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Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

Jan 06, 2020

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Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). Daniel Defoe. 1. Defoe’s life. Born into a family of Dissenters in 1660. Studied modern languages , economics , geography , besides the traditional subjects. Started to write in Whig papers; his greatest achievement was The Review. Daniel Defoe. 1. Defoe’s life.

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• robinson crusoe
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• robinson crusoe 1719
• ron embleton 1930 1988

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Daniel Defoe 1. Defoe’s life • Born into a family ofDissentersin 1660. • Studiedmodern languages,economics,geography, besides the traditional subjects. • Started to write inWhigpapers; his greatest achievement wasThe Review. Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 1. Defoe’s life • Queen Anne had himarrested, triedandimprisoned. • Denied his Whig ideas and became asecret agent for the new government. • Started to writenovelswhen • was about sixty. • Died in1731. Ron Embleton (1930-1988), Daniel Defoe. Private Collection. Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 2. Defoe’s works • Robinson Crusoe(1719) • The story of a shipwreck on a desert island • Captain Singleton(1720) • The voyage story of a captain who becomes a pirate • Colonel Jack(1722) • The story of a pickpocket who repents Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 2. Defoe’s works • Moll Flanders(1722) • The adventures of a woman who becomes a thief and a prostitute to survive but finally leads a respectable life • Roxana (1724) • The adventures of ahigh-society woman who exploits her beauty to obtain what she wants. Only Connect ... New Directions

Fictional autobiographies. Daniel Defoe 3. Defoe’s novels: structure • A series ofepisodes and adventures. • Unifying presence of asingle hero. Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 3. Defoe’s novels: structure • Lack of acoherent plot. • Retrospective first-person narration. • The author’spoint of viewcoincides with the main character’s. • Characters presentedthrough their actions. Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 4. Robinson Crusoe: the middle-class hero Robinson shares restlessness with classical heroes of travel literature An act of transgression, of disobedience His isolation on the island after the shipwreck Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 5. Robinson Crusoe: a spiritual autobiography Full of religious references to God, sin, providence, salvation The hero reads the Bible to find comfort and guidance Defoe explores the conflict between economic motivation and spiritual salvation Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 6. Robinson Crusoe: the island The ideal place for Robinson to prove his qualities Robinson organizes a primitive empire Not a return to nature, but a chance to exploit and dominate nature Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 7. Robinson Crusoe: the individual and society The society Robinson creates on the island is not an alternative to but an exaltation of 18th-century England, its ideals of mobility, material productiveness, and individualism Though God is the prime cause of everything, the individual can shape his destiny through action Only Connect ... New Directions

Clear and precise details. Daniel Defoe 8. Robinson Crusoe: the style • Description of the primary qualities of objects. solidity, extension and number • Simple, matter-of-fact and concrete language. Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 9. Moll Flanders Insights into some social problems Set in urban society Women were not able to support themselves legally in 18th-century society Moll is Crusoe’s female counterpart The novel includes «documents» Moll rejects emotional experience Only Connect ... New Directions

Daniel Defoe 9. Moll Flanders • It has insights into some social problemslike crime and the provisions for poor orphans. • Moll rejects emotional experience, seen as an impediment to the accumulation of capital. • The novel includes «documents»– Moll’s memorandums, quoted letters, hospital bills – in order to increase the illusion of verifiable fact. Only Connect ... New Directions

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Daniel Defoe

(1660-1731)

Who Was Daniel Defoe?

Daniel Defoe became a merchant and participated in several failing businesses, facing bankruptcy and aggressive creditors. He was also a prolific political pamphleteer which landed him in prison for slander. Late in life he turned his pen to fiction and wrote Robinson Crusoe , one of the most widely read and influential novels of all time.

Daniel Foe, born circa 1660, was the son of James Foe, a London butcher. Daniel later changed his name to Daniel Defoe, wanting to sound more gentlemanly.

Defoe graduated from an academy at Newington Green, run by the Reverend Charles Morton. Not long after, in 1683, he went into business, having given up an earlier intent on becoming a dissenting minister. He traveled often, selling such goods as wine and wool, but was rarely out of debt. He went bankrupt in 1692 (paying his debts for nearly a decade thereafter), and by 1703, decided to leave the business industry altogether.

Acclaimed Writer

Having always been interested in politics, Defoe published his first literary piece, a political pamphlet, in 1683. He continued to write political works, working as a journalist, until the early 1700s. Many of Defoe's works during this period targeted support for King William III, also known as "William Henry of Orange." Some of his most popular works include The True-Born Englishman, which shed light on racial prejudice in England following attacks on William for being a foreigner; and the Review , a periodical that was published from 1704 to 1713, during the reign of Queen Anne, King William II's successor. Political opponents of Defoe's repeatedly had him imprisoned for his writing in 1713.

Defoe took a new literary path in 1719, around the age of 59, when he published Robinson Crusoe , a fiction novel based on several short essays that he had composed over the years. A handful of novels followed soon after—often with rogues and criminals as lead characters—including Moll Flanders , Colonel Jack , Captain Singleton , Journal of the Plague Year and his last major fiction piece, Roxana (1724).

In the mid-1720s, Defoe returned to writing editorial pieces, focusing on such subjects as morality, politics and the breakdown of social order in England. Some of his later works include Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business (1725); the nonfiction essay "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom" (1727); and a follow-up piece to the "Conjugal Lewdness" essay, entitled "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed."

Death and Legacy

Defoe died on April 24, 1731. While little is known about Defoe's personal life—largely due to a lack of documentation—Defoe is remembered today as a prolific journalist and author, and has been lauded for his hundreds of fiction and nonfiction works, from political pamphlets to other journalistic pieces, to fantasy-filled novels. The characters that Defoe created in his fiction books have been brought to life countless times over the years, in editorial works, as well as stage and screen productions.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Daniel Defoe
• Birth Year: 1660
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: English novelist, pamphleteer and journalist Daniel Defoe is best known for his novels 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Moll Flanders.'
• Fiction and Poetry
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Academy at Newington Green
• Death Year: 1731
• Death date: April 24, 1731
• Death City: London
• Death Country: United Kingdom

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Daniel Defoe Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/daniel-defoe
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 26, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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17. DANIEL DEFOE - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

17. DANIEL DEFOE

Daniel defoe (1660-1731) 1. defoe s life born into a family of dissenters in 1660. daniel defoe studied modern languages, economics, geography, besides the ... – powerpoint ppt presentation.

• Born into a family of Dissenters in 1660.
• Studied modern languages, economics, geography, besides the traditional subjects.
• Started to write in Whig papers his greatest achievement was The Review.
• Queen Anne had him arrested, tried and imprisoned.
• Denied his Whig ideas and became a secret agent for the new government.
• Started to write novels when
• was about sixty.
• Died in 1731.
• Robinson Crusoe (1719)
• The story of a shipwreck on a desert island
• Captain Singleton (1720)
• The voyage story of a captain who becomes a pirate
• Colonel Jack (1722)
• The story of a pickpocket who repents
• Moll Flanders (1722)
• The adventures of a woman who becomes a thief and a prostitute to survive but finally leads a respectable life
• Roxana (1724)
• The adventures of a high-society woman who exploits her beauty to obtain what she wants.
• Fictional autobiographies.
• A series of episodes and adventures.
• Unifying presence of a single hero.
• Lack of a coherent plot.
• Retrospective first-person narration.
• The authors point of view coincides with the main characters.
• Characters presented through their actions.
• Clear and precise details.
• Description of the primary qualities of objects.
• Simple, matter-of-fact and concrete language.
• It has insights into some social problems like crime and the provisions for poor orphans.
• Moll rejects emotional experience, seen as an impediment to the accumulation of capital.
• The novel includes documents Molls memorandums, quoted letters, hospital bills in order to increase the illusion of verifiable fact.

