Daniel Defoe: Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress

     Early prose fiction is a strange kettle of fish, as writers gradually worked out how to develop the form which eventually became the novel that most of us are now familiar with. It’s hard enough to decide where the ‘beginning’ of the novel actually was, but many seem to agree that Defoe was in there at the start, early in the eighteenth century, with Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year; Roxana is far less-known, and after finally reading it (nearly twenty years on the pending pile!) I can see why…

There are layers to the narrative as Defoe works to create the impression of verisimilitude: a writer did not want to give the impression a story was completely made up, but on the contrary to convince readers that it was true. Defoe is perhaps most successful at this in A Journal of the Plague Year, but when you look at the chronology you realise he could not have lived through the events he describes in the first person. We are to get a story of life of wickedness – sexual sin – and in those days it was necessary to ensure that the purported narrator was ultimately repentant as she regaled you with the salacious details of her past, as well as making clear she receives her comeuppance. So, regularly her regrets are trotted out, along with her supposed learning from her mistakes, and her warnings to others not to follow in her tracks. All very prurient, in a News Of The World manner.

Early novels are hard work for the reader, for a number of reasons. Firstly, no chapter divisions, which means the entire work, 300 pages, has no convenient start/stop points: you just have to put the book down, and try and pick up the thread later. Then there is the tonal monotony: almost no variation either in the pace or in the intensity of the narrative, no excitement, tension, build-up to a climax and then a relaxation for the reader. This is exhausting. And finally, there’s the question of dialogue, or speech: the conventions for this had to develop, and Defoe is in there right at the start. There’s an awful lot of reported speech, which we find harder to deal with nowadays. Occasionally there’s an attempt at presenting speech in the way we know it, but without the customary punctuation which makes it easier to follow. Finally, there’s a good deal of dialogue presented playscript fashion, which was the one clearly-established convention available at the time. To the contemporary reader, finding chunks of that in the middle of a novel is strange, too. All of these methods are also subservient to the desire to emphasise the verisimilitude of the story.

So, our heroine, after experiencing dire poverty at the hands of a worthless husband, eventually cashes in on her good looks and becomes a kept woman or mistress to a series of wealthy businessmen and aristocrats, living the life of Riley and amassing a huge fortune, whilst occasionally professing to have a conscience troubled by what she is doing. A series of children are abandoned on the way; these also come back to haunt her, and she discovers that trying to ‘go straight’ and become an honest woman again – being too old to be a mistress, and having amassed great wealth already – is harder than it looks. That will do as a summary of a rather tiresome plot; it’s actually pretty similar to Moll Flanders’ life story, so Defoe clearly knew what would sell…

There are a number of serious social and political issues Defoe raises, at a time when the middle classes and businessmen are emerging as a significant force in English society. All a woman’s property passed to her husband on marriage and she herself became a mere chattel; if you’ve acquired great wealth through whoring like our heroine, then a man offering to make an honest woman of you – socially and religiously a desirable outcome – means the loss of your wealth. So you continue as a ‘dishonest’ woman…

Equally, and this ties into Defoe’s time and the emergence of capitalism, our heroine is more interested in amassing wealth and hanging on to it than in anything else. There are numerous descriptions of presents she is given, money she is given, all listed like cash accounts, almost. Is this covetousness her real sin? She’s proud of her ability to hobnob with the highest society, and it’s even hinted that at one point she becomes the king’s mistress for a while. Defoe was a journalist, and I think we’re reminded here of ongoing public interest in the sexual and financial lives of celebrities today.

In the end, I have to say, the novel becomes tiresome and repetitive, plot development and suspense do not yet figure in the fictional template; the nearest we get is the description of a stormy passage over the North Sea, and Defoe does this much better in Robinson Crusoe. Overall, there is very little deliberate manipulation of the reader’s response. It’s a shambolic ragbag of a story, and an extremely unsatisfactory ending, too: open and unresolved, really and a complete let-down.

So, one to read only if you have it already sitting on your shelf, or if you are seriously interested in the early days of the English novel; even then, other of Defoe’s novels will serve and entertain you better.

John Howell: The Life & Adventures of Alexander Selkirk

Daniel Defoe‘s novel The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is generally acknowledged to have been the first novel in English. Published in 1719, it is based on and inspired by the sojourn of a Scots sailor and buccaneer, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years voluntarily marooned on the island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile.

