Institute for Space Systems Operations * 2001 Annual Report * 101-105

The Man in the Moon-An International Debate in Defoe Studies

Irving N. Rothman, Ph.D., Professor, Department of English, University of Houston

Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719), was one of the most prolific writers in the history of English literature. His most renowned work, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was so successful that he immediately published a sequel in the same year entitled The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life (1719). That second volume garnered such heavy readership that the next year he published Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World (1720). The first volume appeared in publication in seven separate editions during Defoe's lifetime with two distinctively different third editions and two different fourth editions. His second volume was also popular and ran to five editions during his lifetime.

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of The Consolidator (1705), which describes a voyage to the Moon, with reports of lunar behavior in science, economics, political wars, and religion.

In all, according to his last major bibliographer John Robert Moore,¹ Defoe published 547 works and more poetry than John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. However, the size of the Defoe canon has been contested in recent years by two British scholars of the Open University, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens whose Critical Bibliography (1998)² reduced the Defoe canon to 276 items, half the Moore attribution.³ They claim that much work published anonymously and previously assigned to Defoe has no basis for attribution. They forgot, however, that most of Defoe's important works, of which no one denies his authorship, were published anonymously, among them An Essay on Projects (1697), devoted to economics; The Consolidator (l705), a satire on English public life; The Family Instructor (1715, 1718), a defense of the worship of the Protestant dissenters; the Robinson Crusoe volumes (1719, 1720), a merchant shipwrecked on a deserted island; Moll Flanders (1722), a woman who survives poverty; Roxana (1724), a scheming woman who is the alleged murderer of her own daughter; The Political History of the Devil (1726), a satire on human hypocrisy; and Conjugal Lewdness (1726), a treatise seeking the liberalization of divorce laws.

Dr. Maximillian E. Novak (UCLA) initiated the debate.⁴ Dr. Irving N. Rothman entered the international debate when he noted that 54 of the works de-attributed by the British scholars (i.e., removed from the canon) had been verified as Defoe's works by the Swedish scholar Stieg Hargevik in a 1974 stylometric study conducted without the use of computers. Furbank and Owens had ignored the study because they place no faith in stylometrics or computer-based analysis of writing style. Prof. Hargevik had spent six years on the study in writing his doctoral dissertation.⁵ When it became apparent that the Furbank and Owens were basing their opinion primarily on their subjective opinion of Defoe's writing style and disclaiming the evidence of scientific and analytical investigation, Dr. Rothman contested their results in an article in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (2000).⁶ He has since been joined by Dr. Rakesh Verma, associate professor of computer sciences at the University of Houston, and Dr. Thomas Woodell, associate professor of English and linguistics (ret.), in pursuing a computer-based stylometric study of Defoe's style initiated under a 2000-2001 GEAR award (Grant to Enhance Advanced Research), provided by the Office of Research. Outside consultants include Dr. Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann, director of the English/American Institute at the University of Goettingen and a Defoe scholar.

Stylometric study is continuing at the University of Houston to translate the Hargevik criteria into computer-aided analysis.

The Man in the Moon
A feature of the debate that may prove significant in point of proof is the myth of the "Man in the Moon." In 1705, Daniel Defoe published The Consolidator, a satire on English politics. In that work, an inventor ascends to the Moon in a flying machine . From his perspective on the Moon, the traveller comments upon politics, religion, and trade. On the moon, political events focus upon the King of Gallunaria (France) and the Crown of Ebronia (Spain). The religious wars show the Antepredestinarians' opposing the Universal Soulians. In this work, the Solunarians represent the Anglican Church; the Cronians are members of the Protestant faith who dissent from mandated Anglican ritual. The Consolidator includes letters signed "The Man in the Moon." Because Defoe is the incontestable author of this work, letters signed "The Man in the Moon" provide proof that Defoe on this occasion had adopted the "Man in the Moon" as a narrative persona. His contemporaries associated Defoe, himself, on at least on known occasion, with the "Man in the Moon."

