ABSTRACT
The storm of 26 November 1703 remains the worst storm recorded in British history. Daniel Defoe enthusiastically rushed out his tract The Layman’s Sermon upon the Late Storm and therein called upon his fellow-citizens to join him in his self-flagellation and submit to their deserved punishment. He claimed that the occasion and consequence of the storm would be spelt out by the recitation of unadorned facts. Nothing would be recorded but authenticated material, only reliable eye-witness accounts of his own and his correspondents would be admitted, and these were to be told without embroidery or extravagance. As the noted Defoe scholar G. A. Starr has argued, The Storm suffers by comparison with works like A Journal of the Plague Year: The litany of losses has limited emotional impact because they are seldom adequately individualized. In The Storm, as a defence mechanism, a faulty floodgate is in place; it is there to save Defoe from being drowned in his own masochism.
