Why Defoe Probably Did Not Write The Apparition of Mrs. Veal
George Starr, University of California
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
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ABSTRACT
The short answer is because he did not believe in ghosts, as he understood the term and in what is “now the prevailing sense” (OED): “the soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living.” A ghost of just this sort is the central figure in an anonymous work long thought to be Defoe’s: 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 (AMV). Defoe’s lifelong interest in what he called “the Invisible World” embraced a belief in spirits, and in their active communication with mankind. Towards the end of his life, he wrote a book of nearly 400 pages devoted to the subject, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions. Being An Account … (HRA). “What they are not,” Defoe argues emphatically, are ghosts. “Whence they come not” are from heaven and hell, where souls go immediately after death, once and for all. They “do not appear again, or concern themselves in the Affairs of Life” because, as Defoe memorably puts it, “the Good would not if they could, and the Bad could not if they would.”
ECF articles on the topic of “Daniel Defoe” include:
“A Life of Continu’d Variety”: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders
by KATE LOVEMAN (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
“Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship”: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
by MORGAN STRAWN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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