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1 Defoe’s Life and Times

Brian Cowan is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History at McGill University. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), editor of The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012), and coeditor of The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (2021).

• Published: 18 December 2023
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This chapter situates Daniel Defoe’s life and writings in the literary, social, and political history of Britain from the Restoration to the period following the Hanoverian succession. Defoe was born in the wake of the regicidal revolution that produced the Civil War and a brief period of republicanism; he lived his early life in the context of the legal clampdown on religious dissent, and he started out as a businessman. He was an avid supporter of the Revolution of 1688, which established the Protestant succession and religious toleration for nonconformists. After establishing these wider contexts, the chapter surveys Defoe’s writing career: his reputation in his lifetime as a whiggish and seditious ‘scribbler’ of topical wrings for payment, and the growth in his ‘literary’ reputation in the later eighteenth century. As well as his politics and his writings, the chapter discusses portraits of Defoe and his earnings from his writings.

Zealous Revolutioner

Daniel Defoe was born in the wake of one revolution, and he lived to help build the legacy of yet another one which he lived through. Defoe’s life and times were thus shaped by two great revolutions of the Stuart age: the regicidal revolution of 1649 and the ‘glorious’ revolution of 1688–9. Defoe’s birth coincided with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660—a moment that attempted, unsuccessfully, to efface the memory of two decades of civil wars and regime changes that preceded it. As a young man, Defoe joined the fight against the prospect of a popish successor to the throne by supporting the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion ( Appeal , 28). 1 Although Monmouth’s attempted coup d’état failed in 1685, William of Orange’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 succeeded beyond expectations. Henceforth, Defoe would defend the rectitude and greatness of ‘the Revolution’ as it would thereafter be known to him and his contemporaries. The revolutionary King William III became Defoe’s hero, and throughout his life Defoe would insist that he had been a close confidant and advisor to the revolutionary king. Much of Defoe’s political activities in the succeeding decades would be devoted to defending William’s Glorious Revolution and to securing its enduring legacy. By the time of Defoe’s death in 1731, the Jacobite menace that had threatened to undo the Glorious Revolution had receded, and the Protestant succession to a now united British throne appeared to be secure as a second Hanoverian king, George II, had succeeded to his throne without contest after the death of his father in 1727.

Defoe wrote ceaselessly about the Glorious Revolution and almost always with great praise and reverence for the nation’s deliverance from the double threat of popery and arbitrary government that it heralded, but the regicidal revolution was never far from his mind either. He drew upon the later Stuart debates about the English civil wars when he crafted his fictional Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), a work which Nicholas Seager has argued was an attempt to moderate between the more partisan views of the war promoted by the posthumous publication of works such as John Toland’s edition of Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698–9) or the Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702–4). Pat Rogers notes that Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) ‘never openly takes sides on the issues of the English Civil War, when (as often happens) the narrator comes on remnants of that great and divisive struggle’. 2 The challenge for Defoe, as for many of his contemporaries, was to acknowledge the divisive legacy of the civil wars without obviously aligning himself with either the regicidal or absolutist extremes of either side.

For most of his contemporaries, however, Defoe’s views on the civil war era were far from moderate. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Defoe saw the revolution that ended Charles I’s reign as an event akin to the more respectable glorious revolution that ended James VII and II’s rule. In a pamphlet published early in Anne’s reign, Defoe shocked many of his readers by declaring that the only difference between the two revolutions ‘lyes here, the Whigs in 41. to 48. took up Arms against their King; and having conquer’d him, and taken him Prisoner, cut off his Head, because they had him : The Church of England took Arms against their King in 88. and did not cut off his Head, because they had him not . King Charles lost his Life, because he did not run away ; and his Son, King James , sav’d his Life, because he did run away ’ ( PEW , iii. 65). A few years later, in the Review (1704–13), Defoe would return to the topic where he would declare that there was little difference between ‘the dry Martyrdom of King James , by his Passive Obedience , Church Subjects; and the wet Martyrdom of King Charles I, by People that never made any such Pretence’. 3

Resistance was the common denominator between the two revolutions for Defoe; unlike most of his contemporaries, Defoe did not shy away from comparing the regicidal revolution with the Glorious Revolution. He made the analogy explicit in the preface to his longest poem, Jure Divino (1706), where he declared, despite acknowledging that ‘some People will not bear the Comparison … That the Parallel between the Civil War, or Parliament War, or Rebellion , call it which you will; and the Inviting over, Joyning with, and Taking up Arms under the Prince of Orange , against King James , seems to me to be very exact, the drawing such a Parallel very just, and the Foundation proceeding, and Issue just the same’ ( SFS , ii. 42, 43–4). Defoe could not understand ‘How any People can then Defend the inviting over the Prince of Orange , to check the Invasions of King James II. and at the same time condemn the taking Arms against the Invasions of King Charles I’ ( SFS , ii. 44). Defoe even went so far as to claim that King James suffered more than his father Charles, whose execution was ‘ Une coup de Grace ’, whereas for James his rebellious subjects ‘were 11 years a Murthering of him, and he languish’d all that while under their Treachery’ ( SFS , ii. 49). Defoe’s point was not to denigrate the Glorious Revolution, it was quite the opposite: he insisted that it had been achieved through resistance to the king’s sovereign power and that resistance had been legitimate.

This was a highly controversial claim to make at the time. Queen Anne’s reign saw the resurgence of a Tory ideology that abhorred all forms of resistance theory, even when applied to the Glorious Revolution. This Tory revanche put establishment Whigs on the defensive, and all but the most radical of them sought to temper their avowal of resistance theory, or even better to avoid the question altogether. Defoe’s refusal to do either horrified many, and his equation of the revolution of 1649 with that of 1688 was explicitly condemned during the trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell. 4 After this official repudiation of his vigorous defence of resistance theory, very few other writers would dare to take it up again later in the eighteenth century.

Defoe was mainly known in his lifetime as a seditious writer with dangerously unorthodox views about resistance and revolution, but this is not how Defoe saw himself. Defoe consistently presented himself as a political moderate, a pragmatist, and a skilful politician who had access to and the esteem of the good and the great, above all his two heroes, King William III and the wily Robert Harley, whom Defoe did not hesitate to call ‘Prime Minister’ ( Letters , 31). As important as they are for understanding Defoe’s own self-regard and his public self-fashioning, these characteristics were guises adopted by a mercurial figure who delighted in presenting himself as a key player in the frenzied politics of post-revolutionary Britain. Defoe was not entirely wrong about this: through his varied and prolific writings, he managed to find himself embroiled in some of the major debates of his day. He wrote on politics, religion, economics, education, social policy, travel, and geography; he documented current events as well as writing histories.

