page_title: The Apparition of Mrs. Veal
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: The Apparition of Mrs. Veal / Themes
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Porträt Daniel Defoes im National Maritime Museum, London English: Portrait of Daniel Defoe, National Maritime Museum, London
context_page_description: The Apparition of Mrs. Veal is a pamphlet that was published anonymously in 1706 and is usually attributed to Daniel Defoe. Titled in full A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next Day after her Death: to one Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury. The 8th of September, 1705, it has been described as "the first modern ghost story".
context_section_description: The pamphlet has often and for many years been attributed to Daniel Defoe, though this has been challenged in a 2003 paper by George Starr. Defoe had a long-standing interest in what would now be termed the supernatural and addressed the topic several times in his works. His 1720 Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, the "sequel" to his much more famous 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, described "A vision of the Angelick World", and he later wrote three works which addressed demonology: The Political History of the Devil (1726), A System of Magick (1727) and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727).
  The Apparition of Mrs. Veal is the most famous example of a well-established genre at the time, that of the "apparition narrative", which flourished in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The genre had similarities to later ghost stories and gothic fiction, but differed from both in its philosophical starting point. The subject of "apparitions" was not necessarily regarded as supernatural – a category that was still evolving at the time – nor were they taken to be spirits of the dead, a concept which contemporary English Protestant writers (not least Defoe himself, in his History and Reality of Apparitions) strongly rejected. They were taken to be literally "appearances" in which "a spirit may vest it self with Flesh and Blood", as Defoe put it; a form with apparently solid substance but no actual person present.
  The story of the apparition of Mrs. Veal was not original to Defoe. It may have circulated as a popular tale, as did other accounts of "life after death", and at least one other early 18th-century letter addressed the story.  Defoe's version is unusual, however, in that it explicitly highlights its status as a printed text. It is prefaced by an introduction from an unnamed editor that describes the purported circumstances in which the story came to be published, implicitly indicating that it passed through multiple sets of hands in manuscript before the editor arranged for it to be printed. The text of the story itself also focuses on the printed word, specifically mentioning "Drelincourt's Book of Death" and other unnamed works on death. The Apparition was in fact subsequently included with the fourth edition of the English translation of Charles Drelincourt's book, The Christian's Defence against the Fears of Death, and helped to boost its sales in many more editions published around the country. One of Defoe's earliest biographers claimed that The Apparition had been written specifically to promote Drelincourt's book in response to a complaint about its slow sales, but the veracity of this claim is unclear; as William Lee puts it, "all this is circumstantial".
  The Apparition goes to some lengths to convince the reader of its authenticity – as the lengthy title illustrates, specifying names, dates and places and closing with a commentary on the veracity of the "witnesses". Although it has been described as a work of fiction and as an influence on the development of the formal story, it has rather more in common with Defoe's journalistic work than with his other works of fiction. It served a didactic purpose, like other "apparation narratives" of the time, which developed in response to a crisis in religious belief that had been provoked by the works of Thomas Hobbes and the emergence of modern materialist philosophies. Their influence was resisted by the authors of apparition narratives, who sought to convince sceptics of the existence of the afterlife and divine providence through accounts of spiritual visitations that presented a detailed and ostensibly authenticated version of the events that they described. As such, they can be seen as works of "theological propaganda", an outlook which later ghost stories, written purely for the purposes of entertainment, lacked.
caption: Daniel Defoe pictured in the late 17th/early 18th century
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