylvania state university
abstract
Scholars think of Defoe primarily as a novelist, secondarily as a journalist and a commentator on politics and economics. Most assume that he wrote as most profited him, and changed his convictions as
convenient or perhaps had none. In recent revisions to the bibliography of Defoes writings, satire
occupies a prominent place, and in this article Ashley Marshall shows Defoes consistency of argument
and approach in satires written over a period of thirty-six years. She argues that they were not only
central to his contemporary reputation but also seriously challenge his long-standing reputation as an
inconsistent, unprincipled scribbler. Keywords: Daniel Defoe, Defoes satiric purpose, Augustan satire,
The True-Born Englishman, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters
appendix overleaf
67. Novak, Defoe: Master of Fictions, 122; Schonhorn, Defoe and the Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric,
872. For Defoe, Schonhorn argues, religion is unequivocally subordinated to power struggles over the
possession of lands, commercial routes, and overseas expansion. Crusades and holy expeditions were
cheats of the past. Markets, not martyrs and denominations, were the locales of contention between
countries.

574
ashley marshall
Appendix: Satires by Daniel Defoe

I include (in chronological order of original publication) works that Defoe himself
identified as satires, those that were regarded as such by his contemporaries, and those
that have been since treated as such either by modern scholars or in databases such as
the English Short Title Catalogue. For the works identified by Furbank and Owens as
probable attributions, I follow the entry with (P). I give the title, date of first appearance, format and length, original price if known, and note reprints and inclusion in
collections. With respect to text length, I have simplified the collational formulas and
provided only sum total of pages (instead of vi + 40, for example, I give 46). Numbers 2, 6, and 7 were reprinted in Poems on Affairs of State (1703); number 16 was
reprinted in POAS (1707); number 5 was reprinted in POAS (1712) and in Somers Tracts
(1748); and numbers 12 and 17 were reprinted in A Collection of the Best English Poetry
(2 vols.; 1717). I abbreviate the titles of collections of Defoes work as follows:
TC
SV
A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man
(1703), 490 p.; 8.
A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman
(1705), 496 p.; 8; 16s.
A second edition of TC appeared with SV in 1710 (6s.); a pirated version was also
published. A Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman in
two volumes appeared in 1711, and a third edition of that work came out in 1713. In 1714,
The Works of Mr. D. De Foe was published in two volumes, and in 1721 appeared The
Genuine Works of Mr. Daniel DFoe, Author of the True-Born English-Man, a Satyr, also
in two volumes (12s.).
(1) A New Discovery of an Old Intreague: a satyr leveld at treachery and ambition
(Jan. 1691), 38 p.; 4; rpt. 1704, SV.
(2) An Encomium upon a Parliament (composed in May 1699); many manuscript
versions have been found, but no full copy is known to have appeared in 1699; 5 p. in
POAS as The Patriots. (P)
(3) The Pacificator (Feb. 1700), 16 p.; 2; rpt. 1705, SV.
(4) The True-Born Englishman (Jan. 1701), 32 p.; 8; rpt. 1708, TC and SV; 26 more
editions in the century.
(5) Ye True-Born Englishman Proceed (sometimes listed as New Satyr on the Parliament) (1701), 1 p.; Bs.; rpt. 7 times in 1701. (P)
(6) The Mock Mourners: a satyr, by way of elegy on King William (12 May 1702), 16 p.; 8;
9 editions in 1702; Rpt. TC.
(7) Reformation of Manners, a Satyr (July/Aug. 1702), 68 p.; 4; 3 editions in 1702;
rpt. TC.