FLIGHT-The flying machine of Bartolomao de Gusmao (1709) illustrates universal interest in extraterrestrial flight, in The Consolidator. The Stoke Newington Defoe Edition. 1697; N. Y.: AMS Press, Inc., 2001, p. 18.

By himself, Defoe produced his periodical The Review Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday from 1704-1713. The work contains many episodes in which the narrator (Defoe) has himself flown to the Moon to observe from that vantage point the affairs of men on Earth. One example in The Review of Thursday, January 11, has him criticize the human condition: "the last time I was up in the Lunar Regions, and Travell'd to that well known World in the Moon, I could not refrain, when I came to a certain height, to stop, and look back upon this Contemptible Thing call'd the Earth. . . . having furnish'd my self . . . with certain Wonderful Optick Glasses [telescopes], such as were perhaps never heard of on this side the Moon; I had, by them, the Advantage of seeing into Cabals, Cabinets, Congresses, Private and Publick Assemblies, Counsels of State, Counsels of War, Counsels of Men, and Counsels of Devils-."⁷

Following their theory of de-attribution, Furbank and Owens removed from the canon a work entitled An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and Ennobling Foreigners is a Treasonous Conspiracy Against the Constitution, Dangerous to the Kingdom, an Affront to the Nobility of Scotland in Particular, and Dishonourable to the Peerage of Britain in General (1717). Furbank and Owens point out that a contemporary of Defoe's had claimed that Defoe "was no more Author of this Book than the Man in the Moon . . . ."⁸ The irony of the statement is that Defoe is the incontrovertible author of The Consolidator (1705), which includes in its sub-title the addendum, "Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon." Publication of The Consolidator was followed immediately in 1705 by three tracts that utilized "Man in the Moon" terminology, one of which is signed "The Man in the Moon." All were excerpted from The Consolidator. One of those pamphlets is entitled A Letter from the Man in the Moon. Because Defoe is the undisputed author of The Consolidator and the pamphlets are excerpts from that work, the ironical joke would lie in the repudiation of Defoe's authorship when, in fact, Defoe's authorship had been confirmed by this circumlocution. Thus, Abel Boyer's assertion that no one but the Man in the Moon could have written the piece is a coded ascription to Defoe who had in The Consolidator assumed the identity of the "Man in the Moon." Profs. Furbank and Owens missed the point. In this assessment and in their de-attribution of items on a subjective basis, their studies are premature and seem unproven.

History
The history of lunar literature has long been documented. In 1948, Marjorie Nicolson published Voyages to the Moon where she identified classical and modern works treating man's literary aspirations to reach the moon.⁸ Among the ideas discussed is the "Consolidator engine," which was based upon Robert Boyle's air and heat experiments. Bishop Wilkins' Mathematical Magic (1648) had considered the theoretical possibility of a vehicle that could rise into the firmament through some inner structure, "some lamp, or other fire within it, which might produce such a formidable rarefaction, as should give a motion to the whole frame."¹⁰

Literature on moon travel was satirical. Characters of the moon and humans who somehow thought they had landed on the moon were given the opportunity to assess-and critique-the behavior of human beings. For example, the novelist and playwright Aphra Behn produced the popular comedy The Emperor in the Moon (1687),¹¹ begun before the death of Charles II in 1685, which showed the influence of Lucian's Dialogue of Icaromenippus in which Menippus narrates his transport to the moon. Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moon (1620), and Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique ou Voyage dans la Lune (1650) were widely read in their time.

One of the premier works in this panoply of moon literature is Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator, published March 26, 1705, a full-length satire on English politics, religion, commerce, and social customs.¹² The satire was so pointed that at one time Defoe thought he might be arrested and charged with treason for literary attacks upon the government. The Consolidator has the unique characteristic of featuring letters from the "Man in the Moon" whose comments upon earthly life focus upon the target of attack.

