Daniel Defoe and South Sea Friendship

Abstract

In a significant article on the ambiguities of friendship in the early Georgian era, Stephen Gregg has discussed Daniel Defoe’s fictions of the early 1720s — particularly The Life, Adventures and Piracies of Captain Singleton — as sites of anxiety about the balance of private interest and public virtue in homosocial relationships of the time. Gregg’s underlying interest in this anxiety is in how it might feed into broader concerns about gender and sexuality in the period, but he also acknowledges that it is in the very nature of such a text’s ambivalence to confound simplistic interpretations based on concealed homosexual desire.¹ Gregg sees the friendship between Captain Singleton and his Quaker comrade William Walters as problematic not merely because of its closeness and the threat that this might pose to normative sexual and social relationships; this friendship is potentially dangerous as much for the awkward situation of these friends in relation to the smooth conduct of public commerce and national trade. The friendship of William and Bob, as Gregg sees it, lacks ‘a public and civic dimension’. At the same time, the motives of these friends are at points expressly mercenary, and this Gregg describes in stark contrast with the view of Pope and others, in which ‘symbolic exchanges between men’ must be protected from erosion by the powers of the market and exchanges based on ‘pure economic self-interest’.²