Daniel Defoe

English novelist

• Born: 1660
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: April 26, 1731
• Place of death: London, England

Because of his inventiveness, his eye for detail, and his stylistic adeptness, Defoe was a great journalist and creator of fiction, including the popular Robinson Crusoe, which set the standard for the English novel.

Early Life

Daniel Defoe was the son of James Foe, a tallow chandler who later acted as an auditor for the Butchers’ Company (Daniel changed his name to Defoe in 1695). Little is known about Daniel’s mother, Alice, except that she came from Dissenting stock and, like her husband, was a Presbyterian. She died when Daniel was eight.

Daniel’s formal education began at the Reverend James Fisher’s school at Dorking, Surrey. Since Dissenters were refused admission to the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, Defoe then went to the Reverend Charles Morton’s small college at Newington Green, which, Defoe later commented, lacked the intellectual stimulus of the great universities.

Unlike his classmates, most of whom entered the ministry, when he left school in 1680 Daniel went into trade as a hose-factor, seeking out and distributing various sorts of goods. The business necessitated extensive travel in Europe. Since he was a keen observer, he thus gained knowledge of people and places that would be useful in his writing. In 1684, he married Mary Tuffley, the daughter of a prosperous wine-cooper, who provided her with a considerable dowry. Mary was to bear her husband eight children.

The young merchant then became increasingly active on the political scene. In 1683, he published his first journalistic effort, a political tract. Two years later, he joined the army of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Protestant duke of Monmouth, who was attempting to seize the throne from Catholic James II. When the rebellion failed, Daniel may have fled the country; in any case, two years later a Daniel Foe was pardoned for taking part in the uprising. In 1688, when William of Orange and Mary, both staunch Protestants, became England’s monarchs, Daniel Foe was a highly visible supporter of the new regime.

His political contacts served him well, for his business affairs were in dire straits, in part because of imprudent ventures, in part because of heavy shipping losses incurred during a war with France. In 1692, Foe declared bankruptcy, and for a time only his income from appointments in the Whig government enabled him to support his family. He added the prefix to his name in 1695, perhaps to suggest to his new associates that he had an aristocratic background. During this period, Defoe also became a secret agent for William III; at the same time, he was again involved in a business venture, a brick and roof-tile factory near London. When it prospered, Defoe was able to pay off most of his debts, to buy a new house, and even to keep a coach. However, like the characters in his novels, he was soon to discover how abruptly Providence could change the direction of one’s life. At thirty-seven, Defoe became a writer.

Life’s Work

Daniel Defoe’s new life began in 1697 with the publication of his first signed work, An Essay upon Projects. In this work, he suggested that the nation would benefit by educating women, providing care for those with mental disabilities, setting up insurance, and instituting an income tax. The book is still of interest, demonstrating as it does Defoe’s original mind, his attention to detail, and the clarity of his prose. There is also much of lasting value to be found among the propaganda pieces that Defoe began turning out, for example, the long doggerel poem The True-Born Englishman (1701), a brilliant work that countered attacks on William as a foreigner by pointing out that the English themselves were of mixed ancestry. The poem was extremely popular; according to the author, the first edition alone sold more than eighty thousand copies.

After William died in 1702 and the Tories rose to power, the Dissenters found themselves threatened by Tory extremists, and Defoe responded by writing The Shortest Way with Dissenters. Though the pamphlet appeared to urge the Tories to further action against nonconformists, it was actually a parody of the Tories at their most intolerant. When his intent became clear, Defoe was arrested, convicted of seditious libel, and sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, pay a large fine, and remain in jail for an indeterminate period. Defoe’s response was to write a poem in praise of liberty called “A Hymn to the Pillory.” Although Defoe was roundly cheered by the populace while he was in the pillory, he was deserted by the Whig leadership. It was the Tory leader Robert Harley who obtained a pardon for Defoe and also found him financial aid, for during his six months in prison the factory had failed, and Defoe was once again bankrupt.

Defoe now became a full-time professional journalist in the service of the Tories. It is difficult to believe that a single person could write so much, and so well, as Defoe did during this period. From 1704 to 1713, he composed and edited The Review, a landmark in the history of journalism. He was also turning out hundreds of highly effective political pamphlets and writing accounts such as A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, the Next Day After Her Death, to One Mrs. Bargrave . . . (1706), which many consider his finest work as a reporter. Among Defoe’s many book-length publications were the political allegory The Consolidator (1705); Jure Divino (1706), a poem about the principles of government; and The History of the Union (1709), which drew upon the author’s knowledge of Scotland, where Harley had sent him while the two countries were negotiating over unification.

As long as the Tories were in power, Defoe felt secure; whenever he was arrested, his friends could secure his release. When George I succeeded Queen Anne and the Whigs took over the country, however, Defoe found it necessary to make peace with his old Whig enemies. He became a double agent, taking orders from the Whig leader Robert Walpole while still pretending to be a Tory. Not only did Defoe gather information from his Tory associates, but he also placed articles in Tory journals that would subvert their policies. It is ironic that at this time Defoe also produced a morally edifying book entitled The Family Instructor (1715), which became his most popular didactic work. In fact, it sold so well that he soon followed it with a sequel.

