The Works of Daniel Defoe
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THE WORKS OF DANIEL DEFOE IN SIXTEEN VOLUMES STije Cn'ppltfiate latrition THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND COPIES, EACH OF WHICH IS NUMBERED AND REGISTERED THE NUMBER OF THIS SET IS.... THE WORKS OF DANIEL DEFOE DUE PREPARATIONS FOR THE PLAGUE AS WELL FOR SOUL AS BODY NEW YORK MCMVIII GEORGE D. SPROUL Copyright, 1904, by THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 34-00 UNIVERSITY PRESS JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. CONTENTS PAGE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii INTRODUCTION ix AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION xvii DUE PREPARATIONS FOR THE PLAGUE 1 THE DUMB PHILOSOPHER; GREAT BRITAIN'S WONDER 207 The Preface .... ... 209 . 211 The Dumb Philosopher .. , A TRUE RELATION OF THE APPARITION OF ONE MRS. VEAL. .-'I . | '.,.'.' . 249 The Preface . ;: 251 <; .;..., A Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal . 253 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ISLE OF ST. VINCENT . 267 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE SISTER COMFORTS HER BROTHER . Frontispiece TO SECURE GOOD RESULTS Page 58 WHEN THE PLAGUE BEGAN TO ABATE ... 80 A WAY OF ESCAPE APPEARS ...... 176 INTRODUCTION Tf^V UE Preparations for the Plague, as well for i 1 Soul as Body, was published in 1722. m ^J Whether it came out before or after the Journal of the Plague Year, which appeared in March of the same year, cannot be definitely said. Though Mr. Lee accidentally omitted the Due Preparations from the catalogue of Defoe's works prefixed to the first volume of his Daniel Defoe, there can be little doubt that the book was from Defoe's pen. It was on a subject which we know, from A Journal of the Plague Year, greatly interested him; and portions of the book deal with incidents mentioned in the better known Journal. Besides, as Mr. Aitken has 1 shown, Due Preparations for the Plague is full of Defoe's mannerisms, both in vocabulary and in nar rative method. "Neither or" is an instance of use of in the second the former ; the dialogue part, of the latter. There seems to be no good reason for doubting Defoe's authorship. It is commonly said that Defoe wrote Due Prep arations for the Plague for the same purpose as A Journal of the Plague Year, namely to rouse people to take precautions against the plague which had 1 Introduction to Vol. XV., Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, London, 1901. [ix] INTRODUCTION been raging in Marseilles in 1720 and 1721. That Defoe was actuated somewhat by public-spirited mo tives in his two is writing works on the plague likely, but it is even likelier that he was led to compose them by his shrewd commercial sense. He was aware that the interest in the Marseilles plague would give them a good sale. Due Preparationsfor the Plague reads for the most part like a continuation of the more famous Journal of the Plague Year. Showing what preparations, both spiritual and material, should be made for the disease, by instances cited from the Great Plague, it becomes very much like the Journal in tone, though it is not so evenly interesting. A reader's interest cannot but flag in the second part, when he struggles with the tedious religious cant of the sister who warns her brother to be spiritually ready for the pestilence. In some of the verbose, unnatural conversation here, Defoe appears at his worst. When a reader, how ever, comes to the story of the sister's taking refuge from the pestilence with her two brothers on a ship which drops down the Thames, his interest revives. And nothing in the Journal itself is better narrative than the story, in the first part of Due Preparations, " of the family in the parish of St. Alban's, Wood 1' Street, who, in order to escape the sickness, lived shut up in their house, without once going out, from the fourteenth of July to the first of December. Immediately following Due Preparations for the Plague will be found a short history with a very long title, namely : The Dumb Philosopher : or, Great INTRODUCTION Britain's Wonder, containing I. A Faithful and a very Surprising Account, how Dickory Cronke, Tinner's Son, in the County of Cornwall, was born Dumb, and continued so for 58 years ; and how, some he came to his With Days before he Died, Speech. Memoirs of his Life, and the manner of his Death. II. A Declaration of his Faith and Principles in Religion : With a Collection of Select Meditations composed in his Retirement. III. His Proplwtical Observations upon the Affairs of Europe, more par- to ticidarly of Great Britain, from 1720 1729. The whole extracted from his original Papers, and con- Jirmed by unquestionable