to read, not least in order to calculate the interest he makes on a sum he has left in safekeeping with a gentleman. Finally realizing that not knowing how is a handicap even within his doubtful profession, he learns to read in six months, and the narrative immediately propels him from his criminal life into army service and thence to Virginia, which, as it does for Moll, proves to be an environment that makes a new person of him. He learns to rule the slaves on his master's estates by benevolence instead of force, creating a bond of gratitude rather than fear; and he soon succeeds on his own estates by the same principle. (Colonel Jack later becomes a grateful supporter of the Hanoverian succession after he benefits from a general pardon to those involved in the 1715 rebellion: he is thus repaid in kind.)
The middle of the book involves several changes at once: having described his success, the narrator pauses to 'Impose a short Digression on the Reader,' which provides the first important moment of selfreflection. He suffers a kind of hell, but not one generated by genuine religious feeling 'but from meer Reasonings with myself, and from -37- being arriv'd to a Capacity of making a right Judgement of things more than before.' This is a Lockean rather than a providential development, one confirmed by a new love of books, especially 'Livy's Roman History, the History of the Turks, the English History of Speed, and others; the History of the Low Country Wars, the History of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the History of the Spaniard's Conquest of Mexico.' He instantly mentions a new servant whom «Fate» places in his way. This man is 'an excellent Schollar' with a 'liberal Education,' and Colonel Jack learns Latin; the plantation does better than ever during the next twelve years. Colonel Jack is increasingly burdened with a conscience about his state, and causes his «Tutor» to turn from teaching him Latin to instructing him in the scriptures, but biblical instruction is interspersed with 'History,' stimulating Colonel Jack's desire to see more of the world: this introduces the second half of his tale, which is more episodic than the first, although it finally returns him to Virginia, to a wife, and from there to trade and riches in the West Indies. The reader learns of his wealth through the appropriate journals, books, and lists. As in Roxana, the plot ends rather abruptly with Colonel Jack living in retirement, as if to create some physical space between himself and his past and between the reader and the «History» that he has presented. If we are led to repentance, as he hopes, the means of persuasion follows a historical method. The reader must contemplate the distinction between example and precept, between raw experience and some account of its total significance: as it surfaces in the course of the narrative, the language of providence is too wayward to achieve that result on its own.
Like Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton falls into two parts. At first, Captain Bob, as he is also known, travels extensively in Africa, crossing deserts and lakes, meeting exotic animals, and confronting native peoples; for a change of career, he becomes a pirate, gets very rich, and has a last-minute spasm of conscience about his wealth. Even more patently than Colonel Jack, the narrative is more concerned with revealing its historical method than with securing a satisfactorily providential ending: in the first paragraph, Captain Singleton explicitly makes such method his subject. He becomes literate fairly early on in his career, learning a smattering of Latin, writing 'a tolerable Hand,' and reading 'Charts and Books.' The meandering style of the accounts of his African journey is explained to some extent by the fact that, since he didn't understand navigation at the time, he kept no journal of his exploits. The journey -38- becomes slightly more purposeful when the gunner acts as a tutor: he is 'an excellent Mathematician, a good Scholar, and a compleat Sailor,' and teaches Captain Bob 'all the Sciences useful for Navigation, and particularly… the Geographical Part of Knowledge.' This training 'laid the Foundation of a general Knowledge of things in my Mind.' Eventually, the party meets a European in an African village, a «Gentleman» and scholar, who knows the region and the way to the sea. The European recounts his own 'History,' and though the party stays to accumulate more gold and ivory, this is the end of the African venture, as if to suggest that cartographic knowledge is really the most valuable plunder Captain Singleton has gained.
