A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe believed firmly in the existence of spirits, apparitions, and the invisible world. However, could he, without help from the spiritual world, validate all of the anonymous writings attributed to him today? Could we trust him to list his actual works honestly and accurately? In his lifetime jealous enemies attacked his character and falsely attributed various tracts to him. Thus, for self-protection but further complicating the work of attribution--he denied his authorship of numerous seditious propaganda tracts that he is now known to have written. By the 1790s, more than fifty years after his death, Defoe's reputation was built largely upon his religious dissent and the fiction he authored during his last twelve years of his life. Popular as they are, these works overshadowed the vast political and economic writings which constituted the greater part of his professional work.

Except perhaps for Shakespeare, no other writer has intrigued, baffled, and eluded scholars more successfully than Defoe. Those who have sought to establish the Defoe canon have done their best to right the wrongs of their predecessors. Defoe devotees have held definite opinions about who he was and what he must have written; without substantial historical evidence, they have expunged the violently Whig tracts or added recklessly to the canon's disarray. During the past two-hundred years, eight major bibliographers have assigned more and more works to him, with the result that the scholarly perceptions about Defoe and his works have changed many times. The size and scope of Defoe's canon, along with the difficulty of establishing his life, writings, and milieu, and the further challenge of determining his motives for taking diverse and sometimes contradictory stances in his political tracts, have been ongoing and intensely debated subjects for antiquarians and eighteenth-century scholars alike. The recent shape and enormous dimension of his bibliography, some 572 separate titles according to John Moore's second edition of the Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1971), was unwieldy and fundamentally unsound. Today the problem of faulty attributions complicates attempts to stabilize the image of the man and the writer.

The publication of P. N. Furbank and W.R. Owens' A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe marks an important clarification of the Defoe canon. Furbank and Owens had already debunked 252 questionable attributions that had configured the usually anonymous or pseudonymous writer as one who had written on practically every subject in earlier projects, including The Canonization of Daniel Defoe (1988), Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore's Checklist (1994), and in numerous recent articles. Now, the authors of A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe have applied strict rules and systematic reasoning in constructing their authorial canon. Thanks to their rigorous labors, Defoe scholars will have a vastly improved, albeit still problematic canon.

In their introduction, Furbank and Owens offer a chronological history of Defoe attributions, discuss the particularly difficult aspects of their bibliographical project, and hint at the direction of their next venture in Defoe studies--a lengthy book on his economic and political writings. More significantly, they show the interconnections between bibliography and biography and indicate their principles of author attribution and guidelines for categorizing the 276 works, of which 113 are marked "probably." The first attributions include those "indisputably written by the author" (xxix). In the second group, Furbank and Owens provide sound explanations for making new attributions. Aptly conservative, Furbank and Owens regard internal evidence alone as insufficient basis for making new attributions. The final selections are decided by external evidence (defined as contemporary affirmation of Defoe's authorship in the first sixty years after his death) that has priority over internal markings (what are considered idiosyncratic and favorite allusions used by Defoe). Careful to acknowledge the difference between certain attributions and likely ones, the bibliographers append a (P) next to the probable entries. For each entry, they include boldface item numbers (chronologically arranged) beside their titles and provide informative commentary consisting of the genealogy of the work, the reasons for its status in the canon, and a brief synopsis. They provide detailed descriptions of the physical texts, including publication dates, format, pagination, and source information, as well as brief historical and modern commentary. In addition to the bibliographical information, Furbank and Owens provide four appendices on the unresolved problems related to the canon and on various topical issues on which Defoe wrote.

It is a credit to the research methods of Furbank and Owens that they have not sought to end the debate about Defoe's canon, because that canon is still evolving. Indeed, the notion that there will ever be a definitive, authentic, stable Defoe canon is open to question. Defoe extended traditional genre boundaries to incorporate books, pamphlets, broadsheets, periodicals, collaborative works, translations, compilations, letters, and some unfinished manuscripts in his collected works. His modus operandi has ensured that his canon will remain indeterminate indefinitely. Though Furbank and Owens have made only a few new attributions and have vastly reduced the number of specific texts in Defoe's canon, they have already subtly changed the image of the man and the writer. To revise an author's bibliography is simultaneously to rewrite his or her biography. For the present, Furbank and Owens capture Defoe's authorial canon admirably. Further evidence concerning Defoe's authorship will doubtless emerge. In the meantime, scholars will continue to think of themselves as interpreters haunted by Defoe's alluring ghost, whispering over their shoulders in the strongest terms, "Yes, it's me; it's mine." How appropriate that a writer for whom life after death was the ultimate experience should sustain this endless afterlife.