Commercial paper, commercial fiction: 'The Compleat English Tradesman' and Defoe's reluctant novels

If he be unfortunate it satisfies the world of his just dealing,

and is the fairest and best Apologie for his innocence and

honesty to the World, and contributes exceedingly to the satisfaction

of all his friends and well-wishers, and to the Confutation

and silencing of all his malevolent and detracting

Enemies, and often proves the great cause to bring him a

most favorable Composition with his Creditors: whereas

these that are ignorant of it, in such a Condition are censured

by all, when they have nothing to show but bare words to

vindicate themselves.(23)

The accounting text is credible to reader/creditors because it opens itself to investigation, confuting "malevolent and detracting Enemies." In The Compleat English Tradesman, credit texts that cannot bear investigation resist protocols that would permit, invite investigation. Against this disparity, Defoe has to discredit accounting's claims. He has to demonstrate that the accounting text, like the intertextual shell-games of credit, is a shaky version of the real.

3

In The Compleat English Tradesman, the accounting text is fragile. While still potentially defensive it is also potentially productive of irony, and more readily reinscribes the confusion it was intended to dispel. Defoe argues that "That Tradesman, who keeps no books, may depend upon it, he will e're long keep no trade, unless he resolves also to give no credit" (I, 268). He then suggests, however, that "He that does not keep his books exactly, and so as that he may depend on them for charging his Debtors, had better keep no books at all ...; for as books well kept make business easy and certain, so books neglected turn all into confusion' and leave the Tradesman in a wood, which he can never get out of without damage and loss" (I, 271). Defoe's logic leads to paranoia. Inexact books are worse than no books; it is impossible to eschew books unless one gives no credit; yet "He that gives no trust ... is not yet born, or if there was any such, they are all dead" (I, 268 In other words, if your books are inexact, you are out of business. The very texts supposed to safeguard the Tradesman can provoke his undoing.

Defoe suggests that the inept text proliferates hostile fictions around it:

... if ever his dealers know that his books are ill-kept they

play upon him, and impose horrid forgeries and falsities

upon him; whatever he omits they catch at, and leave it out;

whatever they put upon him, he is bound to yield to; so that

in short, as books well kept are the security of the Tradesman's

estate, and the ascertaining of his debts, so books ill

kept will assist every knavish customer or chapman to cheat

and decieve him. (I, 271)

The inexact text is vulnerable, yielding to "forgeries" that reconstruct the author as discreditable. No longer constrained by an abstracting protocol, the text is open to market-place noise, to opinion and irony. The vulnerability of the Tradesman's texts distinguishes them from those described by Colinson, North and Malcolm, which resisted "After-cheats." Defoe's version of accounting, which provides "the security of the Tradesman's estate" if well-inscribed, easily pitches into reverse.