Lecture 5 daniel defoe

1660-1731

Daniel Foe was born in 1660. It was not till he was 35 years old that he assumed the more high-sounding name Defoe. He was the son of a London butcher. Many of his activities were of a sort which demanded concealment and this concealment modern scholarship has been able only partially to penetrate. As a boy he was sent for four or five years to a non-conformist (conformist is one, who conforms the Church of England) school at Newington Green to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. Though he never became a minister, he is in all his books an indefatigable preacher. Throughout his life he had the knack of picking up information on a wide variety of subjects - history, economics, geography, demonology. At some time in his earlier manhood he lived for a while in Spain, also he travelled to France, Italy and Bavaria. In 1684 we find him established as a London merchant in the hosiery trade. His business was on a large scale, in 1692 he owed the very considerable sum of 17 000 pounds. These debts and the fear of a debtor's prison hung like a millstone around his neck for many years.

He had published a satire in verse in 1691, but his first publication of any importance was "An Essay Upon Projects" in 1697. In 1701 appeared the "True-Born Englishman", a vigorous satire in verse, the purport of which is that the English, as a mixed race, should not object to the foreign birth of King William III.

It was not until Defoe was nearly sixty that he discovered the literary vein of realistically written romance that was to assure the permanence of his fame. In 1719 appeared "The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe"; in 1720 "The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton", in 1724 "Roxana" and so on. [17] The journalist found his true vocation as the teller of stories which are of the nature of a heightened journalism. And whatever the theme the middle class author provided his audience of middle- class readers with moralizing comment which put the book into the category of improving reading.

Defoe was not the man to be satisfied with fictitious people and events, even if they could be made to point a moral. He had been in the thick ofpublic affairs too long to give up his chosen part as a debater of sharp social issues and an interpreter of the contemporary social scene.

One of the great virtues of Defoe's writing is the quality of his English prose - vigorous, homely, racy- with no affection of fine writing. The homely racy style is particularly appropriate when put into the mouth of such middle-class of lower-class personages as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Ftanders (1722 - "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders").

Check yourself

1. Where and when was D. Foe born?

2. When and why did he get his new name?

3. Why was he sent to a non-conformist school?

4. What kind of knack did he have?

5. Where did he travel in his earlier manhood?

6. When did he work as a London merchant?

7. Why was Defoe afraid of debtor's prison?

8. When was his first important publication?

9. What was the purport of the "True-Born Englishman"?

10. When did Defoe's famous works appear?

11. What is one of the greatest virtues of Defoe's writing? [18]