authority. To which is annexed, His Etegy, written by a young Cornish Gentleman, of Exeter Coll. in Oxford. With an Epitaph by another Hand. This curious pamphlet was published in October, 1719, nearly a year and a half after the subject of it, according to Defoe's statement, had died. It is prob able that the history was founded on fact. Dickory Cronke was very likely a real man like Duncan Campbell and the criminals whose lives are sketched in the volume which is to follow this. He did not achieve the notoriety of any of these, however. On the contrary, he lived obscurely in Wales or the southwest of England, and his reputation may be supposed to have been purely local. For this reason, unlike his contemporary dumb man, Campbell, who for years was a much visited fortune-teller of the metrop olis, Dickory Cronke died unknown to fame. There is no mention of him in either contemporary periodi cals or the Dictionary of National Biography ; and INTRODUCTION in 1901, such a careful student of Defoe as Mr. G. A. Aitken had been unable to get any information about him. The Elegy and the Epitaph at the end of the history are as likely to have been Defoe^s as the work " " of a young Cornish Gentleman of Exeter College, " or of the gentleman, who, having heard much in " commendation of the dumb man, was said to have written his epitaph. At all events, the verses which Defoe wrote on The Character of the late Dr. Samuel Annesley, by Way of Elegy in 1697 are much like those on Cronke, as a few lines will show : '* A Heavenly Patience did his Mind possess, Cheerful in Pain and thoughtful in Distress ; Mighty in Works of Sacred Charity, Which none knew better how to guide than he ; Bounty and generous thoughts took up his Mind, Extensive, like his Maker's, to Mankind." The old graveyards of New England can show many epitaphs neither better nor worse than this. Following The Dumb Philosopher, will be found two interesting bits of narrative by Defoe : A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next Day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave at Can terbury, the Sth of September, 1705. Which Appari tion recommends the Perusal of Drelincourfs Boole oj Consolations against the Fears of Death, and The Destruction of the Isle of St. Vincent. The former of these is one of the best known compositions of J Defoe. From the time that Scott selected it as a 1 Biographical Memoirs : Daniel DeFoe. [xii] INTRODUCTION good example of Defoe's power of imparting reality to his narratives, it has been especially famous, and so it does show deservedly ; though apparently not Defoe's inventive powers so much as Scott thought. Scott mentions an old tradition to the effect that Defoe wrote the Apparition as a puff for Drelincourt's book of Consolations against the Fears of Death, and he calls it an instance of Defoe's bold invention that " he summoned up a ghost from the grave to bear witness in favour of a halting body of divinity." It is a pity that nowadays doubt attaches to this story of Defoe's writing a puff for Drelincourt's book, for it is exactly what he would have been likely to do. Mr. Lee, however, in his Daniel Defoe? argues that Mrs. Veal was written for no such purpose. Drelin court's book, he states, was in no need of such a puff. The third edition sold very well, but the fourth, which contained a reprint of Defoe's Apparition, was slow in selling. After this the Apparition of Mrs. Veal was sometimes printed with Drelincourt's book and sometimes not, till the eleventh edition, from which, to the present time, according to Lee, " Drelincourt has never been published without it." For my part, I do not feel that this testimony en tirely disproves the old story. On the other hand, it proves that from the first, there was some connec tion between Defoe's pamphlet and Drelincourt. The fact that the first edition of Drelincourt which included the Apparition did not sell so well as a previous edition without the Apparition, proves not that Defoe did not write his pamphlet partly for a 1 London, 1869, Vol. I., page 127. [ *i J INTRODUCTION puff, but rather that the puff was not successful. And though Drelincourt's book is not the only one which the ghost of Mrs. Veal recommends to Mrs. Bargrave, fully twice as much space is given to this as to the book next most commended, Norris's Friendship in Perfection, and much more praise. After all, may it not have occurred to Defoe, as he wrote The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, that in telling a remarkable contemporary story, he might inciden tally do Drelincourt some service ? That Mrs. Veal was a contemporary story now seems clear are to it as ; we no longer accept a marvellous instance of Defoe's power of invention.