His financial situation, however, remained a particular source of worry, both for him and for his wife Mary, whose £3,700 dowry he had squandered within a few years of their marriage in 1684. Defoe’s first bankruptcy had come in 1692, when a series of ill-judged investments collapsed, leaving him £17,000 in debt. Since then he had slowly begun to pay back his creditors, with a successful brick and pantile works at Tilbury, Essex, being his main source of income since he established it, in 1694, with money given to him by his patron William III. The works had done well, supplying the London building boom with highquality materials, and some of Defoe’s bricks were used in the construction of Sir Christopher Wren’s great Naval Hospital at Greenwich, while the s-shaped roofing pantiles were used so widely on the hundreds of Nonconformist chapels and meeting houses that were built during the reign of William III that Dissenters became known as ‘Pantilers’.18 Defoe had made an annual profit of around £600 from the Tilbury works, which he put towards paying back some of what he owed, but his flight and imprisonment in 1703 led to the inevitable collapse of his business and to his second experience of bankruptcy. Every day in prison, as Robert Harley was well aware, Defoe’s debts and money worries increased, and he was later to describe the moment when a merchant is declared officially bankrupt, which happened to him while he was still in Newgate, as like being ‘mortally stabb’d, or, as we may say, shot thro’ the head in his trading capacity’.19

The timing of the November storm added insult to injury, for had it come just a few months earlier, when his tile business was still a going concern, Defoe would have made a fortune overnight. As he pointed out in The Storm, the price of tiles rose ‘from 2Is. per Thousand to 6 l. for plain Tiles; and from 5os. per Thousand for Pantiles, to 10 l. and Bricklayers Labour to 5s. per Day’ (p. 57). Although the prices soon came down, tiles remained in high demand, and Defoe knew that had he still been in the roof-tiling business, he would have been in a position to pay off all his debts within a few weeks of the storm. As it was, he had to suffer the success of his old business rivals, and read advertisements such as this one, from the Daily Courant for 24 December 1703:

This is to give Notice to all Persons who may have occasion for good new well burnt plain Tyles, that they may be supply’d with what quantity they want at 3 l. 5 s. per Thousand, at Mr. Harveys’ a Timber Merchant’s Yard near Puddle-Dock. Likewise good Pan-Tyles to be sold for 6 l. per Thousand.

It reads like a scene from one of his later novels, in which the fear of debt and failure haunts the narrators, whose economic fates are meted out with calm Presbyterian irony. ‘’Tis an ill Wind that blows no Body good,’ wrote one of his contemporaries on 29 November, ‘but I’m sure both Tilers and Bricklayers will be much the better for this Storm.’20 To think what he might have done with such a windfall! But Defoe always wrote more compellingly of loss than of gain, and it is here, in The Storm, that he draws closest to its source, where the relationship between shared disaster and private ruin is evident on almost every page.

The storm, for Defoe, is the third in the trinity of disasters which struck the capital city in his lifetime, and he wrote more than once about each of them in the course of his writing career. London, ‘the monster city’ in the words of the historian Jack Lindsay, is presented by Defoe as a carefully delineated geography of suffering, both collective, as in the case of plague, fire and storm, and personal, as in the case of bankruptcy, prison and pillory.21 The London of a A Journal of the Plague Year, for example, like the London of The Storm, is filled with scenes of private suffering played out against a backdrop of public calamity, with the narrators of both books seen walking through the disordered streets, collecting evidence and offering reflections on the causes and the consequences of the tragedies. Both narrators act as implicated observers, giving details of their own first-hand experiences as well as quoting from material written and collected by others. The Bills of Mortality, the weekly printed lists of deaths supplied by every parish, are reproduced in both books as a kind of recurring motif of loss, as well as an assessment of the gravity of the unfolding situations. Letters, diaries and cuttings from newspapers and journals are flourished throughout the narratives like exhibits at a trial. Even though A Journal of the Plague Year is a work of historical fiction, whereas The Storm is a work of contemporary reportage, Defoe’s approach to the narrative structure is the same in both cases: a calm accumulation of facts and circumstances is built up into a body of evidence, which is then used variously to set the scene, to explain and interpret the action, and to offer subjects for conjecture to the reader. It is perhaps the chief characteristic of Defoe’s unmistakable style, regardless of the particular genre in which any of his works might be cast. His narrative instinct, both as a journalist and a novelist, lay in his development of a form of circumstantial realism, the effectiveness of which relied not so much on his powers of description as on the force of the submitted evidence.22

There is a much-admired passage in an early scene of Robinson Crusoe, for example, when Crusoe remembers his shipmates who were drowned when their vessel was broken on a sandbank during a storm off the coast of Venezuela: ‘as for them,’ he writes, ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows’.23 Even in list form such details carry all the emotion and loss of the moment more effectively, perhaps, than would a lengthy description of the drownings, and it is in such passages, with their privileging of evidence over description, that Defoe demonstrates some of his true greatness as a writer. Similar touches occur throughout The Storm, too, such as the detail of roof tiles which he saw ‘blown from a House above thirty or forty Yards, and stuck from five to eight Inches into the solid Earth’ (p. 31), or of the lead from church roofs ‘roll’d up like a Roll of Parchment, and blown in some Places clear off from the Buildings’ (p. 60). These images, and others like them, such as the ship blown from the Thames to the coast of Norway (p. 143), or the burning windmills, on fire from the friction of their whirling sails (p. 108), stand out from their surrounding texts as ‘speaking sights’, a concept which Defoe first introduced in The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm, when he suggested that ‘in publick Callamities, every Circumstance is a Sermon, and every thing we see a Preacher’ (p. 186). He developed this idea further in A Journal of the Plague Year, when he has a sexton tell the narrator, who is seeking permission to view a mass burial pit at Whitechapel: ‘depend upon it, ’twill be a Sermon to you, it may be, the best that ever you heard in your Life. ’Tis a speaking Sight, says he, and has a Voice with it, and a loud one, to call us all to Repentance.’24

This conviction, that ‘every Circumstance is a Sermon, and every thing we see a Preacher’, is what lies behind Defoe’s reliance upon eyewitness descriptions as his guarantee of narrative authenticity. Around sixty of the letters that were submitted in response to the newspaper advertisements in the London Gazette are included in The Storm, and their appearance undoubtedly heightens the sense of immediacy and crisis which so characterizes the atmosphere of the book.