Defoe’s reputation in his own day was indelibly associated with his politics, and particularly his enthusiasm for the Revolution. When John Oldmixon identified Defoe as ‘a Zealous Revolutioner and Dissenter’ for the readers of his History of England (1735), he was merely repeating a standard opinion of the writer’s significance. 5 Defoe’s emergence in literary public opinion as a writer of genius emerged only posthumously, and even then the process was a slow one [ see   chapter   33 ]. Robert Shiells was an early defender when he wrote the first substantive (albeit brief) biography of Defoe in The Lives of the Poets (1753), in which he argued against the derisive views of Pope and other arbiters of literary taste: ‘De Foe can never with any propriety, be ranked amongst the dunces, for whoever reads his works with candour and impartiality, must be convinced that he was a man of the strongest natural powers, a lively imagination, and solid judgment, which … ought not only to screen him from the petulant attacks of satire, but transmit his name with some degree of applause to posterity’. Even so, Shiells noted that Defoe’s ‘considerable name’ was earned by ‘his early attachment to the revolution interest, and the extraordinary zeal and ability with which he defended it’. Defoe was ‘best known for the True-Born Englishman’, Sheills added. 6

It was only in the later eighteenth century, and particularly after the enterprising bookseller Francis Noble began to attribute fictional narratives such as Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) to Defoe, that Defoe’s reputation as an author of literary distinction, rather than a political writer who defended the Revolution interest, began to take shape. 7 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Defoe’s reputation as a ‘master of fictions’, grounded largely on the growing esteem for the novels he wrote between 1719 and 1724, dominated critical interest in him as a canonical author. Defoe is now probably best known as a fiction writer, and thanks largely to the prominence of his fictional writings in Ian Watt’s influential The Rise of the Novel (1957), he is a key figure in debates about the ‘rise of the novel’ in the eighteenth century. Taken as a whole, Defoe’s oeuvre (insofar as it can be known) illustrates the changing fortunes of literary production from the age of revolutions into which he was born to the subsequent century of politeness and sensibility in which his writings proved to become increasingly admired, reprinted, and in due course canonized.

He did not set out to be a writer, let alone a great one. Daniel Defoe was born as Daniel Foe, the son of James Foe (d. 1706), a successful London tallow chandler whose Puritanism would become known in his son’s lifetime as ‘Dissent’ due to the ecclesiastical schism created by the ‘Clarendon Code’ of penal laws enacted in the early years of the Restoration. 8 Young Daniel grew up in the religious culture of late Puritanism and the political culture of what Mark Goldie has identified as ‘Puritan Whiggery’ [ see   chapter   17 ]. His family’s minister was the renowned Presbyterian Samuel Annesley, and he was educated at the Reverend Charles Morton’s dissenting academy in Newington Green. It was in this nascent culture of Dissent that the young Defoe was raised. He was encouraged to begin training as a minister; had he done so, he would have been one of the first generation of Dissenting ministers wholly educated and ordained entirely outside the Church of England, but this was not to be. 9 It is possible that Defoe practised as a Dissenting preacher for a while when he was a young man in his twenties, and he would later pen a few lay sermons that were published, but he publicly acknowledged that ‘the Pulpit is none of my Office—It was my disaster first to be set a-part for, and then to be set a-part from the Honour of that Sacred Employ’. 10

Daniel chose instead to follow a secular life of trade and, ultimately, of professional writing. His life and his writings reflect the final phase of Puritanism in the age of revolutions. Certain Puritan themes remained central to Defoe’s worldview: the importance of divine providence; the primacy of Biblical scripture as a guide to the divine plan; the centrality of faith to one’s spiritual life; his orthodox trinitarianism; his plain style of prose expression; his respect for and even practice of lay preaching; and a rigorous sense of personal and social morality that found expression in his support for (and even participation in) the ‘reformation of manners’ movement. 11 Defoe’s hostility to the theatre, which he described in distinctly Puritan terms as ‘Nurseries of Crime, Colleges, or rather Universities of the Devil—Satan’s Workhouse, where all the Manufactures of Hell are propagated’, is exemplary of a worldview in which sin was omnipresent and a source of fear and social concern [ see   chapter   4 ]. 12 Indeed, Defoe’s self-proclaimed conception of his position as a writer depended upon his notion that a satirist aims to provoke and chasten the consciences of his readers [ see   chapter   11 ]. As he put it in the preface to The True-Born Englishman (1700/1), ‘ The End of Satyr is Reformation ’ ( SFS , i. 83). 13 Defoe’s vocation as a public satirist reflected the evolution of trends within Dissenting culture, particularly as Dissent came to reconcile itself with the emergence of a post-revolutionary public sphere. 14

Over the course of Defoe’s lifetime, the social and cultural worlds of Dissent became more securely urban and mercantile, just like Defoe himself. Without ever abandoning his piety, Defoe turned his talents towards the world around him. He sought to understand and describe that world for his contemporaries, and as it happens his works have become an invaluable guide to his world for later historians of his age. 15

The Scribbler

Defoe’s life as a writer mirrored substantial changes in English literary culture over his lifetime. Defoe claimed that his first publication was a 1683 tract in which he argued against supporting the Ottoman Turks in their war against the Catholic Habsburgs—a point ‘which was taken very unkindly indeed’ by his Whig friends—but no copy of this work survives, and it is unclear whether it ever existed ( Appeal , 51). The first work of Defoe’s which survives and can be definitively attributed to him is A Letter to a Dissenter from a Friend at the Hague (1688), in which he warned his Dissenting friends against the dangers of allying with King James II ( Appeal , 51–2). He published at least ten more tracts in the 1690s. 16 Defoe is most often categorized as a characteristically eighteenth-century author, partly because the bulk of his publications were produced after 1700, but also because the concept of a ‘long eighteenth century’ beginning with the Restoration (and coincidentally the putative year of Defoe’s birth) has long operated as a category of periodization in English literary and historical studies. The fact that Defoe’s literary reputation, and particularly his reputation as a novelist, only grew in esteem over the course of the rest of the eighteenth century has helped to reinforce this notion of him as an eighteenth-century author. 17 Yet it is worth remembering that Defoe lived more than half of his life in the chronological seventeenth century, and his mental world was in many ways ensconced within the concerns of that revolutionary age. Like so many of his contemporaries, Defoe knew that the revolutions of the Stuart era had not been fully settled. They had simply created possibilities for seeing the world anew, and no one of his generation did more to exploit those new mental horizons in print than Defoe.

Print is the key for understanding Defoe’s significance in his own day, but the print culture of his lifetime differed from the late Hanoverian and Victorian world that would canonize him as a great author. Defoe wrote in a time when authorship was considered to be an act rather than a profession, and quite often writing was a suspect act that was liable to get one in trouble. 18 Defoe learned this the hard way when he was prosecuted for seditious libel in 1703 for his authorship of The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702). Defoe’s experience of imprisonment—a large fine and three days of spectacular punishment in the pillory on 29, 30, and 31 July 1703—was a key turning point in his life: it signalled his moment of transition from a controversial scribbler to a writer with privileged contacts at the highest levels of government. 19 Robert Harley, then Speaker of the House of Commons and soon to be made secretary of state for the Northern Department, contacted Defoe while he was imprisoned in Newgate with an offer of patronage and relief from his suffering.

