Daniel Defoe, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, Study Questions

1. Irony: How can you locate it? Why did contemporary readers at first not recognize it? Why is impersonation important here?
"Openly mourning the Revolution settlement": What does this phrasing mean? Try looking it up, here or elsewhere.

2. What is the issue in this pamphlet? What is "occasional conformity"? (Look it up.) If you had lived in the late 17th century, would you have defended it or repudiated it?

3. Why might Defoe have begun the pamphlet with something from Sir Roger Lestrange's Aesop's Fables? Click here for an online edition of Aesop's Fables.

4. The language of the pamphlet is often quite extreme. Can you imagine extirpation in a political pamphlet today?

5. What is the direction of the ironly in "We hang men for trifles, and banish them for things not worth naming"?

6. How does Defoe use the queen in his irony?

7. How does he skew biblical themes? Pay attention to the word charity. What does he do with the image of Christ between two thieves? What does "Now let us crucify the thieves" suggest?

8. What underlying desire surfaces in "we had been a national, unmixed Church; the Church of England had been kept undivided an entire"?

9. Can you locate the nostalgia of the pamphlet?

10. Add questions of your own: What do you need to know in order to understand this pamphlet?

 

See exhibit on Defoe as a political pamphleteer

 

Some background information for The Shortest Way:

What Defoe said about the purpose of Shortest Way with the Dissenters and then about his experience of punishment:

"The Case the Book pointed at, was to speak in the first person of the Party, and then, threby, not only speak their Language, but make them acknowledge it to be theirs, which they did so openly, that confounded all their Atttempt afterwards to deny it, and to call it a Scandall thrown upon them by another." From The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain (London, 1712), 24. Qtd. in Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 173.

"Gaol, pillories, and imprisonments . . . with which I have been much threatened of late, have convinced me that I lack passive courage, and I shall never for the future think myself injured if I am called a coward." Letter to William Paterson (April 1703).

Formal complaint against Shortest Way (February 25, 1703):

The House of Commons resolved that "'this book being full of false and scandalous Refleections on this Parliament, and tending to promote Sedition, be burnt by the hands of the common Hangman, to-morrow in New Palace Yard'" (Qtd. in Novak, p. 180).

Letter to Harley from Godolphin re: project to release Defoe on condition that he write for the ministry:

"I have found it proper to read some paragraphs of your letter to the queen. What you propose about Defoe may be done, when you will and how you will." (Sept. 26, 1703).