Throughout the eighteenth century, satirists drew large bodies of material from the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions such that even the most theoretical experiments become the source of narrative exposition. Translated from the laboratory into the judgment and affairs of mankind, scientific projects helped measure the state of the mind and judge the state of the government. Whether or not one was concerned with tidal flux or lunar gravity, the satirist could find in the experiments of Halley and Newton descriptions that tested one's credulity and demonstrated the author's loss of reason. Defoe's The Consolidator, published March 26, 1705, employs scientific discovery and mechanical invention in satirizing the government, contemporary politics, and religious divisiveness.

The narrator of the text discovers in the far east a lunar vehicle that will transport him. It is a fanciful machine composed of a chariot body set upon "two vast Bodies of extended Wings . . . compos'd of Feathers" but a body made of "Lunar Earth" that can be motivated with an "ambient Flame," much as modern rockets are fueled with propellant and flown into space. The engine is flown, but only after unsuccessful attempts and early disasters requiring reconstruction and repair.

BALLOONS-Franceso Lana-Terzi's plan for a flying machine, from Prodromo ouero saggio di alcune inuentione nuoue premesso all'maesta (1670), in The Consolidator, Stoke Newington Edition. 1705; N. Y.: AMS Press, Inc., 2001; p. 16.

A successful flight lands the narrator on the Moon where he meets a "Man in the Moon" with whom he becomes conversant. Discussions include the identification of diverse experimenters drawn from the Transactions, but also discussions in Lunarian language, utilizing unique optical glasses, capable of discerning the nature of politics and religious conflict in the earth below- "Partition treaties damned . . . confederacies without allies, . . . princes without armies, armies without men, and men without money, crowns without kings, kings without subjects, more kings than countries, and more countries than were worth fighting for." These glasses are characterized as horoscopes, microscopes, telescopes, caeliscopes, money-scopes, and indescribable optical devices to help Moon-blind men understand actual circumstances, after wandering through "bogs and wildernesses of guess, conjectures, supposes, and calculations . . . in physics, politics, ethics, astronomy, mathematics, and such sort of bewildering things." These descriptions of optical devices, based upon contemporary scientific investigation, with fantastic possibilities for identifying the truth of public and government acts, become the stock of the author's satirical thrust.

The satire on religious conflicts offers an example of the text. The Abrogratzian religion, i.e., the primary religion, suffers the delusion of the Solunarian Clergy who, pretending submissiveness, actually seek to wield influence and overpower the Abrogratzians. References to the Anglican clergy and the Calvinist rulers of the Commonwealth are self-evident to students of the period.

After publication of The Consolidator, Defoe published three extracts from the work as "A Journey to the World in the Moon," "A Letter from the Man in the Moon," and "A Second and More Strange Voyage to the World in the Moon; Containing a Comical Description of That Remarkable Country, with Characters and Humours of the Inhabitants." The study of The Consolidator with publication of its lunar extracts reveals the satire of earth-bound conduct. The text clearly demonstrates Daniel Defoe's awareness of contemporary scientific research.

Years later, Thomas Gordon was to address this variety of themes in his preface to The Humorist, a collection of essays on diverse subjects.¹³ In his preface addressed "To the Man in the Moon," Gordon, who objects to a standing army, offers the nation's military to the Man in the Moon:

You shall have Soldiers and Sailors, Ships and Arms; keep them as long as you will, 'till your Business is done, and all at our proper Cost and Charges. Make them Fight for you, or Cruise for you, or Transport for you, or what you please: They are at your Service and Command,. Provided, nevertheless, that when our Fleets are decay'd or lost, and our Men are knock'd on the Head, you send them all back again safe and sound to us."¹⁴

Gordon, himself a Protestant dissenter and a radical Whig, attacks the zealots of the state church who have sought to prevent worship other than rituals adopted by High Church Anglicans. He attributes this fury to the types of lunacy, associated with the Moon:

The ardent Zeal of her orthodox Sons, is, without Peradventure, all of your own begetting. Without an Inspiration from you, they could never have seen her Danger, nor contended with such devout Rage for her Relief out of it. You, Sir, prompted, and they preach'd, and the People catch'd your Spirit from their Mouth. Thus full of Lunacy and Zeal, these holy Men and the rest of the Mob, when once a Parading and Murdering, and Demolishing, for the Welfare of the Church."¹⁵ (xxvi).