In his personal apologia published after the Hanoverian accession, An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), Defoe drew a parallel between this offer from Harley and the Biblical encounter between Christ and the faithful blind man, who when asked ‘ What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? ’ replied ‘My Answer is plain in my Misery, Lord, that I may receive my Sight ’ ( Appeal , 12). 20 To see, for Defoe, was to write. Harley’s reprieve gave Defoe a chance to write again. Not long thereafter, Defoe would publish his Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704), which argued against the restoration of pre-publication licensing, but also that authorial accountability should be established by a requirement that every published work should include the name of the author. Furthermore, he thought that authors should own ‘an undoubted exclusive Right to the Property’ of their works ( PEW , viii. 158). Defoe was possibly the earliest advocate for an author’s property rights in their writings; he argued for something closer to a common law right of property in an author’s works: ‘A Book is the Author’s Property, ’tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain’. 21 This argument did not prevail in law, however. When a change in copyright came with the coming into effect of the Statute of Anne (8 Ann. c. 19) in 1710, property rights were granted not to authors but to booksellers, and only for a term of fourteen years for ‘new books’, with the possibility of extension for a second fourteen-year term. Copyright for ‘existing books’ was granted to their present owners for twenty-one years. The terms of the act would remain controversial, and Defoe’s arguments for a common right of intellectual property in written works would be taken up most enthusiastically by the booksellers rather than authors until the matter was definitively settled in favour of fixed statutory limits by the Lords’ decision in Donaldson v. Becket (1774). 22

Defoe’s writing career, despite his prodigious efforts and his relative success as a professional scribbler, relied upon a remarkably diverse stream of income from various sources, amongst which payment for copy was one of the least important. To be sure, he prospered more than most of his Grub Street contemporaries. Robert Harley’s patronage was crucial in allowing Defoe to travel extensively whilst also maintaining his prodigious periodical and pamphlet writing in Anne’s reign. Estimates regarding the amount of patronage Defoe received from the government vary considerably. An anonymous pamphlet, The Republican Bullies (1705), claimed that he received ‘a handsome Allowance, (viz.) 100 l . for the first Volume’ of the Review . Novak estimates that he received £200 per annum from government secret service funds whilst writing the Review and other works; Downie’s ‘meanest estimate’ is an annual income of £250 that may have been as high as £400; Backscheider contends that Defoe earned somewhere between £400 and £500 per year from at least 1707 until the death of the queen, thanks to his connections to Harley, Sunderland, and Godolphin. 23 Contemporaries certainly thought Defoe was well paid. Oldmixon claimed that Harley ‘paid Foe better than he did Swift , looking on him as the shrewder Head of the Two for Business’. 24

After Harley’s fall from power and the Hanoverian accession in 1714, Defoe became more reliant upon commercial income from his relationships with the publishing industry; here too he was relatively well paid for his efforts. For pamphleteering, John Baker paid Defoe two guineas for every 500 copies of a sixpence pamphlet during the latter years of Anne’s reign. Richard Janeway was more generous: on at least one occasion, he paid four guineas plus some free copies for every 1,000 pamphlets sold. Defoe had a similar arrangement with William Taylor, the publisher for the first edition of Robinson Crusoe . He was paid £10 for the original print run of 1,000 copies of the first volume, and £10 10 s . more upon the printing of the second volume in 1,000 copies, along with provision for a supplementary payment of £5 if 500 copies of that printing were sold. For the third volume of Crusoe , Defoe was to be paid 15 guineas for every 1,000 copies printed. 25

But it was through his ownership of several periodicals that Defoe may have made serious profits from his writing; Backscheider estimates that he earned perhaps as much as £1,200 per year by the 1720s. 26 As chief proprietor for the Review , Defoe had supplemented his small income from sales of the periodical, which was barely profitable, by selling advertisement space in its pages, and by collecting payments from readers for additional services rendered, such as offering advice on casuistic matters, problem solving, or in gratitude for having written something desirable in its pages. McVeagh estimates that he may have earned as much as £50 per year from advertisement revenues, but he garnered the rather more substantial sum of £1,300 annually from his ‘Scandal Club business’, although he only kept the latter running for less than two years from 1704 to 1705. The Scandal Club offered a section devoted to questions from readers, often of a personal or moral nature, that would be answered in the journal. Or, as Defoe put it, ‘Here are Questions in Divinity, Morality, Love, State, War, Trade, Language, Poetry, Marriage, Drunkenness, Whoring, Gaming, Vowing, and the like’. 27 The business of answering questions and publishing puff pieces for readers was apparently a lucrative one. Defoe’s erstwhile friend and Grub Street competitor John Dunton complained that the Review ’s ‘interloping’ on Dunton’s idea of answering readers’ cases of conscience cost Dunton £200 in lost income; he also accused Defoe of ‘re-printing a Copy’ of one of Defoe’s earliest published poems, The Character of the Late Dr. Samuel Annesley (1697), which had allegedly been given to Dunton for publication but was in fact printed and sold by the bookseller Elizabeth Whitlock instead. 28 After the Review , Defoe would also manage periodicals such as Mercator (26 May 1713–20 July 1714), the Monitor (22 April–7 August 1714), the Manufacturer (30 October 1719–9 March 1721), the Commentator (1 January–6 September 1720), and the Director (5 October 1720–16 January 1721), and it was from these publications that he may have profited handsomely.

These earnings were considerable for a writer of his day, and Defoe may be considered one of the few Grub Street scribblers who managed to earn a respectable living from his pen. Samuel Johnson’s annual income was under £100 for the first twenty years of his London career, which roughly coincided with the two decades succeeding Defoe’s death in 1731. 29 Nevertheless, Defoe did not rely upon income from his writing alone, and he maintained a diversified income stream throughout his life.

Along with his work as a writer, Defoe remained active as a businessman and a high-risk investor in various projects [ see   chapter   14 ]. His first major investment was his marriage on 1 January 1684 to a cooper’s daughter, Mary Tuffley (1665–1732), who brought him a dowry of £3,700. This considerable sum allowed Defoe the capital and business networks he required to set up his trade as a wholesale hosier, and it did not take long before he had expanded his ventures to include overseas imports and exports in other wholesale goods such as tobacco, logwood, wine, spirits, and cloth. Some of his more speculative investments turned out to be unfortunate, such as his purchase of seventy civet cats for about £850 in April 1692. Two months later, he made an investment of £200 in a diving bell scheme designed to recover sunken treasure. Both cases resulted in lawsuits and recriminations with his business partners, including with his own mother-in-law, Joan Tuffley. In addition to these cases, Defoe’s liabilities extended well beyond his ability to pay, and he found himself with £17,000 of debt claimed by his creditors. By the end of the year, Defoe was bankrupt and committed to the Fleet Prison on 29 October 1692; he was released upon recognizances but returned again on 12 February 1693. 30

This was a first-hand experience with what he would call ‘the Poverty of Disaster’ which ‘falls chiefly on the middling Sorts of People, who have been Trading-Men, but by Misfortune or Mismanagement, or both, fall from flourishing Fortunes into Debt, Bankruptcy, Jails, Distress and all Sorts of Misery’. 31 In several works, Defoe defended the practice of declaring bankruptcy. He saw it as an honest and honourable recourse for a trader who had run into unforeseen financial difficulties: ‘Certainly honesty obliges every man, when he sees that his stock is gone, that he is below the level, and eating into the estates of other men, to put a stop to it; and to do it in time, while something is left’ ( RDW , vii. 83). Bankruptcy and, even more so, imprisonment for debt were not uncommon experiences for middle-class traders in eighteenth-century England. Thirty-three thousand businesses went bankrupt in the eighteenth century, and over 300,000 people were imprisoned for debt. It has recently been estimated that perhaps 7% of all London men would experience incarceration for debt during their lifetime. 32 In 1709, Defoe estimated that there were 80,000 men imprisoned for debt in England, ‘most of whom have Families, Wives, and Children innumerable, whose Miseries and Disasters are deriv’d from’ such incarceration. Defoe’s passion for this matter derived from his personal experiences with imprisonment. 33

Somewhat miraculously, Defoe managed to settle his terms with his creditors, and he negotiated a relatively quick release from prison in 1693. It is not clear how he accomplished this. Defoe credited ‘the late kings Bounty’ ( Letters , 17) with his financial salvation. Soon thereafter he ‘was invited by some Merchants … to settle at Cadiz in Spain ’, but he demurred and instead was able to secure a new position from the crown ‘without the least application’ ( Appeal , 5–6) as an accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty after his release.

