Studies in Philology

Scholars have shown that apparition stories such as Defoe's "A True Relation" (1706) were popular in his era because they explored and usually affirmed posthumous and supernatural experience despite the era's increasing materialism, which cast doubt upon such experience.¹ To readers, as well as writers like Defoe, the denial of the reality of apparitions meant a rejection of God and the spiritual world and therefore of immortality. As Defoe was to assert in his "Vision of the Angelic World" (1720), those who try to discredit apparitions "persuade themselves there are no spirits at all" and that "there is no God."²

Apparition stories were important not only for religious but also for narrative reasons. According to Michael McKeon, because of their "claim to historicity" and "empirical premise," these stories played an [End Page 384] important role in the genesis of English fiction as well as its readership. They "derive[d] their techniques of authentication from the very strong-hold of skepticism," which they sought to refute.³ Literary techniques in stories like "A True Relation" involve journalistic approaches aimed at creating a sense of realism and persuading the skeptical reader of their truthfulness. Published only ten months after the events it narrates, Defoe's story appears as reportage that blends matters of mystery with sufficient "matter of fact" (a recurrent phrase in the story) and sufficient credibility among its key figures in order to convince readers of its veracity. As a "true relation" the story reflects chief characteristics of that genre, which according to J. Paul Hunter include an attention to the contemporary and the unusual or novel.⁴ Indeed, as Maximillian Novak observes, Defoe's "A True Relation" explores supernatural phenomena in the context of a "larger controversy" over the soul and the afterlife. Regarding this controversy, Novak refers very briefly to "deists and agnostics" such as Toland, Tindal, Hobbes, and Spinoza.⁵ But he neglects, as others do, a more pertinent set of contestants, the specific issues they raised, and their particular relevance to Defoe's story. This essay argues that the public controversy between John Locke and Bishop Edward Stillingfleet concerning personal identity and whether or not it endures from this life to another constitutes the most immediate context of "A True Relation," which deploys elements of realism skillfully in order to convince readers of Defoe's perspective on the controversy. In support of my argument I show the great likelihood that Defoe, as a devout and vigilant Christian, would have known about the Locke-Stillingfleet debate, that the controversy itself was significant and for that reason well-known and long-lasting, and that in his apparition story Defoe addressed the debate's most important issues.

Among the most controversial works in the early eighteenth century, Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) was rejected almost unanimously in pulpit and pamphlet alike because some of his ideas called Christian beliefs into question.⁶ Locke was considered, as [End Page 385] John Yolton observes, "one of the more dangerous . . . writers of the day"⁷ The concepts in the Essay that seemed most threatening to Christianity were those involving the grounds of knowledge and the basis of personal identity. These raised serious concerns such as the danger of materializing the self, undermining its unity, continuity, and capacity for moral responsibility and resurrected life. From the Essay's second edition (1694), in which Locke's theory of personal identity first appeared, to Stillingfleet's Doctrine of the Trinity in 1696, to the published exchanges starting in 1706 between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke, to Joseph Butler's "Of Personal Identity" in 1736, the controversy raised by Lockean ideas remained a significant part of the religious, intellectual, and cultural milieu.⁸

That Defoe must have known of the controversy seems beyond question. In Sir Richard Blackmore's Satyr against Wit (1699), from which Defoe borrowed for his poem The Pacificator (1700), he would have been reminded of Stillingfleet's recent death during the controversy and also how the bishop's "Sacred-Urn" was "prophan'd by the leud Sons of Wit"—those, no...