DEFOE'S ENGLAND
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—In the concluding paragraph of his review of Defoe's Tour Mr. Thomas is guilty of a double injustice to Defoe. " Stories and anecdotes in questionable taste besprinkle his Tour," says Mr. Thomas. To say the least this is' a gross exaggeration. The word " besprinkle " can seldom have been used with greater recklessness. If it were not that taste differs in these matters, I would say that there is not a grain of truth in Mr. Thomas's statement. Throughout the Tour Defoe maintains the grave mien of a moralist, a role which he seldom discarded. In any case there must be very few who would receive from the Tour the impression that Defoe was a purveyor of " questionable " anecdotes. Mr. Thomas may even be unique in this respect.
Mr. Thomas then takes Defoe to task for his poor opinion of women. " A prophet in many things, he did not foresee the day when women would qualify as tutors even in his own sphere of economics." Defoe was more foreseeing than his reviewer .imagines, as the following sentences from an essay on " The Education of Women printed in 1697 show. " I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence ; while I am confident, had they. the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves."
" What they might be capable of being bred to is plain from some instances of female with which this age is not without, which upbraids us with Injustice, and looks as if we denied women the advantages of education, for fear they should vie with the men in their improvements . . ." " I need not enlarge on the loss the defect of education is to the sex; nor argue the benefit of the contrary practice. 'Tis a thing will be more easily granted than remedied. This chapter is but an Essay at the thing : and I refer the Practice to those Happy Days (if they ever shall be) when men shal be wise enough to mend it." (An English Garner—Later Stuart Tracts. Constable and Co.).—! am, Sir, &C.,
GEORGE L. BRANDER. 15 Cromwell Place, Highgate.
[Mr. Gilbert Thomas writes : I had certainly no wish to be unfair to Defoe, whom I admire as much as Mr. Brander apparently does. Perhaps the terms I used in the last para- graph of my review were unwittingly a little strong. Defoe, I grant, is never really nasty. Indeed, it was only because I had always regarded him as being the opposite that I was a little surprised to find him, for example, going out of his way to mention—though I concede to Mr. Brander that he did not trouble actually to see—" the monstrous fat woman of Ross " who had to have " a small stool placed before her, to rest her belly on, and the like." Nor did it seem to me to argue great respect on Defoe's part for female intelligence that he should dwell at some length, " on the women's account," about the wholesale bigamy which was reported to him to exist in the Essex marshes. Probably I am not alone in not having read the whole of Defoe's colossal literary output, most of which is not easily accessible. But I am glad to learn from Mr. Brander that Defoe " a prophet in many things," as I myself said—was, after all, an advocate of women's rights.—En. Spectator.]
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