Defoe managed around the same time to open a brick and pantile factory in Tilbury that promised to become very profitable given the growing market for building trades in the London area. He claimed to have employed ‘a hundred Poor Familys at work and … Generally Made Six hundred pound profit per Annum’ ( Letters , 17). He was forced to sell the factory as a result of his prosecution for The Shortest-Way . 34 The timing of the sale was truly unfortunate, as it occurred just before the great storm of 26–7 November 1703, an event that immediately created substantial new demand for the factory’s products. Rather than profiting from brick and pantile sales from the great rebuilding after the storm, Defoe turned to the book trade and rapidly published a series of tracts relating to the natural disaster: The Lay-Man’s Sermon ; a poem, An Essay on the Late Storm ; and a journalistic account titled simply The Storm (1704). 35 Although Defoe’s business interests along with their accompanying debts would persist through his life, his two moments of imprisonment and prosecution for bankruptcy in 1692–3 and later for seditious libel in 1703 proved to be decisive in focusing his attention towards writing as both a source of income and a vocation [ see   chapter   12 ].

Defoe’s literary production was shaped by his experience of a series of personal misfortunes and twists of fate that were also key moments in his life. The bankruptcy proceedings prompted Defoe’s emergence as a well-known writer, mainly of poems and satires, in the 1690s. Harley’s reprieve granted after Defoe’s second imprisonment and his pillorying a decade later initiated a new phase of work as propagandist for the government, in which he devoted himself primarily to journalism and pamphleteering [ see   chapters   6 , 7 , and   20 ]. After the Hanoverian accession resulted in the fall from power of his primary patron, Robert Harley, Defoe would once again reshape his literary career as he began to concentrate on crafting and marketing narratives (both fictional and non-fictional or an amalgam of both) and guidebooks and didactic manuals such as The Family Instructor (1715, 1718), The Compleat English Tradesman (1725–7), and A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) [ see   chapters   3 , 5 , and   8 ].

Self-Fashioning in Print

Although Defoe is best known today as a novelist and a political commentator or propagandist, for much of his career as a writer he conceived of and presented himself to his publics primarily as a satirist. Throughout his lifetime and well afterwards, Defoe was best known as ‘the author of the True-Born Englishman’, a work that he significantly subtitled ‘a satyr’. The first authorized collection of Defoe’s writings was titled A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man (1703); this was followed soon thereafter by A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman (1705). 36 Both volumes were reissued in 1710 as a two-volume collection. In 1721, Defoe published yet another collection of his writings with the title The Genuine Works of Mr. Daniel D’Foe, Author of The True-Born English-Man, a Satyr , which was largely a reprint of the earlier anthologies. These collections of Defoe’s works sold well throughout his lifetime, and they were priced high enough to suggest that the works must have attracted a relatively wealthy readership. 37

These various editions of Defoe’s collected works, curated and edited by their author, offer some significant clues as to how Defoe conceived of his own authorial persona. The prominence of The True-Born Englishman as his most noteworthy work is clear. Perhaps because of the patriotic connotations evoked by the title, Defoe consistently wished to be known as the author of this ‘satiric’ poem. The True-Born Englishman was the first work of his that sold well. Although he claimed that the work brought him no personal profit, Defoe proudly announced (with no doubt a substantial amount of hyperbole) that it had earned the booksellers over £1,000 profit through sales of nine authorized and twelve pirated editions, including 80,000 copies sold for ‘2d. or at a Penny’. 38 The size of these print runs is likely exaggerated: more reliable evidence for the authorized printing of Henry Sacheverell’s best-selling sermon, The Perils of False Brethren (1709), indicates that the work sold just under 54,000 copies, and it is highly unlikely that Defoe’s poem outsold Sacheverell’s sermon. 39

As a defence of King William and the Glorious Revolution, The True-Born Englishman suited Defoe’s public self-fashioning as a vociferous defender of the Revolution cause and an intimate friend of the king. The scandal and spectacular punishment associated with The Shortest-Way may have brought Defoe more notoriety, his continuous writing for the Review for almost a decade may have secured him the nickname ‘Mr. Review’, and his authorship of Robinson Crusoe would seal his posthumous reputation as a novelist of great genius, but it was The True-Born Englishman that Defoe would continually refer back to as his most noteworthy work.

The frontispiece to Defoe’s True Collection is an engraved portrait of the author (Figure 1.1 ). This portrait, drawn by Jeremiah Tavernier and engraved by Michael Van der Gucht, presented Defoe as he wished to be seen by his readers. He appeared handsome, well dressed, and spectacularly bewigged with a large perruque. Below his portrait appeared the words ‘Daniel DeFoe, author of the Trueborn Englishman’, along with a coat of arms. This rather august self-presentation was advertised for sale in the Daily Courant for 22 July 1703, just one week before Defoe’s first day of punishment in the pillory. It was clearly designed to counter the now common image of Defoe as a rogue writer and a convicted criminal, and perhaps to capitalize upon his new-found notoriety. It also made the bourgeois tradesman appear as a gentleman worthy of respect. The portrait may have been printed and sold independently from the work. Although there is no evidence that such individualized sales were advertised, a copy of Defoe’s pamphlet Advice to All Parties (1705) has the portrait inserted as a frontispiece. It also appears as the frontispiece to a copy of Defoe’s Second Volume of the Writings (1705) and was tipped in to serve as the frontispiece for some editions of his Jure Divino as well. There are minor differences in the engravings for these works: some appear with attribution of the artists Tavernier and Van der Gucht, others do not; Defoe’s eyes are reworked in later prints. 40 The image was obviously popular enough to demand a new execution of the original drawing for later printings.

Aside from the frontispiece to the True Collection , the only other work of Defoe’s to include an authorial portrait was his major poem Jure Divino (1706) (Figure 1.2 ). Unlike his other works, most of which were composed and published with astounding speed (often in less than a year), Defoe spent five years working on this poem. He also experimented with a subscription model for marketing and selling the folio edition for the substantial price of fifteen shillings. The experiment did not go as planned, however: the list of subscribers was not as substantial as he had hoped, and Defoe ultimately had to apologize for delays in publication. By the time it appeared, pirate editions were already in the works and would soon appear. 41 Defoe must have hoped that this publication would secure his reputation as a poet of major importance, and therefore he commissioned a more detailed and impressive version of the True Collection portrait from Van der Gucht, claiming that it had been ‘prepar’d at the request of some of my Friends who are pleas’d to value it more than it deserves’ ( Letters , 124). It was printed as the frontispiece for the folio edition of Jure Divino . Here, Defoe’s genteel dress and long wig appear even more elaborately detailed. The coat of arms is reproduced below, along with the Latin epigraph ‘ laudatur et alget ’, identified as from Juvenal’s first satire. The quote from Juvenal ( Satires 1.74) reads ‘ probitas laudatur et alget ’, or ‘honesty is praised and is left to shiver’. Defoe significantly omits probitas from his epigraph, thus suggesting that it was the honest author himself who had once been praised for his work and then cruelly abandoned afterwards, which may be a reference to his prosecution for seditious libel in 1703.

Frontispiece, Daniel Defoe, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man (1703). Courtesy of McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, shelf mark PR3401 1703.

Frontispiece, Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino: A Satyr. In Twelve Books. By the Author of The True-Born Englishman . Courtesy of Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, shelf mark PR3404 .J89.

