Daniel Defoe

• 1. Introduction

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  Daniel Defoe died on the 24th of April 1731 in Ropemakers Alley, probably hiding from creditors, not far from where he had been born roughly seven decades earlier. He left behind little wealth, a tangle of lawsuits with the royal treasury, and what scholars have counted as somewhere between 370 and 550 published works. Before the end of 1719, Robinson Crusoe had already run through four editions. It has since become one of the most widely published books in history, and it gave birth to an entire genre of imitation stories that now bear its name: the Robinsonade. The man who wrote it had, at various points in his life, been a hosiery merchant, a spy for rival political factions, a convicted seditious libeler, a manufacturer of roof tiles, a tax collector on glass bottles, and a newspaper editor writing three issues a week almost entirely by himself. How the same person managed all of that, and why so much of it ended in debt and prosecution, is the animating question behind the life of Daniel Defoe.

• 2. A Merchant's Debts

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  James Foe, Daniel's father, was a prosperous tallow chandler of probable Flemish descent and a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers. His son absorbed the merchant world early and pursued it with ambition that consistently outran his means. At different times Defoe traded in hosiery, general woollen goods, and wine. He bought a country estate, a ship, and even civets to make perfume. On the 1st of January 1684, he married Mary Tuffley at St Botolph's Aldgate; she brought a dowry of 3,700 pounds, a substantial sum. Yet by 1692 he had been arrested for debts of 700 pounds, with total obligations that may have reached 17,000 pounds. He was forced into bankruptcy. After his release from debtors' prison, he probably travelled in Europe and Scotland, and it was likely during this period that he traded wine to Cadiz, Porto, and Lisbon. By 1695 he was back in England and had taken up a position as a commissioner of the glass duty, collecting taxes on bottles. A year later he ran a tile and brick factory in what is now Tilbury, Essex. He died, as he had often lived, encircled by debt.

• 3. Pillory and Prison

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  On the 31st of July 1703, Defoe stood in a pillory, placed there by the notoriously sadistic judge Salathiel Lovell after a trial at the Old Bailey. The charge was seditious libel. The publication that triggered it was a December 1702 pamphlet called The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, which appeared to argue, in savagely ironic terms, for the extermination of Protestant nonconformists. It also mocked his Stoke Newington neighbour Sir Thomas Abney for the hypocritical practice of occasional conformity. The pamphlet was published anonymously, but the authorship was quickly discovered. Lovell sentenced Defoe to a punitive fine of 200 marks, three days in the pillory, and an indeterminate prison term that would end only when the fine was paid. A legend grew up that his poem Hymn to the Pillory so moved the crowd that they threw flowers rather than the customary noxious objects and drank to his health. Most scholars doubt the story, though the scholar John Robert Moore later wrote that no man in England but Defoe had ever stood in the pillory and afterward risen to eminence among his fellow men. What is not in doubt is that within a week of leaving Newgate Prison, Defoe witnessed the Great Storm of 1703, which raged through the night of the 26th and the 27th of November, killed more than 8,000 people mostly at sea, and uprooted millions of trees across England. Defoe turned the disaster into The Storm, published in 1704, collecting witness accounts of the tempest. Many regard it as one of the world's first examples of modern journalism.

• 4. Spy for All Parties

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  Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, brokered Defoe's release from Newgate in exchange for intelligence work supporting the Tories. Harley also paid a portion of Defoe's outstanding debts. Defoe had first entered political orbit as a close ally of William III, becoming one of the king's secret agents after William and Queen Mary were jointly crowned in 1689. He had also briefly joined the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, escaping the Bloody Assizes of Judge George Jeffreys by obtaining a pardon. After Harley was ousted from the ministry in 1708, Defoe pivoted to support the Whig government, writing pamphlets styled as Tory arguments that actually undermined Tory positions. He was, by then, a professional chameleon. In Scotland, ahead of the Act of Union in 1707, Harley had ordered Defoe to Edinburgh by September 1706 to use what instructions described as underhand methods to predispose Scots opinion toward the Treaty of Union. Defoe reported violent demonstrations: a Scots rabble is the worst of its kind, he wrote. He described nearly being lynched as a crowd surged up the High Street shouting "No Union! No English dogs!" John Clerk of Penicuik, a leading Unionist, later wrote in his memoirs that had the Edinburgh mob known Defoe was a spy, they would have pulled him to pieces. Defoe was so trusted as a Scottish Presbyterian that he was accepted as an adviser to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, even while he reported everything back to Harley.