Defoe was also a journalist, and certainly succeeded in making his fictions appear to be factual, as did many writers in those early days of the novel, when this new form was gradually being developed and its potential discovered. A Journal of the Plague Year reads convincingly as an account by someone who lived through the London events of 1665, yet Defoe had not even been born in that year. And Jonathan Swift went out of his way in 1726 to try and lend verisimilitude to the far more outlandish Gulliver’s Travels.

It’s clear that Defoe would have had access to accounts of Selkirk’s stay on the island, which is quite sketchy, but mentioned many of the things that Defoe was skilfully to develop and enhance: the need for shelter, how to feed and clothe himself, fear of strangers landing on the island and capturing him – though, of course, Defoe makes the strangers savages and cannibals rather than mere French or Spanish sailors – and the comfort brought to a solitary man by his faith in God. Defoe’s hero remains on the island for far longer, and is assisted by the shipwreck which provides him with all sorts of useful supplies and equipment that Selkirk never enjoyed; his stay on the island lasts over twenty years, and he eventually gains the companionship of the faithful Friday… you can see how a novelist puts his imagination to good use with his source material.

John Howell, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, thoroughly researched Defoe’s source material, tracing Selkirk’s life and interviewing surviving relatives, as well as mining archives of obscure magazines and other publications; in this relatively short account – an excellent Librivox production – he gives us all the material with a commentary. No aspect of Selkirk is left untouched, and we have clearly laid before us the bare bones from which Defoe worked to produce his masterpiece. If you’ve enjoyed Robinson Crusoe, you may enjoy this…

Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

I’m not quite sure why I went back to this, 42 years after I last read it as an undergraduate. But it was an interesting little digression: Rasselas, the privileged prince, escapes from the happy valley where the emperor’s offspring are confined and determines to explore the world and find out what to do with his life; he’s pretty quickly tied up in the philosophical problem of whether to work out the best way to happiness and contentment or to get on with actually living life…

It was published in 1759, exactly the same year as Voltaire’s Candide, which it immediately reminded me of, except that Voltaire’s conte is more obviously and deliberately satirical, whereas Johnson’s tale mocks lightly while ultimately bringing our naive hero gently to his senses.

Rasselas discovers there’s no happiness to be found in stasis: we must always be striving for something new, and we also need to see and experience misery in order to recognise happiness. Is it better to get on with living and enjoying life, rather than trying to plan ahead to achieve perfection? Equally, it’s important to be yourself, rather than to imitate someone else, or to strive to be someone you are not: there is no place for gurus. It is impossible to plan for every eventuality. As the prince, his sister and their companions travel around, everyone they meet who initially appears to have found the answers and to be happy, is actually dissatisfied in some way with their lot…

Johnson also explores the contrast between innocence and experience, which William Blake was to present in his songs some thirty years later: would it be better to just be satisfied with the state of innocence in which Rasselas begins? or perhaps explore and experience the world and then go back to seclusion? Where can there be true happiness, in that forever sheltered state of initial innocence or some carefully sought out, deliberately tried and tested path, from which clearly it’s not possible to return to the womb, as it were?

We are in the early days of the development of the novel, it occurred to me: Fielding’s Tom Jones was published ten years earlier, and what a difference! True, Rasselas isn’t really a novel, and has a philosophical purpose whereas Fielding sets out to divert and entertain. I was struck, nevertheless, by how sophisticated Tom Jones was as a text, by comparison, in terms of form, structure and language, but above all, characterisation. Rasselas is didactic, a tale of ideas, and also part of prose fiction finding its feet, writers exploring the potential of a new form, but it’s not a book I gaze fondly at on the shelves of my library…

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

For a couple of years or so, I’ve felt it was time to revisit Tom Jones, Fielding’s masterpiece and a landmark in the development of the English novel; I saved it up for a holiday, when I knew I wouldn’t be dragged away from it by daily routine and trivia.

I’ve always gone with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) being the first real novel in English; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) follows; Fielding is roughly thirty years later, and how far the novel has developed is astonishing. Fielding is constantly interacting with his readers, creating humour, and summing up various aspects of life and the human condition with witty aphorisms: I found myself thinking, ‘surely Jane Austen must have read Fielding?’

There is a real – and very complicated – plot here (someone, I have forgotten who, has called it the most perfect plot in all literature) unlike the linear narrative of Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver’s Travels; we follow characters then leave them and move on to another thread, then come back to it – here is a writer learning how to create suspense, to keep his readers hooked, to develop subplots. He’s also aware of how he is manipulating us, as he lets us into the secrets of an author’s choices, all of which writers eventually came to conceal from their readers under the mask of so-called ‘realism’, or verisimilitude, and it’s only later in the twentieth century that writers come back to this sort of conversation with their readers, and acknowledge openly that fiction is just that, a creation.