This portrait may also have been sold independently. Defoe noted in a letter to his friend John Fransham that it cost one shilling ( Letters , 124), a price that was close to the market rate for folio sized portraits. A few years later, unframed mezzotint print portraits of Henry Sacheverell would sell for one shilling and six pence. The British Museum and the Wellcome Library both hold a singular copy of the print in which the epigraph from Juvenal is printed around the oval coat of arms and the subject is identified below as ‘Daniel De Foe, author of the True Born Englishman’. 42 These separates may have been sold for a shilling each at print shops or from booksellers, although no contemporary advertisements for them seem to have been placed in the newspaper press. Ads for such portraits tended to be reserved for clergymen or other figures of a higher social status than the struggling writer and bankrupted trader Defoe.

Defoe’s investment in commissioning portraits for his True Collection and Jure Divino offers useful clues as to how he wished to be seen, and how he wished to have his authorized works recognized by his readers. The authorial portraits are testaments to his attempt to establish himself as a genteel author worthy of respect, rather than as a Grub Street scribbler. This was a cause that he took up in the Review at the same time. He admitted that he could not speak Latin with fluency: ‘Latin, Non ita Latinus sum ut Latine Loqui —I easily acknowledge my self Blockhead enough, to have lost the Fluency of Expression in the Latin’. This did not deter him however from challenging the Whig journalist John Tutchin (who had provoked the ire that had inspired The True Born Englishman ) to a translation contest. He dared his adversary to translate one Latin, one French, and one Italian author into English and then to retranslate each, ‘the English into French, the French into Italian, and the Italian into Latin’. Whoever managed to do this best and quickest would owe the other £20, a considerable sum. ‘And by this’, Defoe declared, ‘he shall have an Opportunity to show the World, how much De Foe the Hosier, is Inferior in Learning, to Mr. Tutchin the Gentleman’. 43 Tutchin did not take him up on the challenge. 44 Defoe was aware that his bourgeois and Dissenting origins disadvantaged his authorial status as a polite writer, but he never renounced them. Instead, he struggled to convince his contemporaries that even a Dissenter from the middling sorts could outperform his gentleman rivals.

Further evidence that Defoe continued to seek genteel status throughout his life exists in the survival of a portrait of the author in oil on canvas (Figure 1.3 ). The 762 x 635 mm painting survives in the Caird collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but the date of composition is unknown. If it was painted from the life, it must have been commissioned well after Defoe’s earlier engraved portraits for his printed works, as the painted portrait represents a man considerably older in appearance than the pictures published in the 1700s when Defoe would have been in his forties. The Greenwich portrait was therefore probably painted in the 1710s or 1720s, or perhaps even later. 45 This is possibly the only surviving contemporary painting of Defoe, and it was not reproduced in print for popular consumption. Defoe presented himself in his writings as an expert on painting, and it is possible that he found some inspiration for his prose fictions in the works of contemporary Dutch realist painters. 46 It is plausible that he would have commissioned a formal portrait of himself later in life as a means of asserting his reputation as an accomplished man of means.

Defoe’s efforts to establish himself as an author of recognized genius and politeness evidently did not pay off. The authorized portraits of Defoe as Juvenalian satirist and esteemed ‘author of the True Born Englishman’ were more than matched by less flattering images of him as a Grub Street hack who had stood in the pillory. Hills’s pirate edition of Jure Divino included its own crude portrait of the author that was much less flattering and lacked the genteel coat of arms and Latin epigram (Figure 1.4 ). Another piracy by Benjamin Bragg included an even more damning image of Defoe standing in the pillory (Figure 1.5 ). 47 These critical effigies served to reinforce the general impression of Defoe as a writer who was not to be taken seriously, and they undermined his efforts to rehabilitate his public reputation in the wake of his spectacular punishment for The Shortest-Way . Other contemporary representations of Defoe made little effort to depict him realistically. His journalistic guise as Mr Review allowed him to be represented as a generic Whig writer, just one of ‘the British Libellers’ in The Three Champions ( c. 1710), who ‘have the Pillory disgraced and may the Gallows ’, or one amongst several monstrous heads on a hydra-like beast in Faction Display’d (1709). In A Character of a Turn-coat: Or, The True Picture of an English Monster (1707), an effigy of Defoe is paired with one of Tutchin, in which both are depicted as two-faced, gender-bending, position-shifting, untrustworthy scribblers. 48 The overall effect of these caricatures was to present Defoe as an entirely untrustworthy writer.

Portrait of Daniel Defoe, oil painting. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection BHC2648. https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14122.html .

Frontispiece, P. Hills’s pirated edition of Jure Divino (1706). Courtesy of Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, shelf mark PR3404 .J89 1706.

Frontispiece, Benjamin Bragg’s piracy of Jure Divino (1706). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, shelf mark Ik D362 706Je.

The most sophisticated critical graphic satire of Defoe was George Bickham’s The Whig’s Medly (1711) (Figure 1.6 ). In this print, Defoe appears twice: first at the top as ‘A Deformed head in the Pillory’. He also figures prominently in the centre of the image, depicted as a writer receiving advice from both the Pope and the Devil as he composes a text titled ‘Resistance Lawful’, a reference to Defoe’s controversial advocacy of resistance theory in Jure Divino and the Review . The text below Defoe’s head in the pillory reads:

What awkward ill-look’d fellow’s this? He has an ugly frightful phys; And sure as black his conscience is? Cadaverous, black, blue, and green. Not fit in publick to be seen. With dirt besmear’d, & goggle-ey’d With a long nose, & mouth as wide; With blobber lips, & lockram jaws, Warts, wrinkles, wens, & other flaws: With nitty beard, & neck that’s scabby, And in a dress, that’s very shabby. Who this should be I do not know, Unless a Whig? I guess he’s so. If I am right, pray take a throw.

The recurrent rhyming of the last three lines with the name ‘Defoe’ must have been obvious to most contemporary readers of the print. Despite the fact that the print was produced in 1711, when Defoe was writing primarily in support of Harley’s Tory ministry, Bickham has no reservations about associating him with the Whig cause. Surely the main reason for this was Defoe’s strident defence of resistance theory and his consistent attacks on the resurgent high church cause epitomized by Dr Henry Sacheverell, whose sermons denigrated all justifications for resistance as sinful heresy. Defoe here is associated with the disgraced Oliver Cromwell, who ‘is gone I fear to Hell, to be Protector’, and the Calves Head Club, an imaginary club devoted to commemorating the regicide of Charles I by holding a feast on 30 January every year. 49

Bickham’s print confirms Defoe’s contemporary reputation as a dangerous revolutionary subversive figure. It also invokes a graphic trope that had become common in the Sacheverell controversies, wherein a controversial writer is portrayed receiving counsel from nefarious figures such as the Pope, Oliver Cromwell, or the Devil. Both Sacheverell and his Whig nemesis Benjamin Hoadly were depicted in this manner, including in Bickham’s own earlier print The High Church Champion and His Two Seconds (1709–10). 50 In The Whig’s Medly, Bickham pays Defoe an ironic compliment by placing such a common scribbler in the company of clergymen, even if the intention is to satirize him. 51

George Bickham, The Whig’s Medly (1711). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, shelf mark 711.00.00.01+. http://hdl.handle.net/10079/digcoll/549567 .

Defoe was unable to control the public reception of his authorial persona. Given the promiscuity of his writing practices, and his penchant for publishing anonymously or pseudonymously, it is hard to see how he could ever have succeeded in doing so. The first reason Defoe gave for publishing his self-justifying Appeal to Honour and Justice was, he said, because ‘I think I have long enough been made Fabula Vulgi [the talk of the town], and born the Weight of general Slander’ ( Appeal , 2). Despite the fact that the vast majority of Defoe’s publications appeared anonymously or pseudonymously, his authorial persona figured prominently, albeit rather unfavourably, in early eighteenth-century print culture. His conviction and punishment for seditious libel in 1703 proved to be difficult to surmount. While he would eventually emerge in the nineteenth century as a liberal culture hero who would be lionized as a martyr for the cause of freedom of speech, in his own day Defoe could never escape the stigma of his conviction for seditious libel.

