A Criminal History of Mankind (67 page)

Sooner or later, he was bound to be found out. One of his dupes was a man called Mist, who ran a Jacobite newspaper. Mist printed a letter criticising the government without showing it to Defoe, and when he was summoned before government ministers tried to put the blame on Defoe. The Whigs began to suspect that Defoe was doubly treacherous. The breach was healed, but Defoe seems to have realised that his days as a double-dealer were numbered. He had to find some other way of making a living. He recollected that he possessed the material for an interesting narrative. In 1704, a Scottish pirate named Alexander Selkirk had quarrelled with his pirate captain and been marooned, at his own request, on an uninhabited island called Juan Fernandez. He spent five years there before he was rescued, and when he returned to England, became a celebrity. Defoe probably went to see him in Bristol in 1713, and bought his papers for a trifling sum. Using this material as a basis, Defoe dashed off Robinson Crusoe. The book appeared in 1719, and immediately became a classic. Unfortunately for Defoe, it instantly appeared in several pirated editions, so he made less from it than he might. But he went on to write more novels -
Captain Singleton
,
Moll Flanders
,
Colonel Jack
,
Journal of the Plague Year
and others. By the early 1720s, his credit as a spy had collapsed completely, and he lived mainly from his novels. But these were highly popular - particularly novels of ‘low life’ like
Moll Flanders
, which may well have inspired Osborn to bring out
his Lives of the Notorious Criminals
.

His end was typical. In August 1730, at the age of seventy, he suddenly disappeared. Until recently, the reason has been a mystery, but research has revealed that old debts - his tile factory had gone bankrupt while he was in prison for his dissenters pamphlet - were catching up with him. He could almost certainly have paid them off with the money from his novels. Instead, he preferred to abscond again. He died in the April of the following year in an obscure lodging house, not far from the spot where he was born.

For us, Defoe is a figure of symbolic importance. Shaw remarked that we judge the artist by his highest moments, the criminal by his lowest. It is rare to find a man who combines elements of both, and it enables us to see clearly the relationship between these two elements in human nature itself.

As a human being, Defoe was essentially a compromiser, a man who was always on the lookout for short-cuts, who believed that it is impossible to prosper in this world unless you cheat - in short, a crook. Yet we only have to look at his career to see that he was totally mistaken. Like all crooks, he suffered from a peculiar form of stupidity that made him unaware that bending the rules is not the best way of achieving what you want. In creating the secret service Defoe undoubtedly thought he was being brilliantly Machiavellian, placing his natural immorality at the service of his craving for security and influence. In fact, he gained neither security nor influence; he merely placed himself at the mercy of the political weather. His eventual downfall - after the Mist affair - strikes us as completely inevitable, the obligatory third-act downfall of any comedy villain. (It seems odd how often the lives of criminals seem to follow the pattern of a morality play - until we recognise that this is not divine retribution but the inevitable consequence of stupidity.)

What Defoe
did
possess was a certain wry honesty about his own dishonesty. This probably explains why
Moll Flanders
- the story of a woman with no principles - is his best novel; like Moll, Defoe was an honest whore. And it is
this
element in Defoe that made him a great novelist, and led to the only real success he ever achieved. He gained security only when he made honest use of his writing talent, without any attempt to be Machiavellian.

So in Defoe we can see with exceptional clarity the two great opposing tendencies of human nature which are also the two main currents of human history: crime and creativity, violence and intelligence, expediency and integrity. We can also see that the real objection to crime is that it is basically a mistake, a miscalculation. It is, quite simply, the wrong way of going about the business of survival. If dishonesty achieves its immediate aims, it does so at the cost of a long-term self-undermining.

The irony about Defoe is that his core of honesty - the instinctive honesty of the artist - not only brought him his only real success, but changed the direction of European culture. We could say that Defoe’s career symbolises the conflict between the outer and the inner man, the personality and the soul. His dubious personal morality died with him; his artistic integrity went marching on, and created a revolution whose importance it would be impossible to underestimate. This is why we must now consider it in some detail.

Robinson Crusoe
was not, of course, quite the first novel - possibly the
Morte d’Arthur
deserves that title; and there had been many others, from Sidney’s
Arcadia
to
Don Quixote
and Lesage’s
Gil
Bias
. But most of these works would be described as sophisticated fairy stories, relying almost wholly on fantastic plots to hold the reader’s interest.

By contrast,
Robinson Crusoe
is a sustained flight of imagination. When Crusoe struggles ashore, then builds a raft and removes food, ammunition and wine from the wrecked ship and constructs a tent of sailcloth, the reader is there on the island with him.
Robinson Crusoe
is a long book, and the story is extremely simple. But no one objects to the slowness of the narrative because the reader’s time scale has changed. Crusoe has been there for twenty-four years before he finds the footprint of Man Friday. Why did Defoe extend Selkirk’s five years to decades? Because he had become so fascinated by his own narrative that he felt it would be a pity to shorten it. Unlike earlier novels, unlike
Don Quixote
and
Gil Bias
,
Robinson Crusoe
is one single sustained narrative, like a flight from London to New York.

In the history of European culture,
Robinson Crusoe
is perhaps the most important single event since Thespis invented the Greek drama in the sixth century B.C. Like the drama, it was a kind of magic carpet, making human beings aware that life is
not
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, that the material reality around us is not the only reality. All animals feel themselves to be at the mercy of the material world, so that when serious problems arise, they are inclined to run away or surrender. Human beings have emerged from the purely animal stage far too recently not to be victims of this instinctive assumption. The result is that we habitually underestimate ourselves and our strength. But when a man can explore a desert island without leaving his armchair, when he can charge into battle without risking his life, when he can cross Africa - in company with Defo’s Captain Singleton - without fatigue or thirst, then he also begins to experience a new courage to face his own problems. More: he begins to experience a desire to explore the unknown. Defoe enabled his middle-class reader to share the excitement of Columbus and Magellan, of Galileo and Newton. He revealed that human beings do not have to be limited by the narrowness of their physical experience.