Since he had now become a master of subterfuge, perhaps it was appropriate that Defoe should try his hand at fiction. In 1719, he published Robinson Crusoe, which many scholars consider the first true English novel. Though purely fictional, Robinson Crusoe was presented as a true story of travel and adventure, so detailed that its veracity could hardly be doubted and so well provided with moral and religious content that not even a Dissenter could find it less than edifying. Some months later came a sequel, Further Adventures.

In these and in the novels that followed, Defoe, like many earlier storytellers, used a first-person narrator. What sets Defoe’s fiction apart from its predecessors, however, is a new complexity in characterization, especially where the narrator is concerned. Defoe’s narrators change and develop as the story progresses, thus providing a kind of unity and interest that simpler narratives did not have. Like Crusoe, the narrator-protagonists of Captain Singleton (1720), Colonel Jacque (1722), and Memoirs of a Cavalier (1724) describe the exterior landscape in painstaking detail, but they also take their readers into the interior landscape, confiding their fears, self-doubts, and moral confusion. These revelations make each protagonist distinct from the others. The narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, is shown as a practical man who totals up horror like an accountant, almost certainly preserving his sanity in the process. Defoe’s female characters are just as interesting and just as distinct. The title character of Roxana (1724) describes her glittering past with regret and dies poor and penitent. However, the narrator in Moll Flanders (1722), who, along with Crusoe, is probably Defoe’s finest creation, is so adept at justifying her actions that one wonders if she has tricked even Providence, for the book ends with her rich and happy enough to indulge in a little repentance.

Defoe produced these great novels over the course of just five years and then turned back to nonfiction, rapidly producing books on subjects ranging from Conjugal Lewdness (1727) to A Plan of the English Commerce (1728). However, despite his industry, in the summer of 1730 Defoe was again in financial difficulty. Though his health was failing, he had to leave his family and go into hiding to escape an old creditor. The following April, he died alone in a rented room. Defoe was buried in a cemetery favored by Dissenters, not far from another literary genius well acquainted with prison life, the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), John Bunyan.

Significance

Although scholars are still uncertain about attribution in a few cases, they have identified a total of 566 separate works by Daniel Defoe. So huge an output cannot be explained either by the author’s intellectual curiosity, though certainly he possessed that quality, or by his mastery of the language, though he had that gift, too. Defoe was responsible for supporting both himself and his family, and when his businesses failed, not once but twice, he could not quit. In desperation, he looked for other ways to make money, and he found two: political intrigue and writing.

It would be easy to brand Defoe as an opportunist who wrote whatever would sell and who in his own life ignored the principles he professed. That would be profoundly unfair. Defoe often wrote that his own difficult life had demonstrated how Providence operated. Like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Defoe felt himself guided by God. He did not live to realize that his financial failures paved the way for him to become one of England’s greatest writers, breaking ground and producing works of lasting value in not one but two areas. However, as he said in a letter written from his hiding place just a few months before his death, his faith never failed. At the last, he trusted the God who had been with him in adversity and danger, on the pillory and in prison, to guide him safely to his eternal rest.

Bibliography

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. A lengthy biographical study of the author and his place in the eighteenth century literary tradition. A work of major importance.

Bastian, F. Defoe’s Early Life. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. A detailed discussion of Defoe’s family background, youth, and involvement in politics. Ends in 1703, with Defoe imprisoned in Newgate.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Daniel Defoe. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. A volume in the Modern Critical Views series. Thirteen essays represent three decades of criticism. Subjects include point of view, theme, style, and characterization. Harold Bloom’s introduction, Leo Braudy’s “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography,” and John J. Burke, Jr.’s “Observing the Observer in Historical Fictions by Defoe” are of particular interest.

Curtis, Laura A. The Elusive Daniel Defoe. London: Vision, 1984. Prompted by Defoe’s habit of writing in the first person, Curtis hopes to discover the true identity of the author by looking for repeated patterns in his novels. Voluminous notes point out similarities between Defoe and other writers and possible influences. A highly original study.

Earle, Peter. The World of Defoe. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976. Though not new, this work is still valuable for its comments about the author’s society and his relationship to it. Helpful notes and good index.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Definitive, scholarly biography written by a noted Defoe scholar. Focuses on Defoe’s writing career, integrating details of his life with information about his fiction, travel literature, and other written works. On a par with, and a supplement to, Paula Backscheider’s biography.

Richetti, John J. Daniel Defoe. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Argues that examination of Defoe’s fiction should be balanced by careful study of his nonfiction. This book looks at both, noting both similarities and inconsistencies.

Rogers, Pat, ed. Defoe: The Critical Heritage. 1972. Reprint. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995. This comprehensive collection of comments about Defoe is essential for the understanding of such a complex figure. The editor’s introduction provides an excellent overview.

West, Richard. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe. London: Flamingo, 1998. A nonscholarly biography providing a detailed and sympathetic portrait of Defoe. Focuses on his travel books and journalism, with less emphasis on his novels and other literature.