Lies, damned lies, and statistics: epistemology and fiction in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year.(Daniel Defoe)(Critical essay)

This article considers Defoe's use of statistical data in his historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year, a device generally considered as a means of supplying a work of fiction with verisimilitude. Re-evaluating Defoe's attitude to the science of political arithmetic and the earliest proponents of statistics, it argues that Defoe validates a subjective and novelistic account of the plague over fallacious figures that purport to be hard facts. It therefore contextualizes the emergence of the novel within shifts in epistemology, as certainty was increasingly perceived as unattainable, and probability deemed the best standard for knowledge and action.

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Part of what I have to say about Daniel Defoe's use of statistical data in his 1722 historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year can be illustrated by an episode from Robinson Crusoe. It is the moment when Crusoe and Friday violently interrupt a cannibal ritual and rescue the Spanish captive. Laying aside earlier practical and ethical reservations about doing this, Crusoe and Friday rush in, massacring a number of the natives. At this point the monologue is transformed into something of a primitive table, enumerating deaths and assigning causes. The dead bodies, figures strewn across the beach, are transformed into figures ordered on the sheet:

The account of the rest is as follows:

3 Kill'd in the first shot from the tree.

2 Kill'd at the next shot.

2 Kill'd by Friday in the boat.