A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (review)

584 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens. A Critical Bibliography ofDaniel Defoe. London: Pickering and Chatio, 1998. xxvii + 319pp. US$175.00. ISBN 1-85196-389-8. From one point of view, author-bibliography might seem one of the modest, subordinate reaches ofscholarship, akin to textual studies in performing a function that is useful, even necessary, but at best preliminary and ancillary to the more exalted realms of critical interpretation. From another perspective, attributionstudy can be seen as distinctly immodest, a process of aggressively exposing authors by penetrating their anonymity and stripping away their disguises. The anonymous author issues what amounts to an implicit challenge, and is defeated when that challenge is met and his or her hidden identity is revealed. Considered in this light, a scholar such as John Robert Moore, who personally attributed 140 works to Defoe, should probably be seen not only as the swashbuckling champion of an author he idolized, but also as a determined adversary who revelled in seeing through (or in imagining that he could see through) Defoe's many masks. On this view, the very nature of the relationship transforms the anonymous author from hero to shifty culprit, and the attribution-scholar from humble servant into relentless pursuer. The weird dynamics of detection remind one of Caleb Williams—and I begin with this seeming digression in order to marvel at the fact that more than fifty years ago, when the Jacobin novelists were by no means the canonical authors they have since become, P.N. Furbank, who together with W.R. Owens has contributed more extensively and valuably than anyone else to Defoe studies in recent years, was already writing brilliantly about William Godwin. This is a remarkable career, and it is still thriving. The most significant development in Defoe studies in the past decade has been the publication of three collaborative books by Furbank and Owens, The Canonisation ofDaniel Defoe (1988), Defoe De-Attributions (1994), and A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998). The nature of their achievement differs somewhat from book to book. Canonisation is designed to persuade readers that the existing tally of Defoe's writings is not only grossly inflated but hopelessly chaotic, and calls for radical reconstruction rather than local revision. It traces the evolution of the Defoe canon, focusing on the careers and personalities of those most responsible for its explosive growth. This venture into historical and biographical narrative has a clear rhetorical function: to establish that the canon as we have it is not the shapely product ofa careful,judicious process, each scholar building with caution and restraint on earlier work, but rather a confused sprawl, brought into being partly by a hubristic over-reliance on intuition and professional authority on the part of some very fallible mortals, and partly by the failure of other scholars to call them to account. One mighty attributor is presented as a tragic hero, another as a buffoonish villain, but the spectacle is uniformly dismal. In their later volumes Furbank and Owens are at pains to make local, respectful gestures towards some of their immediate predecessors, but The Canonisation ofDaniel Defoe is wholesale in its condemnation, in order to drive home the need for redoing, rather than merely "tidying," the received canon. In a review of this first volume in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1996), 310— 12, Paul Hunter rightly emphasized its dispiriting vision of the way the profession has operated, or failed to operate, in allowing so much shaky speculation and REVIEWS 585 surmise to take on an aura of established scholarly fact. Furbank and Owens show how collective deference towards authority—an authority based on the supposed expertise acquired through long specialization—enabled an energetic entrepreneur such as John Robert Moore to flourish, and Hunter sensibly observes that the role of "authority" is a problem not only in Defoe studies, or in disputes over the authorship of anonymous works, but in the current function (or dysfunction) of our profession at large. Hunter's concerns about the health of the profession are well founded, but on this issue I am more sanguine than he is. An imposing publication list, academic position, reputation and...

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