Characterisation is also being developed, through description, dialogue and continuity; good and bad characters emerge, likeable and detestable ones too. Stratagems and deception figure quite strongly. And conversation begins to come into its own. Differentiation between direct and reported speech still hasn’t clarified itself fully – and blurring this distinction can sometimes serve narrative purpose, as we eventually see Jane Austen doing to great effect the following century – but we hear characters having real conversations and arguments, and these, too, advance and develop the story in interesting ways.

In other ways, it’s still quite crude: the hero’s progress resembles picaresque narrative much of the time; the plot lines are tenuous at times, as quite early on we realise that the hero and heroine must eventually be allowed to marry; we follow Fielding’s whims through multiple epic Virgilian similes, which amuse slightly but are basically padding. And, it’s almost as if he gets tired of it all as we finally gallop at an incredible pace to the denouement, which smacks a bit too much of the deus ex machina, except that various subtle hints and pointers have actually been very carefully sown and then lost at various points in the story…

Whilst on holiday in Lyme Regis and reading the novel I learned that various aspects of the plot may well derive from Fielding’s own life story, as apparently he tried to seduce and then marry a young woman in that very town (there is a blue plaque on a wall to commemorate (?) him or the failed enterprise).

It’s a wonderful and relatively easy read, I feel; we see a writer working out how to bring his characters to a happy conclusion, and I can forgive Fielding his flaws and verbosity and almost anything else for the sheer brilliance of the character of Squire Western, perhaps the first and certainly one of the best comic characters in the history of the novel…

Daniel Defoe: Captain Singleton

I’ve always had an interest in Defoe’s novels, mainly because in many ways he counts as the first English novelist, and it’s very interesting to see both how the novel began, and how much it has changed and developed since its earliest days.

Defoe is famous particularly for Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but his Journal of the Plague Year is also worth reading, and Captain Singleton (which I didn’t actually read, but listened to – unabridged – courtesy of the excellent Librivox website) is a good yarn, too. Early novelists were keen to persuade their readers that their novels were true, factual accounts of real people’s lives, that they – the authors themselves – were therefore journalists rather than fictionalists. A Journal of the Plague Year is particularly convincing in this respect, given that Defoe wasn’t even alive at the time of the 1665 outbreak.

Captain Singleton is a notorious pirate, writing his memoirs – a very modern-seeming enterprise. But that’s about all the book has in common with twenty-first century confessions. For starters, it’s very monotonous. By this I mean that the entire story is written in the same, even, calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice: there’s no variation to this, no tension, no suspense, no excitement. Here is someone learning to write the novel from scratch.

There’s no characterisation to speak of, either: the narrator emerges sketchily through his own first person narration, and the best-drawn character is ‘Friend William’, a Quaker surgeon who is ‘voluntarily’ captured on one of Singleton’s piratical exploits and becomes his true friend, confidante and advisor: Singleton eventually marries Friend William’s sister at the end of the novel. Just a tad far-fetched, I hear you say. Perhaps, but an interesting early attempt at characterisation, anyway.

There’s no real plot to speak of, either: it’s a linear narrative of Singleton’s life from his childhood escape to sea and abandonment on an island with other rebel crew members who eventually escape, undertake an epic trek across the entire African continent aided by tame natives, finding huge amounts of gold lying around on their way… back in England he fritters the money away in dissipation, and is embezzled, so sets off on a life of piracy. This all seems very mundane apart from one engagement at sea described in some detail, and a spectacular storm somewhere around Java, which awakens the idea of it’s being punishment for his sins, and we’re on the way to our conclusion. Money, of course, is the devil’s temptation: having titillated his readers with sinful exploits, in the same way that he did with the adventures of Moll Flanders, Defoe now has to redeem his hero in his readers’ eyes.

Repentance and reformation are supported by his Quaker friend; Singleton renounces piracy and crime, and the pair eventually make their way back to Europe with their ill-gotten gains, helping the poor on their way. And Singleton even leaves the way open for a sequel: now there’s a nice modern touch, too!

The novel clearly didn’t hatch fully-formed; it had to grow to maturity, if that’s where it has got to now. And it had plenty of adventures along the way. Writers quickly learned how to develop plot, add dialogue and conversation rather than report it, introduce variation in tone, suspense and excitement, real characters and much more. They learned how to experiment with time, to explore the inner life of a character, to see into the future. In less than three centuries the genre has come a long way: another interesting game is to speculate where it may go next…