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.

2 Kill'd by ditto, of those first wounded.

1 Kill'd by ditto, in the wood.

3 Kill'd by the Spaniard.

4 Kill'd, being found dropped here and there of their wounds, or killed by Friday in his chase of them.

4 Escap'd in the boat, whereof one wounded if not dead.

21 In all. (1)

A glance at this lucid table tells us several things, foremost among them that Friday as usual does most of the work. Three died in the first volley, the Spaniard bagged three more, and Crusoe can account for twenty-one in sum. The facts are not quite conclusive, however, as Robinson is unsure whether some of the cannibals that got away pulled through, but he is not quite a good enough bureaucrat to chase up the details--the pursuit is abandoned when they discover Friday's father trussed up in the spare canoe.

When noticing this textual rupture, extrapolated from the prose monologue, critics have normally viewed Crusoe's comfort with statistics in terms of his capitalist and colonialist values, in which these heathen lives are just the numbers trodden under foot by the righteous. Crusoe, like Defoe's other protagonists, maintains an accountant's mentality--the process of quantification underwrites Defoe's much-vaunted realism and underscores Crusoe's administrative authority on the island. However, what this instance also shows is that Defoe, if not Crusoe, was aware of the reductive and inhuman implications of statistical thinking. Everything about the table strikes one as crass, cold, and calculating, from Crusoe's detachment to Friday's reduction to , ditto'. The association of data and death in the novel is appropriate, because statistical science grew during the seventeenth century...