Gordon was the editor of The London Journal when Defoe's son Benjamin chose to forego the law and, instead, determined to pursue a career in political journalism by writing for that periodical.

Future Studies
Dr. Rothman, Department of English, and Dr. Verma, associate professor of computer sciences, are currently seeking institutional funding to sustain computer-based stylometric study of the works of Daniel Defoe and his contemporaries.

The Stoke Newington Edition of the Works of Daniel Defoe is being published by AMS Press, Inc., which has been publishing scholarly works of the eighteenth century since 1886. Partners in this effort are Dr. Maximillian E. Novak (UCLA), Dr. Manuel Schonhorn (Southern Illinois University, ret.) Dr. Jim Springer Borck (LSU), and Dr. John G. Peters (University of North Texas).

References
¹J. R. Moore. A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe. Second Edition. 1960; Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, an imprint of The Shoe String Press, Inc., 1971. 281pp.
²P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998. 319pp.
³P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore's Checklist. London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1994. 161pp.
⁴M. E. Novak. "The Defoe Canon: Attribution and De-Attribution," Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1997): 189-207.
⁵S. Hargevik. The Disputed Assignment of Memoirs of an English Officer to Daniel Defoe. Parts I and II. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in English xxx. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1974. Part I, 144-45.
⁶I. N. Rothman. "Defoe De-Attributions Scrutinized under Hargevik Criteria: Applying Stylometrics to the Canon," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94 (2000): 375-98.
⁷A Review of the State of the British Nation 7.125 (11 Jan. 1711): 498). In Defoe's Review: Reproduced from the Original Editions, with an Introduction and Bibliographical Notes by Arthur Wellesley Secord. Facsimile book l8 (Sept. 23, 1710, to March 22, 1711), Edinburgh No. 35 of Vol. VII. New York: Columbia University Press, published for the Facsimile Text Society, 1938.
⁸Furbank and Owens, Defoe De-Attributions, 95-96.
⁹M. H. Nicolson. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1948. 185-86.
¹⁰Nicolson, 185-86, 193.
¹¹A. Behn. "The Emperor of the Moon," in The Works of Aphra Behn. Ed. J. Todd. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996. 7: 154.
¹²Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator. Ed. M. Seidel, M. E. Novak, and J. D. Kennedy. The Stoke Newington Defoe Edition. General Editors, J. S. Borck, I. N. Rothman, M. Schonhorn, and M. E. Novak; Assoc. Gen. Ed., J. G. Peters, New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2001. 181.
¹³T. Gordon, The Humorist: Being Essays upon Several Subjects, viz., News-Writers, Enthusiasm, the Spleen, Country Entertainment, Love, The History of Mist's Manage., Ambition and Pride, Idleness, Fickleness of Human Nature, Prejudice, Witchcraft, Ghosts and Apparitions, the Weather, Female Disguise, the Art of Modern Conversation, the Use of Speech, the Punishment of Staying at home on Sunday, &, Criticism, Art of Begging, Anger, Avarice, Death, Grief, Keeping the Ten Commandments, Travel Misapply'd, Flattery, the Abuse of Words, Credulity, Eating, the Love of Power, the Expedients to Get Rid of Time, Retirement, the Story of Will. Hackett the Enthusiast, With a Dedication to the Man in the Moon. . . . London, Printed for W. Boreham at the Angel in Pater-noster Row (1720). Note Marie McMahnon, The Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Lanham, Md.: U Presses of America, 1990). Details about Gordon may be found in M. E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, His Life and Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 595, 597-98.
¹⁴Gordon, xii.
¹⁵Gordon, xxvi.

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Institute for Space Systems Operations - 2001 Annual Report
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