Three years after
Robinson Crusoe
there appeared his novel of ‘low life’,
Moll Flanders
. It was certainly read by a London printer and publisher named Samuel Richardson, who had been apprenticed to the trade since he was seventeen. Now in his early thirties, Richardson enjoyed doing a little scribbling in his spare time; but he was too busy making himself a fortune to take it seriously. Like many others, he must have been impressed, perhaps a little shocked, by Moll’s frank description of her seduction. The seed lay dormant for almost twenty years; then, when he had reached the age of fifty and had more spare time, a publisher asked him to write a Teach Yourself book on the art of correspondence. Richardson decided to give his ‘familiar letters’ a moral flavour: he composed letters from deserted women to their unfaithful lovers, from anxious fathers to daughters living in London, and letters of advice to pretty girls who were engaged as maidservants. Suddenly, he found himself carried away by a flood of creation: the letters began to pour out from him. At this point, he recalled a story he had once heard of a virtuous servant girl who had resisted her master’s attempts at seduction and ended by marrying him. It was too good an idea to waste on a few familiar letters; he turned it into a separate novel called
Pamela
. It poured out so fast that he had written two hundred thousand words - twice the length of the average novel - in two months.

Pamela
came out in November 1740. It was an instantaneous success, sweeping across England and to the Continent in a matter of months. It tells the story of an attractive servant girl whose mistress dies; her master, Mr B, tells Pamela she can remain in the house in charge of the linen. Then he begins his attempts to seduce her. In one scene he leaps out of a cupboard just as she has got undressed and throws her on the bed - here the debt to Defoe seems evident. Pamela is saved by the entrance of the housekeeper. Then Mr B sends her to a country house and places her in charge of a procuress; next time he tries to rape her, the procuress holds her hands; but Pamela goes into convulsions and he gives up again. Nothing like this had ever appeared before. Under the guise of a moral tale, Richardson was writing something very like pornography. But pornography itself was quite unknown in 1740; it was invented five years later when a poverty-stricken young man named John Cleland dashed off a novel of seduction called
Fanny Hill
to get himself out of debt. It was true that Pamela moved at a snail’s pace - Dr Johnson remarked that ‘If you were to read Richardson for the story your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself.’ But people were not reading it for the story. They were reading it to
enter the world
of a girl who is in constant danger of being raped. (And in parts of England they rang the church bells when the last part appeared and it became clear that Pamela had retained her virtue to the altar.) Like
Robinson Crusoe
, the novel had the effect of transforming the reader’s time scale, so that he left behind the world of everyday necessities and entered the world of imagination. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Richardson had invented the literary equivalent of the religious experience, a kind of secular nirvana. In fact, before
Pamela
, the most popular literary fare was volumes of sermons, and this was because a sermon can have this effect of suspending the reader above his own life to contemplate the business of living from a bird’s eye view.
Pamela
did it far more efficiently and dramatically, and volumes of sermons quickly became a drug on the market.

Richardson followed up
Pamela
with
Clarissa
, and revealed his insight into the reasons for
Pamela
’s success by making the new novel another long-drawn-out study in seduction; this time the heroine is raped, and dies of shame and humiliation. It was twice as long as
Pamela
, and became even more popular. Once again, clergymen praised the novel from the pulpit for its moral perception, while readers experienced strangely mixed sensations of pity, indignation and erotic excitement.

In 1760 there appeared in Paris a novel called
Julie, or the New Héloise
that achieved a success that made even that of
Pamela
seem trifling by comparison. Public lending libraries - which had sprung up in the past twenty years - hired it out by the
hour
. The philosopher Kant, who took the same walk every day so punctually that local residents could set their watches by him, forgot to go out on the day he read
The New Héloise
.

The author was a Swiss vagabond named Jean Jacques Rousseau, who had fallen in love with a countess who rejected him, and who sublimated his misery in the novel.
The New Héloise
is the story of a handsome young man named Saint-Preux, who is hired as a tutor to two young girls. He falls in love with one of them - Julie - and goes away to place himself beyond temptation. But Julie’s father is so pleased with her progress that he recalls him. One night, Julie admits him to her bedroom, and they become lovers. But the ending is moral; Julie dies in an accident, after marrying the man of her father’s choice, and Saint-Preux devotes his life to becoming the tutor of her children.

What made the book a sensation, of course, was the episode of the seduction - and Rousseau’s argument that if a couple are in love, they have a right to consummate it in defiance of social conventions. In fact,
The New Héloise
, like
Pamela
and
Clarissa
, was taking advantage of the enormous sexual frustration that existed everywhere in the eighteenth century. How did this frustration come about? It is true, of course, that sexual frustration is inherent in the nature of society, since social beings are obliged to restrain their desires. But in the age of Boccaccio or Malory, it was taken as natural that a couple should have sexual intercourse if they fell in love. Shakespeare and his contemporaries also took it for granted. Then came the change in the ‘rules of the game’. Society became more stable because it
had
to become more stable. The old chaos could no longer be tolerated in this world of increasingly powerful nations: the England of Cromwell, the France of Louis XIV, the Spain of Charles II, the Prussia of Frederick William - and later of Frederick the Great - the Russia of Peter the Great, the Sweden of Charles XII. These changes were reflected in English Puritanism, in German Lutheranism, in French Protestantism - with its roots in Calvinism. The foundation of the Bow Street Runners in 1750 is symbolic; society had to learn to become more orderly.