Daniel Defoe

(1660-1731)

Defoe was born in London in 1660. A prosperous and hard-working tradesman, his father was at various times a tallow chandler and a butcher, and was well known for his dissenting or non-conformist views. Those meant that he could not send his son to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, Daniel had a sound, dissenting education at the highly reputable Presbyterian Academy of Newington Green, where the Bible and John Bunyan - as opposed to the classics - featured prominently. The great satirist, Jonathan Swift, was later to dismiss him as "an illiterate figure, whose name I forget", but this was hardly fair. Defoe left the Academy with a keen, practical-minded tem­perament, and was fluent in five languages (which did not, of course, include Latin or Greek).

The somewhat dry prospect of a future in the Presbyterian ministry persuaded him to follow a career in trade in the early 1680s. On becoming a merchant, he dealt in a variety of commodities, including wine and tobacco, and travelled widely both at home and abroad. His practical interests extended to politics and the theory of commerce An Essay Upon Projects contains a wide range of radical proposals for a new kind of state, and pre-dates by two centuries ideas of a similar kind. His dissenting spirit led him to take part in the abortive rebellion against the Roman Catholic king James II, in 1685, but, luckily, he escaped punishment. In 1688, a true Protestant king in the shape of William III was crowned, but Defoe's commercial prosperity and personal joy ('William, the Glorious, Great, and Good, and Kind', wrote Defoe) were to prove short lived. Following a series of rash speculations he went bankrupt in 1692 and spent much of his time hiding from his creditors.

In order to pay back his considerable debts, Defoe turned to writing, among other things. He was to remain William's leading pamphleteer up to 1702 when Queen Anne succeeded to the throne. In the same year Defoe published a pamphlet attacking the High Church Tory intolerance of the mainly Whig supporting Dissenters and was promptly fined, sentenced to three days in the pillory and then detained in Newgate 'during Her Majesty's pleasure'. During this spell in prison, his prosperous brick and tile works in London went bankrupt, thus effectively ending his involvement in trade.

Defoe got out of prison with the help of a Tory politician, Robert Harley. Defoe repaid Harley by agreeing to edit and write almost single-handedly his periodical 'The Review' from 1704-1713, and this, without attacking the government. 'The Review' proved to be an ideal vehicle for his prodigious journalistic talents, and was to exercise considerable influence over future periodicals of the century. Defoe also carried out intelligence work as a spy and government agent during this period, adapting himself to the views of whichever party was in power. When George I came to the throne in 1714, the Tories fell out of favour, but Defoe continued working for the government. In 1719, at the age of fifty-nine, Defoe turned from journalism to a new form of extended prose fiction and produced his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe. His literary fame rests on this and other works produced during the next seven years - works which, in method, style and language, owe much to his previous experience as a journalist. He died alone and in misery in 1731 with creditors still baying for his blood.

Works

Defoe's claim to literary fame rests largely on his novels, and by many critics he is considered to be the father of the English novel. His strongly held Puritan beliefs posed something of a problem for him as a writer because fiction was tantamount to lying, insofar as it was something untrue. Defoe resolved this problem by insisting that what he wrote was "a history of fact", and in each of his works there is a moral or didactic purpose which may serve as an example to others. His most important novels are: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722) and Lady Roxana (1724). However, Defoe is said to have written over five hundred separate works in his time: in the field of journalism he will be remembered chiefly for his work on The Review (1704-1713), a thrice-weekly periodical concerned with politics and current affairs. Many of his pamphlets have become legendary, including the infamous The Shortest Way With The Dissenters (1702). He also wrote some highly successful satirical verse, including The True Born Englishman (1701), an attack on xenophobia and intolerance of immigrants, and Hymn To The Pillory, an audacious mock-Pindaric ode to celebrate his punishment in 1703.