• 5. The Union's Unreliable Historian

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  In 1709, Defoe published The History of the Union of Great Britain in Edinburgh, printed by the Heirs of Anderson. He cited himself as author twice within the book and traced the movement toward union back to the 6th of December 1604, when King James I received a proposal for unification. The history gave some space to arguments against the Union, but Defoe always kept the last word for himself. He ignored the main opposition voice, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, entirely. He also failed to account for the behaviour of the Duke of Hamilton, the official leader of the factions opposed to the Union, who appeared to betray his colleagues in the decisive final stages of the debate. Some of Defoe's pamphlets from this period were written to appear as if authored by Scots, misleading historians for generations into quoting them as genuine evidence of Scottish opinion. When Defoe visited Scotland in the mid-1720s, he admitted in his Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain that the increase of trade and population in Scotland he had predicted from the Union was not the case, but rather the contrary. He had also described Glasgow as a Dear Green Place, a phrase later misquoted as a Gaelic translation of the city's name, when in fact Glaschu more plausibly means Green Hollow.

• 6. The Novels

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  Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, when Defoe was in his late fifties. The novel follows a man shipwrecked on a desert island for twenty-eight years; Crusoe repeatedly bargains with God in crisis and turns away after deliverance, until a genuine conversion finally brings him peace. Defoe is believed to have drawn on the real experience of the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years stranded in the Juan Fernández Islands before being rescued in 1709 by Captain Woodes Rogers, whom Defoe knew personally. The island where Selkirk lived, called Mas a Tierra, was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Defoe's schoolmate at Newington Green had a surname, Caruso, that may have contributed to his hero's name. A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, revisited the Great Plague of London that Defoe had lived through as a child around the age of five. It is signed with the initials H. F., pointing to his uncle Henry Foe as a primary source, and reads as eyewitness nonfiction even though Defoe reconstructed events through research decades later. Moll Flanders, also from 1722, follows a woman who passes through bigamy, theft, adultery, and incest, living in The Mint, yet retains the reader's sympathy throughout; Defoe and a second novel, Roxana, were published anonymously for over fifty years until the publisher Francis Noble named Defoe on their title pages in 1774 and 1775. Roxana stands apart from the other novels because its protagonist, a high-society courtesan, never undergoes the conversion experience that marks Defoe's other central characters.

• 7. The Tradesman's Creed

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  Published in 1726, The Complete English Tradesman argued that trade was the backbone of the British economy, using the aphorism an estate is a pond, but a trade is a spring. Defoe maintained that most of the British gentry had been linked to trade at some point, whether through personal experience, marriage, or ancestry, and that younger sons of noble families regularly entered commerce. He pushed the argument further, contending that expanding British mercantile influence abroad would raise wages for the poor at home by increasing production through laws of supply and demand. His respect for tradesmen was not purely theoretical; he was one himself, and his career as a merchant predated his career as a writer by decades. The first piece he is widely remembered for publishing was An Essay Upon Projects in 1697, a set of proposals for social and economic improvement. His later work A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in three volumes between 1724 and 1727, surveyed British trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution and remains a source historians still consult.

• 8. The Author of Countless Names

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  Defoe used at least 198 pen names across a writing career that scholars have found nearly impossible to bound. If counted only by works he published under his own name or the known pen name the author of the True-Born Englishman, roughly 75 titles can be confirmed. The writer George Chalmers was the first to attempt to recover the anonymous work, assembling a list of more than a hundred additional titles and a separate column of twenty works he labelled Books which are supposed to be De Foe's. Chalmers ultimately attributed 174 works to Defoe. The scholar W. P. Trent, writing for the Cambridge History of English Literature, attributed 370 works. J. R. Moore generated the largest count of all, reaching approximately 550 titles. Defoe was aware of the attribution problem and commented on it in his 1715 apologia Appeal to Honour and Justice, where he defended his conduct during Harley's Tory ministry. A General History of the Pyrates, published in two volumes beginning in 1724 under the name Captain Charles Johnson, is among the contested works that some attribute to him. One certain endpoint stands at Ropemakers Alley, where Defoe died with almost nothing on the 24th of April 1731. A monument was erected at his burial place in Bunhill Fields in 1870, and a street in the Bronx, New York, still carries the name De Foe Place.