An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions by Daniel Defoe

Abstract

32 where he felt it should go—on the English ministers who had preceded Bute and created a situation from which the nation was extricated only with considerable difficulty . I should not conclude the review without calling attention to the warm tribute to Professor Boucé written by Serge Soupel. Melvyn New University of Florida DANIEL DEFOE. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, ed. Kit Kincade. The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. New York: AMS, 2007. Pp. cii ⫹ 463. $158.50. Eighteenth-century scholars these days enjoy an embarrassment of riches when it comes to editions of Defoe’s works. In the wake of the dustup over the Defoe canon started by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens in 1988, we have not only the large (and wildly expensive) Works supervised by those two but also the Stoke Newington edition overseen by, among others, Maximillian Novak. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions is the fourth volume published in the Stoke Newington edition, and while the History of Apparitions is also available from Pickering & Chatto, it is sold by that firm only as part of a set—one volume in the eight-volume set containing ‘‘satire, fantasy and writings on the supernatural’’—that costs just under $600. So for Defoe scholars who are particularly interested in this important work by him or for libraries that want to augment their Defoe collection in a more modest way than that demanded by Pickering & Chatto, the present volume will be most welcome, not least because of the richly informative scholarly apparatus by Ms. Kincade (and, in respect to the notes, John G. Peters, one of the other General Editors of the Stoke Newington Edition). The History of Apparitions, as it has often been called, is one of three works published in 1726 and 1727 that treat ghosts, magic, dreams, spirits, and the like, a trilogy of sorts that also includes The Political History of the Devil and A System of Magick. These works, mostly collections of anecdotes, display a high degree of skepticism about many stories of spirits that are dismissed as mere superstition or fakery. But they, especially the History of Apparitions, also insist that the spiritual world is real and, indeed, that genuine ‘‘apparitions,’’ as Ms. Kincade puts it, ‘‘were part of the working of God’s Providence.’’ She largely lays out Defoe’s complicated view of such matters through an extended discussion of the views of Hobbes and Joseph Glanvill, showing that Defoe is neither as skeptical as the former nor as credulous as the latter. Ms. Kincade argues that Defoe used three tests in judging such stories: human reason, religious principles, and rhetorical analysis. Considering ‘‘his standards of logic, clarity, and piousness’’ in conjunction with one another, Defoe believed , allowed one to separate the rare authentic account of an apparition from the many inauthentic stories. Such analysis enabled him ‘‘to instruct his readers in what one must know to understand the nature and purpose of supernatural visitations’’ and also ‘‘to judge of apparitions and of discourses on the spectral.’’ Ms. Kincade also provides a thorough discussion of the issue of attribution and 33 well over one hundred pages of notes, textual and explanatory. For some, this apparatus will constitute, to some degree at least, rather too much of a good thing. Since the History of Apparitions has been attributed to Defoe from the eighteenth century onward and Furbank and Owens do not disagree with this attribution, the extended discussion of that issue seems unnecessary. Lengthy footnotes on such items as the Goths, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Jakob Böhme, the Basilica of St. Denis near Paris, Clarendon, and Muhammad, among others, often provide a good deal more information than the reader needs to negotiate Defoe’s text. Still, Ms. Kincade’s care and thoroughness indisputably provide readers with what will undoubtedly be the definitive edition of this work. Welcome as this edition is, this reviewer wishes that the Stoke Newington edition could serve not to duplicate the work of Furbank and Owens (all the AMS titles have also been published in the Pickering & Chatto edition of Defoe’s works), but to supplement...