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Keywords

Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton, Quakers, Religious Society of Friends, Quaker pamphlets, cosmopolitan

Document Type

Features

Abstract

Critics have long been puzzled by Daniel Defoe’s depictions of Quakers. Praising them in his Review but mocking them in his Quaker-voiced pamphlets, Defoe sketches Quaker characters in his novels that are helpful to his protagonists but are hardly paragons of moral virtue. Some scholars have concluded that he viewed them favorably while others believe he was disparaging them. Neither of these scholarly approaches, however, takes into account how Quakers were actually seen in Defoe’s own era. Not yet regarded in the positive light they would be in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—as benevolent abolitionists and pacifists—late seventeenth- century Quakers were seen as eccentric disrupters of the peace, known for their awkward social deportment and dubious morals. This article proposes that Defoe depicts Quakers as he saw them—as neither paragons of virtue nor overly eccentric. Deploying yet moving beyond standard caricatures of Quakers, Defoe ultimately humanizes them, just as he humanizes other heterogenous “cosmopolitan” characters across his career.

DOI

10.70213/1948-1802.1108

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Language

English

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application/pdf

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