William the Quaker becomes Captain Singleton's mentor and guide in the second part. William is always pacific, but at the same time bent on profit. The demise of their joint career as pirates is precipitated by an expedition to Ceylon, where they encounter hostile natives who almost get the better of them. At this juncture, Defoe, having stated that William already knows the tale of Captain Knox's experience there, concludes the episode by reproducing a long passage from Knox's story. Critics often see this as a clumsy device by an author too keen to capitalize on the success of Robinson Crusoe. But if this passage is the product of haste, it merely reveals more baldly Defoe's concern with parallel history-we are given comparative stories to judge-and this method of reading is adumbrated within Knox's own tale, since he has as his companions two early-seventeenth-century tracts, Charles Bayly's Practice of Pietie (1620), and Richard Rogers's Seven Treatises Leading and Guiding to True Happiness (1603). He then miraculously happens on a Bible, and, deciding to escape from Ceylon, finally reaches a Dutch harbor, which causes Knox and his native helper to thank God for his providence. The providential significance of Knox's tale is heavily marked by Knox's engagement with devotional texts; but what is relatively easy for Knox to interpret in his life as divine guidance is less easy for Defoe's reader to see in Captain Singleton's tale. This difference in narrative meaning is highlighted by the juxtaposition of Knox's and Singleton's accounts, whereby the latter cannot so easily ascribe events to providential action.
A less indirect exercise in the parallel reading of history is Memoirs of a Cavalier. The book is cleanly divided into two parts to enforce the comparisons Defoe asks his reader to make. Accordingly, we discover that the story is not just about the dangers of civil war. In fact, the cav -39- alier first observes and serves Gustavus Adolphus in his brilliant military exploits on behalf of Protestant Christendom against the French, but we also see Gustavus Adolphus disappear from the scene, and his generals fatally divide their energies after his death. The Memoirs are in large part about the value of good counsel; thus in the second part, which describes the course of the English Civil War, Charles I condemns himself by his inability to choose or to take advice. Charles's failure is underscored by Prince Rupert's notorious impetuosity on the battlefield: in both cases action is singular, rash, and unpremeditated. The central issue is one of political and military method: the cavalier measures all strategies against the 'Method of the King of Sweden.' This establishes a pattern that is matched not among the royalists but, finally, in that model of virtue, the parliamentarian Sir Thomas Fairfax. Defoe's purpose is thus somewhat subversive, since the analogies his history sets up show the values of good republican as well as good Protestant government. He does provide a list of 'providences,' as he calls them, but the list is drawn up by a Roman Catholic, which means that readers still have to judge the application of these incidents to the cavalier's experience, just as the cavalier reminds us that his private history must be compared with or supplemented by public history. He writes: 'The History of the Times will supply the Particulars which I omit, being willing to confine my self to my own Accounts and Observations; I was now no more an Actor, but a melancholly Observator of the Misfortunes of the Times.'
Defoe and 'Character' Just as it is a mistake to ask Defoe to present us with conventional novelistic criteria for judging his narratives, so it would be a mistake to think of Defoean character as primarily psychologistic in its nature and growth. This is not to say that a character's individual circumstances cannot create intense emotion: Defoe powerfully conveys Moll's agonies in Newgate and Roxana's terror at being discovered by her daughter. Critics are also prone to celebrate Moll's and Roxana's energetic commitment to a criminal or sinful life and their feverish dedication to the acquisition of wealth. And it is also possible to think of Robinson Crusoe as profoundly egocentric. But nevertheless I think that in Defoe, character as such remains remarkably static, as changing circumstances induce different emotions that-while they often change -40- dramatically-are not truly cumulative. These emotions cannot constitute continuous psychological development of the kind we expect, for example, from Henry James, in part owing to the episodic nature of the narrative itself. In this sense, Swift's Gulliver is not so far removed from his supposedly «novelistic» cousins in Defoe.
But the representation of a continuous internal state is disrupted also because Defoe seems vexed by the question of what constitutes identity in the first place. He certainly wrote in an age when questions of individual identity were hotly debated and further complicated by a political and ethical issue: how is an individual constituted or defined in relation to his or her social and political roles? Defoe, we must remember, was a profoundly political writer in a profoundly political age. To bolster his reading of the rise of the novel, Watt cites Locke's notion that identity is composed of individual consciousness through time; but he fails to mention that Locke's central criterion for identity is to some extent antiessentialist, since persons are confirmed as such by receiving rewards and punishments at judgment day for their actions during this life. The criterion for individual identity in this light is more external, more socially constituted than Watt seems to imply. What links a person at one time with the same