The memory of his time in the pillory never left Defoe. Swift dismissively referred to Defoe in a pamphlet of 1709 as ‘the Fellow that was Pillor’d , I have forgot his Name’, who ‘is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a Rogue, that there is no enduring him’. A few years later, during Harley’s administration, Joseph Addison noted that ‘the Court found him [i.e., Defoe] such a False, Shuffling, Prevaricating Rascal, that they set him aside as a Person unqualify’d to give his Testimony in a Court of Justice; advising him at the same time, as he tender’d [i.e. valued] his Ears, to forbear uttering such notorious Falshoods as he had then Publish’d’. 52 It was derisory comments such as these that encouraged Pope to include Defoe amongst his literary dunces in The Dunciad (1728), first as ‘ear-less on high, stood pillory’d D—’ and later in the Dunciad Variorium (1729) as ‘Earless on high, stood un-abash’d Defoe’, even when he would admit privately that ‘there’s something good in all he [Defoe] has writ’. 53

Allegorical and Historical Stories

Defoe tried to defend himself and his actions in An Appeal to Honour and Justice , a tract which served as a sort of personal memoir and defence of his public life and actions in support of the post-revolutionary governments. But the work also signalled a new interest in writing memoirs themselves, in both non-fictional and fictional forms. It is arguable that Defoe stumbled upon the fictional novel form through his experiments with memoir writing in the years following the Hanoverian accession, even if he had demonstrated an interest in fictional narratives throughout his life. 54 The manuscript of his ‘Historicall collections, or, Memoires of passages & stories collected from severall authours’, which he composed for his fiancée Mary Tuffley as a young man in 1682, contains a series of short stories and anecdotes of heroic tales drawn from a variety of sources ancient and modern. 55 It certainly demonstrates an early interest in fiction writing—and he incorporated fictional aspects to much of his published work, such as the satiric fantasy about a voyage to the moon in The Consolidator (1705)—but Defoe would not take to writing fiction qua fiction until much later in life. Even as he began to compose secret histories and novels in the early Georgian era, Defoe constructed and presented these fictional narratives under the guise of truth, much as he had done when writing his satires, histories, and political commentary. The much heralded ‘realism’ of Defoe’s fiction emerged out of his skill in crafting stories replete with such detail that they seemed to be true to all but the most sceptical of readers. 56

Before he wrote Robinson Crusoe , Defoe wrote several secret histories or otherwise contrived memoirs based upon claims to truth-telling that made the texts plausible if not entirely believable [ see   chapter   9 ]. Despite denying his authorship ( Appeal , 47), Defoe’s The Secret History of the White-Staff in three parts (1714–15), along with The Secret History of the Secret History of the White-Staff (1715), was widely believed to be his work as it offered a strident defence of his patron Harley’s conduct in office as Lord Treasurer. This work heralded the publication of similar works, such as Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager (1717), before he produced the famous Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Despite being marketed as the memoirs of a most remarkable life, Crusoe ’s truth claims were flimsy, and the work was quickly criticized as an imposition upon the public. Charles Gildon’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D---- de F--, of London (1719) seized upon the narrative inconsistencies and absurdities in Defoe’s Crusoe as a means of ridiculing the novel and denigrating Defoe’s skills as an author. Gildon accuses Defoe of constructing a ‘Fable’ or a fiction without even a ‘useful Moral, either express’d or understood’ to justify its impostures; instead, he claims somewhat improbably that Crusoe was ‘design’d against a publick Good’ by scaring its readers from ‘going to Sea’, and thus will have the effect of impoverishing and endangering the British nation by discouraging maritime ventures. The novel’s protagonist is no hero, but rather an incoherent and impious fool, much like its author. Later, Gildon argues that ‘the Design of the Publication of this Book was not sufficient to justify and make Truth of what you allow to be Fiction and Fable; what you mean by Legitimating, Invention and Parable, I know not; unless you would have us think, that the Manner of your telling a Lie will make it a Truth’. 57

Gildon’s criticisms, while amusing at times, hardly affected the reception of the novel, aside from publicly outing Defoe as its author, but they bothered Defoe enough to provoke a response of sorts when he wrote the third book in his Crusoe trilogy, his Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720). Unlike the first two books, this work sought to justify his fictional tales of Crusoe by demonstrating—contra Gildon—that there were indeed wholesome morals to be derived from them. Furthermore, he embraced Gildon’s satiric equation of Crusoe with Defoe himself. Here, Crusoe declares ‘that the Story [in the first two novels], though Allegorical, is also Historical, and that it is the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexampled Misfortunes, and of a Variety not to be met with in the World’. He insists that ‘the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, are one whole Scheme of a real Life of eight and twenty Years, spent in the most wandring desolate and afflicting Circumstances that ever Man went through … In a Word, there’s not a Circumstance in the imaginary Story, but has its just Allusion to a real Story, and chimes Part for Part, and Step for Step with the inimitable Life of Robinson Crusoe’ ( Novels , iii. 51, 52–3).

Some critics have taken Defoe at his word and have attempted to read Crusoe as an autobiographical allegory, despite obvious difficulties in drawing the parallels too closely. 58 Certainly, Defoe’s invocation of Crusoe’s life of ‘unexampled Misfortunes, and of a Variety not to be met with in the World’ ( Novels , iii. 51) fits well with the way in which he told his own life story as one of constant persecution intermittently interrupted by miraculous reprieves in An Appeal to Honour and Justice . It is on this very abstract level that the analogy between Crusoe’s story and Defoe’s life remains convincing. Any attempt to fix Defoe’s authorial persona to a precise identity or meaning is bound to fail, not least because the writer himself was committed to using the affordances of early modern print culture to develop multiple personalities, different voices, and a radically unfixed, perpetually labile identity. 59 In the published version of his 1976 Ford Lectures, J. P. Kenyon observed that ‘despite the vast amount of work that has been done on Daniel Defoe, there is much in his life and work which is still mysterious’. 60 Kenyon’s remark continues to ring true.

Further Reading

Paula R. Backscheider , Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989 ).

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Paula R. Backscheider , ‘ Defoe, Daniel (1660?–1731) ’, ODNB , https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7421 .

Brian Cowan , ‘Daniel Defoe’s Review and the Transformations of the English Periodical’, HLQ , 77:1 ( 2014 ), 79–110.

Laura A. Curtis , The Elusive Daniel Defoe (London: Vision, 1984 ).

Peter Earle , Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor 1685 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977 ).

Peter Earle , The World of Defoe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976 ).

P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens , The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988 ).

J. P. Kenyon , Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 ).

Thomas Keymer , Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019 ).

John Robert Moore , Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958 ).

Maximillian E. Novak , Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 ).

Michael Watts , The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 ).

Warrant to the Justices of Assize and Gaol Delivery for the Western Circuit (31 May 1687), TNA, SP 44/337, f. 281; Peter Earle , Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor 1685 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 180 , 223 n. 39.

  Nicholas Seager , ‘“A Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read”: History, Fiction, and Politics in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier ’, ECF , 20:4 (2008), 479–505 ; Blair Worden , Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London: Penguin, 2001) ; Pat Rogers , The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 28–9 .

  Review , ii. 804 (18 December 1705).

  Brian Cowan (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 228; T. B. Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials , 34 vols (London: Hansard, 1809–28), xv. 213 , 324, 341.

  John Oldmixon , The History of England, During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I (1735), 235 .

