Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe is often called the father of the English novel. A London tradesman’s son who lived a turbulent life of commerce, bankruptcy, political journalism, espionage and imprisonment, he turned in his late fifties to writing long prose narratives that presented themselves as true memoirs — Robinson Crusoe (1719), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722) and Roxana (1724). Their detailed, matter-of-fact realism — inventories, prices, practical problems, the voice of an ordinary person telling their own life — created a new kind of fiction for a new, middle-class reading public.

Life

Defoe was born Daniel Foe around 1660 in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, London, the son of James Foe, a tallow chandler and member of the Butchers’ Company. The family were Dissenters — Presbyterians who refused to conform to the Church of England — and so excluded from the universities; Daniel was educated at Charles Morton’s dissenting academy in Newington Green, which taught modern subjects in English. As a child he lived through the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666.

He became a merchant — in hosiery, wine, tobacco, oysters, even civet cats for perfume — and travelled widely in Europe. In 1685 he joined the Duke of Monmouth’s Protestant rebellion against James II and narrowly escaped punishment; he welcomed William III in 1688. In 1692 he went bankrupt with debts of £17,000, an enormous sum, and spent years repaying creditors. He later ran a brick and tile works at Tilbury. Around 1695 he began calling himself “De Foe”.

He found his vocation in political writing. An Essay upon Projects (1697) proposed schemes for banks, insurance, road-building, an academy and education for women. The True-Born Englishman (1701), a verse satire defending the Dutch-born King William against xenophobia, argued that the English were a mongrel race — “a True-Born Englishman’s a contradiction” — and was a bestseller. In 1702 he published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a satirical pamphlet in the voice of a High Church extremist proposing that Dissenters be hanged or banished. Both sides took it seriously; when the hoax was discovered, the government prosecuted Defoe for seditious libel. He was fined, imprisoned in Newgate, and sentenced to stand three times in the pillory. He wrote a Hymn to the Pillory, and the crowd, instead of pelting him with refuse, threw flowers.

He was released through the intervention of the Tory minister Robert Harley, who employed him as a writer and secret agent. From 1704 to 1713 Defoe wrote, almost single-handed, the thrice-weekly Review, one of the first periodicals; and he travelled in disguise through England and Scotland gathering intelligence, notably in Edinburgh during the negotiations for the Union of 1707. He served successive governments of both parties, and was often accused of treachery and opportunism.

Then, in April 1719, at about fifty-nine, he published The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner — “Written by Himself”. It was a huge success, with four editions in four months, a sequel and many piracies. In the next six years he wrote a series of further fictional memoirs: Captain Singleton, about a pirate’s journey across Africa; Moll Flanders, the life of a London woman born in Newgate prison who was “Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent”; A Journal of the Plague Year, a vivid pseudo-eyewitness account of the plague of 1665, so convincing that it was long taken for history; Colonel Jack; and Roxana, the darkest of them, the story of a courtesan whose prosperity is haunted by her abandoned daughter. He also wrote A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27), a guide to the economy and landscape of the country, and books on trade, manners, the occult and the “complete English tradesman”. He died in April 1731 in lodgings in Moorfields, hiding from a creditor, and was buried in Bunhill Fields.

The novels

Defoe’s fictions present themselves as true autobiographies, often with prefaces insisting on their truth and moral usefulness. They are told by ordinary people — a sailor, a thief, a courtesan, a saddler — in plain, colloquial, sometimes repetitive prose, full of concrete detail: what things cost, how they were made, how many there were. Their characters are driven by survival and gain; their lives are a series of episodes held together by the narrator’s voice and a loose spiritual pattern of sin and repentance. Critics from Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel, 1957) onward have seen in them the origins of formal realism — the novel’s commitment to the particular, ordinary, contemporary world — and of its preoccupation with the individual and with money.

Moll Flanders is especially admired for its narrator’s voice — shrewd, vital, unrepentant even in repentance — and for its account of a woman’s life in a society where she has only her body and wits. Whether Defoe intends us to see through Moll’s moralising, or shares her values, is an old critical question.

Legacy

Robinson Crusoe became one of the most widely read and translated books ever written and gave rise to a genre, the “Robinsonade”. Rousseau made it the only book for his pupil Émile. Marx used Crusoe as an example of economic man. James Joyce, lecturing on Defoe, called Crusoe “the true symbol of the British conquest”. Defoe’s realism shaped the novel’s whole development; his journalism made him one of the founders of modern reporting.

In conversation

• A Robinson Crusoe — anyone forced to survive alone, self-sufficient.
• “Man Friday” — a faithful assistant (from Crusoe’s servant; now often criticised for its colonial overtones).
• Defoe’s realism — making fiction convincing through ordinary, practical detail.