575
(8) The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (Dec. 1702), 32 p.; 4; 2 editions in 1702;
rpt. 1703, TC.
(9) The Spanish Descent (Dec. 1702), 8 p.; 8; rpt. TC.
(10) A Dialogue between a Dissenter and the Observator (Jan. 1703), 30 p.; 4;
rpt. pirated TC. (P)
(11) More Reformation. A Satyr upon Himself (16 July 1703), 60 p.; 4; rpt. SV.
(12) A Hymn to the Pillory (29 July 1703), 16 p.; 8; rpt. 1703, 1705, 1708 (pirated), SV.
(13) A Hymn to the Funeral Sermon (2 Oct. 1703), 4 p.; 4. (P)
(14) The Lay-Mans Sermon upon the Late Storm (Feb. 1704), 28 p.; 4. (P)
(15) To the Honourable, the CS of England Assembled in Pt (Mar. 1704),
apparently only for private distribution; 2 p.; 2.
(16) The Address (Mar./Apr. 1704), 2 p.; 4.
(17) An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born-English-Man. With an Essay on the Late
Storm (July/Aug. 1704), 32 p.; 8; rpt. Dublin, 1704, 1704 (pirated), 1707 (cheaper edition), SV.
(18) The Dissenter Misrepresented and Represented (Dec. 1704?), published only in SV;
24 p. in SV.
(19) The Consolidator (Mar. 1705), 364 p.; 8; rpt. 1705.
(20) The Dyet of Poland (June/July 1705), 64 p.; 4; Dublin edition, 1705.
(21) Jure Divino (20 July 1706), 374 p. in 12 parts; 2; published by subscription, 15s.;
pirated edition, 5s.
(22) The Vision, a Poem (Edinburgh, 1706), 4 p.; 4; rpt. London, 1706.
(23) A Reply to the Scots Answer, to the British Vision (Edinburgh, Nov. 1706), halfsheet, 2; rpt. as A Poem to the Author of the Scots Answer to the British Vision (1706).
(24) Parn Plton . . . turnd inside out (left in MS), 52-line verse satire; known only
from a transcript by George Staniland to an unknown recipient (11 May 1709).
(25) A Letter to Mr. Bisset (22 Dec. 1709), 16 p.; 8; rpt. Dublin, 1709; 2nd ed., Dublin and
London, 1710. (P)
(26) A New Test of the Sense of the Nation (Oct. 1710), 96 p.; 8. (P)
(27) The Secret History of the October Club (Apr. 1711), 48 p.; 8; 1s. (P)
(28) Atalantis Major (June 1711), 24 p.; 8. (P)
(29) The Secret History . . . Part II (June 1711), 104 p.; 8; 1s. (P)
(30) A Speech of a Stone Chimney-Piece (Dec. 1711), printed only in the Review and
The Present State of the Parties; 2 p. in the latter collection. (P)
(31) Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover (Feb. 1713), 48 p.; 8; 6d.;
4th ed., 1713.

576
ashley marshall
(32) And What if the Pretender should come? (Mar. 1713), 40 p.; 8; 6d.; 2nd ed., 1713.
(33) Memoirs of Count Tariff (Aug. 1713), 96 p.; 8; 1s. (P)
(34) The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff (Jan. 1715), 21 p.; 8; 6d.
(35) A Hymn to the Mob (Sep. 1715), 48 p.; 8; 6d. (P)
(36) An Account of the Great and Generous Actions of James Butler (Sep. 1715), 48 p.; 8;
6d.; rpt. Dublin, 1716. (P)
(37) Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (Jan. 1716), 40 p.; 8; 6d. (P)
(38) Secret Memoirs of a Treasonable Conference at S House (Nov. 1716), 80 p.; 8; 1s.;
2nd ed., 1717.
(39) The Danger of Court Differences (Jan. 1717), 48 p.; 8; 6d. (P)
(40) The Quarrel of the School-Boys at Athens (Jan. 1717), 16 p.; 8; 6d. (P)
(41) Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager (June 1717), 326 p.; 8; 2nd ed., 1736.
(42) A Declaration of Truth to Benjamin Hoadly (June/July 1717), 16 p.; 8; 6d.; rpt.
Dublin, 1717.
(43) The Conduct of Christians Made the Sport of Infidels (July 1717), 38 p.; 8; 6d. (P)
(44) The Old Whig and Modern Whig Revived (July/Aug. 1717), 48 p.; 8; 6d. (P)
(45) A Continuation of Letters written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (Aug. 1718), 324 p.; 12. (P)
(46) The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley (summer 1719), 66 p.; 8; 1s. (P)
(47) The Great Law of Subordination Considerd (Mar./Apr. 1724), 304 p.; 8; 3s. 6d.
(48) The Political History of the Devil (7 May 1726), 416 p.; 8; 2nd ed., 1727; 3rd ed., 1734;
reprinted at least eleven more times in the century; translated into French (1729, 1730)
and German (1733).
(49) Mere Nature Delineated (23 July 1726), 128 p.; 8; 1s. 6d. (P)
(50) A System of Magick . . . Being an Historical Account of Mankinds most early Dealing
with the Devil (Dec. 1726), 416 p.; 8; Re-issue, 1728; rpt. 1729; 2nd ed., 1730.
(51) An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (Mar. 1727), 408 p.; 8.


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Daniel Defoe as Satirist

Author(s): Ashley Marshall

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Daniel Defoe as Satirist

scholars think of daniel defoe primarily as a novelist, secondarily as

huntington library quarterly | vol. 70, no. 4

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question his long-standing notoriety as an inconsistent, unprincipled scribbler. Defoe

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daniel defoe as satirist

poetry, near-doggerel directed at untutored understandings, ready to be hawked in the

6. Richetti, Life of Defoe, 70, 61.

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Defoes Satiric Purpose

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daniel defoe as satirist

Anti-Catholicism. The most consistent theme in Defoes satires is his categorical

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daniel defoe as satirist

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daniel defoe as satirist

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daniel defoe as satirist

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daniel defoe as satirist

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daniel defoe as satirist

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daniel defoe as satirist

direction corresponds in surprising ways to the satiric program outlined so explicitly

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daniel defoe as satirist

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daniel defoe as satirist

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Appendix: Satires by Daniel Defoe

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daniel defoe as satirist

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