D

INTRODUCTION

UE Preparations for the Plague, as well for Soul as Body, was published in 1722. Whether it came out before or after the Journal of the Plague Year, which appeared in March of the same year, cannot be definitely said. Though Mr. Lee accidentally omitted the Due Preparations from the catalogue of Defoe's works prefixed to the first volume of his Daniel Defoe, there can be little doubt that the book was from Defoe's pen. It was on a subject which we know, from A Journal of the Plague Year, greatly interested him; and portions of the book deal with incidents mentioned in the better known Journal. Besides, as Mr. Aitken has shown, Due Preparations for the Plague is full of Defoe's mannerisms, both in vocabulary and in narrative method. "Neither- or" is an instance of the former; the use of dialogue in the second part, of the latter. There seems to be no good reason for doubting Defoe's authorship.

1

It is commonly said that Defoe wrote Due Preparations for the Plague for the same purpose as A Journal of the Plague Year, namely to rouse people to take precautions against the plague which had

1 Introduction to Vol. XV., Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, London, 1901.

been raging in Marseilles in 1720 and 1721. That Defoe was actuated somewhat by public-spirited motives in writing his two works on the plague is likely, but it is even likelier that he was led to compose them by his shrewd commercial sense. He was aware that the interest in the Marseilles plague would give them a good sale.

Due Preparations for the Plague reads for the most part like a continuation of the more famous Journal of the Plague Year. Showing what preparations, both spiritual and material, should be made for the disease, by instances cited from the Great Plague, it becomes very much like the Journal in tone, though it is not so evenly interesting. A reader's interest cannot but flag in the second part, when he struggles with the tedious religious cant of the sister who warns her brother to be spiritually ready for the pestilence. In some of the verbose, unnatural conversation here, Defoe appears at his worst. When a reader, however, comes to the story of the sister's taking refuge from the pestilence with her two brothers on a ship which drops down the Thames, his interest revives. And nothing in the Journal itself is better narrative than the story, in the first part of Due Preparations, of the family "in the parish of St. Alban's, Wood Street," who, in order to escape the sickness, lived shut up in their house, without once going out, from the fourteenth of July to the first of December.

Immediately following Due Preparations for the Plague will be found a short history with a very long title, namely:- The Dumb Philosopher: or, Great

Britain's Wonder, containing I. A Faithful and very Surprising Account, how Dickory Cronke, a Tinner's Son, in the County of Cornwall, was born Dumb, and continued so for 58 years; and how, some Days before he Died, he came to his Speech. With Memoirs of his Life, and the manner of his Death. II. A Declaration of his Faith and Principles in Religion: With a Collection of Select Meditations composed in his Retirement. III. His Prophetical Observations upon the Affairs of Europe, more particularly of Great Britain, from 1720 to 1729. The whole extracted from his original Papers, and confirmed by unquestionable authority. To which is annexed, His Elegy, written by a young Cornish Gentleman, of Exeter Coll. in Oxford. With an Epitaph by another Hand.

This curious pamphlet was published in October, 1719, nearly a year and a half after the subject of it, according to Defoe's statement, had died. It is probable that the history was founded on fact. Dickory Cronke was very likely a real man like Duncan Campbell and the criminals whose lives are sketched in the volume which is to follow this. He did not achieve the notoriety of any of these, however. On the contrary, he lived obscurely in Wales or the southwest of England, and his reputation may be supposed to have been purely local. For this reason, unlike his contemporary dumb man, Campbell, who for years was a much visited fortune-teller of the metropolis, Dickory Cronke died unknown to fame. There is no mention of him in either contemporary periodicals or the Dictionary of National Biography; and

in 1901, such a careful student of Defoe as Mr. G. A. Aitken had been unable to get any information about him.

The Elegy and the Epitaph at the end of the history are as likely to have been Defoe's as the work of "a young Cornish Gentleman " of Exeter College, or of the gentleman, who, having "heard much in commendation of the dumb man, was said to have written his epitaph. At all events, the verses which Defoe wrote on The Character of the late Dr. Samuel Annesley, by Way of Elegy in 1697 are much like those on Cronke, as a few lines will show :

"A Heavenly Patience did his Mind possess,

Cheerful in Pain and thoughtful in Distress;
Mighty in Works of Sacred Charity,

Which none knew better how to guide than he ;
Bounty and generous thoughts took up his Mind,
Extensive, like his Maker's, to Mankind."

The old graveyards of New England can show many epitaphs neither better nor worse than this.

Following The Dumb Philosopher, will be found two interesting bits of narrative by Defoe:- A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next Day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705. Which Apparition recommends the Perusal of Drelincourt's Book of Consolations against the Fears of Death, and The Destruction of the Isle of St. Vincent. The former of these is one of the best known compositions of Defoe. From the time that Scott1 selected it as a

1 Biographical Memoirs: Daniel DeFoe.