The Storm Read Online

But the damage caused by these late November gales was only a taste of what was just about to come in from the west: an entirely separate cyclonic system, a severe storm depression which almost certainly originated in the West Indies or off the coast of Florida, was rapidly making its way over the Atlantic. It would take three or four days for it to arrive in Britain from the coast of North America, but when it did, late on Friday night, 26 November, it would proceed to make its presence felt as it battered its way through the darkness in an east-north-easterly direction.

It was only when the sun rose on the morning of the 27th that the scale of the devastation became apparent. When Defoe, who hadn’t slept all night, ventured outside to inspect ‘the Havock the Storm had made’, he could hardly believe his eyes. He saw ‘the Streets covered with Tyle-sherds, and Heaps of Rubbish, from the Tops of the Houses, lying almost at every Door’, while ‘the Distraction and Fury of the Night was visible in the Faces of the People’ themselves (p. 33). London looked and felt, as many observers noted at the time, like a city in the aftermath of battle; a scene, as it quickly became apparent, that had been repeated throughout the rest of southern Britain. Defoe realized that this was something to which he, as a leading journalist and pamphleteer, would have to give serious attention, and as he walked through the London streets that morning, inspecting the damage and interviewing his neighbours on their own experiences of the night, he began to take the detailed notes that would lead to the writing of what became his first book: The Storm.

As his first full-length work, The Storm can be seen as a significant episode in Defoe’s literary career. He had, over the previous decade, produced some forty or so political and satirical poems and tracts, some of which, like The True-Born Englishman (1701), would prove enduringly popular in his lifetime. But as his first full-length experiment in narrative technique, as well as a move away from the outright polemic of his early works, The Storm marked a new departure in his writing career.

Many of the lessons learned during its months of composition would prove invaluable during the writing of his later and better-known novels, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), not just in his skilled handling of complex structures of space and time, and in his use of varied voices and multiple points of view, but in the unfolding sense of a shared moment of intense historical import. It was as if Defoe had suddenly discovered, amid the trials and losses of his storm-struck neighbours, the two great themes-collective suffering and individual survival-which he would go on to develop as his own.

In fact the storm made such an impression on Defoe that he ended up writing three separate and stylistically distinct pieces in reaction to it, all of which are reproduced in this volume: The Storm, The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm and An Essay on the Late Storm (all 1704). Taken together, the three pieces offer a valuable insight into the apparently contradictory ways in which Defoe reacted to events in both public and private life. It is impossible to know the exact order in which the pieces were started and finished, since Defoe made a habit of working on a number of projects simultaneously, moving between them whenever he alighted upon a suitable idea or phrase, but we know that Defoe began to work on The Storm in the days immediately following the event, and we can assume that he composed the other two pieces alongside it. The satirical Lay-Man’s Sermon was the first of the pieces to be published, appearing in the second week of February 1704, while The Storm and the poetic Essay on the Late Storm both appeared later on in the summer, by which time most of the physical damage caused by the storm had been repaired. But the memory of the night and its aftermath remained, and, as we will go on to see later in the introduction, Defoe was to make the most of what turned out to be a source of powerful and suggestive imagery.

In every other respect, however, 1703 was a terrible year for Defoe. He had had to spend the first five months of it in hiding, on the move from one safe house to another in and around London and the south of England, and possibly even spending some time in Holland, since a search was conducted for him there. His crime was to have published a satirical pamphlet, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), which purported to have been written by an apoplectic High-Church Tory minister who proposed that the only sensible recourse for the security of Britain was to do to the Dissenters what Louis XIV had recently done to the Protestant Huguenots of France, that is, get rid of them through massacre and exile. ‘They are to be rooted out of this nation, if ever we will live in peace,’ wrote Defoe’s anonymous High Church minister, a view with which many of his High-flying readers would happily have agreed.4 The mysterious authorship of The Shortest-Way became a public controversy during the last weeks of 1702, but when the sermon was revealed to have been a mischievous hoax, in that it had been written not by an overheated Anglican clergyman but by Daniel Defoe, a well-known Dissenter and political friend of the recently dead King William III, a warrant for his arrest on the charge of ‘high crime and misdemeanour’ was promptly served by the government. ‘The Plot is discovered,’ the editor of one London newspaper smirked on 30 December 1702; ‘’Twas a pretty Sham enough’.5 But Defoe was now in serious trouble, for it seemed that the sham, whatever its intentions, had grossly insulted the new Queen, Anne, who had read the mock sermon, and was now taking a personal interest in seeing its author punished. Knowing the likely penalties that lay in store for him, Defoe decided to run; not because he imagined that he would never be caught, but to give himself time to negotiate with his enemies in an attempt to defuse their anger.

Defoe was right to be anxious. The sudden death of his patron and employer William III on 8 March 1702 had left Defoe exposed to the resentment of the new administration under Anne. Defoe had devoted much of his time to writing pamphlets and poems in praise of William and his policies of toleration towards the Dissenters, but some of these had included personal attacks on a number of High-Church Tory politicians who now enjoyed influence within the government. They were keen for the slightest excuse to get even with the author of satires such as The True-Born Englishman (1701) or Reformation of Manners (1702), the latter of which had poured public scorn on the very judges in front of whom Defoe would soon be standing. He knew that they were unlikely to be lenient, and that the kinds of punishment they might well recommend included whipping, branding, pillorying and imprisonment. Only a few months earlier another Dissenting author, William Fuller, had been found guilty of seditious libel and was pilloried for three days, given thirty-nine lashes and committed to prison with hard labour.

Of all these punishments the pillory was the worst and most feared. The prisoner was made to stand on a platform, usually in a market square or other public place, with his head and hands locked in an upright wooden stocks. There he stood, usually for an hour or two on a series of consecutive days, suffering whatever the assembled crowd of onlookers cared to throw, whether rotten fruit, animal waste, cobblestones or bricks. Pilloried prisoners often died from their injuries, and William Fuller had only barely escaped with his life, having nearly choked to death after he slipped from the stool on which he was standing. As it was, he suffered a broken leg and a fractured skull, as well as the humiliation of his exposure to a crowd that had taken evident pleasure in his downfall. Defoe, who worried that he was ‘Unfitt to bear the hardships of a Prison’, thought that he might be able to strike some kind of bargain with his pursuers and thus avoid the worst of their hostility.6 So he ran for cover to give himself time, and the hunt for the satirist was on.

The first arrests to be made in the search for Defoe were of George Croome, the printer of The Shortest-Way, and Edward Bellamy, a known agent of Whig propaganda, who admitted that he had been responsible for supplying Croome with the manuscript, and confirmed that Defoe was its author. A few days later, an advertisement appeared in the London Gazette for 7-11 January 1703, offering a £50 reward for information leading to the arrest of ‘Daniel de Fooe’.