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Defoe and Sterne
Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Cox, Brian
THESE EXCELLENT BIOGRAPHIES OF DEFOE AND STERNE tell the stories of two men in many ways fundamentally different, but at one in their determination to manipulate the rapidly shifting social worlds of the eighteenth century to their own advantage.' They both wrote fictions which helped to bring about radical changes in the forms of literature which predominated during the next two centuries. Robinson Crusoe and Tristram Shandy were both immensely popular with large readerships in England and abroad. Defoe wrote stories such as Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack and Roxana when prose fiction was regarded as a low form not worthy to be classed as literature. Defoe and Sterne were major players in elevating the novel to high status. These thoroughly researched and well-written biographies by Novak and Ross show how in life as in their fiction Defoe and Sterne tried to develop an individual style scarcely possible in the hierarchical society of previous eras.
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Defoe was born in 1660, the year of Charles II's Restoration to the throne of England. His family were Nonconformist or Protestant Dissenters, against whom in the 1660s Parliament passed a series of punitive laws. Dissenters faced the danger of imprisonment and they even suspected they might be forced to return to the Catholic Church. So strong was their fear that their Bibles would be confiscated they decided to copy them out in shorthand. We know that as a boy Defoe wrote out the whole Pentateuch in shorthand, and that, as with many highly intelligent children of that period, he was capable of considerable hard work and application to study. Because his parents were Dissenters, Defoe could not attend Oxford or Cambridge, with their privileged status, but he was fortunate to be placed at one of the best schools in England, the Dissenting Academy of Charles Morton at Newington Green, a suburb of London.
In this major biography, the product of years of industrious scholarship, Maximillian E. Novak describes Charles Morton as a brilliant teacher whose Nonconformist principles made him so vulnerable to attacks from Anglicans he eventually emigrated to America, where he became Vice-President of Harvard College. He introduced science into the curriculum, but, most importantly, he taught in English and gave his pupils exercises in English to develop a plain and energetic style. Defoe was his most important pupil, and his style, particularly in the hugely popular Robinson Crusoe, considerably influenced future writers. Instead of religious sonorities or florid courtly urbanity, Defoe practiced a clear and direct style which acted as a great liberating influence on society in the coming decades. Like Crusoe, he was absorbed by things, their nature and how they could be used. Crusoe finds great pleasure in making shelters and finding food, in transforming his island life into a self-sufficient utopia. Defoe's prose provided an instrument to understand and control the material world. Similarly Crusoe controls his environment by attention to the details of the real world. It's not surprising that he has been attacked as a capitalist, an exploiter, an individualist who earns his own rewards. Defoe believed in an open society in which the most talented men ought to rise to the top, and he counted himself worthy of such promotion. His lucid prose in pamphlets and prose fiction opened doors for him into the political world whose power and prestige he coveted.
His overconfidence led to his undoing. He was a man of extraordinary energy, impetuous, overflowing with new ideas without the ability to work them out in practice through careful application over a period of time. His foolhardiness almost cost him his life. Only a year and a half after his marriage, he voluntarily rode out to join the rebellious antiCatholic forces of the Duke of Monmouth after he landed at Lyme Regis in June 1685. The rebels were defeated at the battle of Sedgemoor. No one knows whether Defoe fought at this battle, but he certainly was forced into hiding afterwards and was lucky not to be caught and hanged. Fear of hanging is often described in his novels, and he undoubtedly based this on traumatic personal experience. Novak is always thorough in presenting evidence, but just occasionally surprisingly dogmatic in his conclusions. In comments on Marlborough, whose military exploits he admired, Defoe provides a striking description of the suffering an army must endure in the intervals betwen battle, "the grass all withered and black with the smoke of powder," and from this Novak deduces that Defoe had personal experience from the battle of Sedgemoor. Novak's arguments are wellpresented but, as he admits, Defoe is notorious for his ability to create dramatic scenes through imagination and wide reading. Novak's final sentence-"He was there"-is too confident.
Defoe's impetuosity and foolhardiness extended to his business affairs. Novak analyzes the early poems most perceptively, showing how they illustrate confidence in his own abilities. His Dissenting upbringing had given him a kind of exhilaration produced by a sense of grace, justification and election. He believed that with his powers of reason and his faith he could master the world about him. He would become a wealthy merchant. He would write poetry to equal the best of Dryden and Rochester.