  Robert Shiells , The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland , 5 vols (1753), iv. 325 , 313; Pat Rogers , Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Routledge, 1972), 311–27 .

  P. N. Furbank , and W. R. Owens , ‘Defoe and Francis Noble’, ECF , 4:4 (1992), 301–15 ; P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens , The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988) .

  George Southcombe , ‘Dissent and the Restoration Church of England’, in The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 , ed. Grant Tapsell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 195–216 .

  Mark Goldie , Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (London: Boydell, 2016), 194–5 ; Paula R. Backscheider , Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 7–21 ; Michael Watts , The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 315–16 .

  Review , vi. 427 (22 October 1709); for speculation on Defoe’s preaching, see Rogers, Grub Street , 316; Furbank and Owens, Critical Bibliography , 49, 246, 247 (nos 53(P), 250c, 250i).

  Katherine Clark , Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) ; G. A. Starr , Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965) ; J. Paul Hunter , The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966) ; Charles Eaton Burch , ‘Defoe and the Edinburgh Society for the Reformation of Manners’, RES , 16:63 (1940), 306–12 .

  Review , vi. 328 (1 September 1709).

  Ashley Marshall , ‘Daniel Defoe as Satirist’, HLQ , 70:4 (2007), 553–76 ; Ashley Marshall , The Practice of Satire in England 1658–1770 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 52–3, 153–68 .

  Brian Cowan , ‘The Public Sphere’, in The Cambridge History of Britain, vol. 3, Early Modern Britain, 1500–1750 , ed. Susan Amussen and Paul Monod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, c .2025) ; Mark Knights , Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) .

  Peter Earle , The World of Defoe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976) .

  Furbank and Owens, Critical Bibliography , 8–17 (nos 4–13(P)).

  Lawrence Lipking , ‘Inventing the Eighteenth Centuries: A Long View’, in The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution , ed. Leo Damrosch (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 7–25 ; Furbank and Owens, Canonisation ; Brian Cowan , ‘“Restoration” England and the History of Sociability’, in British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Challenging the Anglo-French Connection , ed. Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé (London: Boydell, 2019), 7–24 .

  Mark Rose , Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–10 ; Jody Greene , The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press , 2005).

  J. R. Moore , Defoe in the Pillory and Other Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1939) ; Thomas Keymer , Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 89–155 .

Defoe paraphrases Mark 10:51 and Luke 18:41.

  Review , vi. 649 (2 February 1710); Mark Rose , Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35 , 39.

  Rose, Authors and Owners ; Trevor Ross , Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) .

  The Republican Bullies: Or a Sham Battel Between Two of a Side (1705), 4; Novak, Daniel Defoe , 211; J. A. Downie , ‘Secret Service Payments to Daniel Defoe, 1710–1714’, RES , 30:120 (1979), 437–41 (439); Paula R. Backscheider , ‘Defoe, Daniel (1660?–1731)’, ODNB , https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7421 .

  John Oldmixon , The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring (1715), 276 .

  Brean S. Hammond , Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 74 , citing Backscheider, Daniel Defoe , 371, 434, 465; Henry Clinton Hutchins , Robinson Crusoe and Its Printing 1719–1731: A Bibliographical Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 40–1 . For more on the printing of Crusoe , see Keith Maslen , An Early London Printing House at Work: Studies in the Bowyer Ledgers (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 17–25, 57–61 .

  Backscheider, Daniel Defoe , 465. Michael Harris , London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987), 49–64 , offers a less sanguine view of the profit potential of early eighteenth-century periodicals.

John McVeagh, ‘Introduction’ to Review , i. xxiii, xxv, xxvii; Review , i. 391 (Supplement for September 1704).

  John Dunton , The Life and Errors of John Dunton , 2 vols (1818), ii. 423 , 424.

  Robert D. Hume , ‘The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740’, HLQ , 69:4 (2006), 487–533 (526); J. A. Downie , ‘Periodicals, the Book Trade and the “Bourgeois Public Sphere”’, Media History , 14:3 (2008), 261–74 .

  Backscheider, Daniel Defoe , 55–8.

  Review , iv. 117 (3 April 1707).

  Tawny Paul , The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 5, 45–6 .

  Review , v. 676 (1 March 1709).

  Backscheider, Daniel Defoe , 63–6, 139–40.

Defoe, The Storm (1704), ed. Richard Hamblyn (London: Penguin, 2003); Backscheider, Daniel Defoe , 141–5.

For the unauthorized Collection of 1703, see Furbank and Owens, Critical Bibliography , 4.

  Marshall, ‘Defoe as Satirist’ , x.

Defoe, A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-born Englishman (1705), sig. A3r.

  Cowan (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell , 209.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, shelfmark *EC7 D3623 705a; McGill University Rare Books & Special Collections, shelfmarks PR3401 1703, PR3401 1705, and PR3404 J8 1706.

  Paula R. Backscheider , ‘The Verse Essay, John Locke, and Defoe’s Jure Divino ’, ELH , 55:1 (1988), 99–124 ; Margaret J. M. Ezell , The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 5: 1645–1714, The Later Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 482 ; John Robert Moore , Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 236–9 .

  Post Boy , no. 2301 (9–11 February 1710); British Museum [BM], registration no. 1872,0713.166; Wellcome Library Image Collection, no. 2425i (accessed 10 November 2020), https://wellcomecollection.org/works/u95mgb6n .

  Review , ii. 221–2 (31 May 1705).

  Brian Cowan , ‘Daniel Defoe’s Review and the Transformations of the English Periodical’, HLQ , 77:1 (2014), 79–110 (95–8).

National Maritime Museum, Caird Collection BHC2648, https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14122.html , (accessed 10 November 2020).

  Maximillian E. Novak , Trans1formations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2015), 43–60 .

  D. F. Foxon (ed.), English Verse 1701–1750 , 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), D130 (Bragg), D131 (Hills); Janine Barchas , Graphic Design, Print Culture and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42 .

BM 1868,0808.3415 (Satires 1512); BM 1868,0808.3419 (Satires 1508); Houghton Library, Harvard University, Bute Broadsides C56.

  Edward Ward , The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club (1703) .

BM 1868,0808.3427 (Satires 1498); Brian Cowan , ‘Hoadly the High and Sacheverell the Low: Religious and Political Celebrity in Post-Revolutionary England’, in Political and Religious Practice in the Early Modern British World: Essays in Honour of Peter Lake , ed. Bill Bulman and Freddy Dominguez (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 158–78 .

  Mark Knights , ‘Possessing the Visual: The Materiality of Visual Print Culture in Later Stuart Britain’, in Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 , ed. James Daybell and Peter Hinds (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 85–122 ; Mark Hallett , The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 46–55 . Bickham’s graphic oeuvre was not obviously partisan. He produced works both critical and laudatory of Whigs and Tories alike. See https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG19578 (accessed 27 September 2020).

Swift, A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England, Concerning the Sacramental Test (1709), 6, and Joseph Addison, The Late Tryal and Conviction of Count Tariff (1713), 12; both quoted in Thomas Keymer , ‘Defoe’s Ears: The Dunciad , the Pillory, and Seditious Libel’, Eighteenth-Century Novel , 6–7 (2009) , 159–96; Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory , 121–48.

  Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory , 100–1; Rogers, Grub Street , 311.

  Paula R. Backscheider , Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 125–35 ; Maximillian E. Novak , ‘ Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s Career as a Writer’, in The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe , ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 32–48 .

William Andrews Clark Library, UCLA, MS 1951.009.

  Maximillian E. Novak , ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction’, Studies in Philology , 61:4 (1964), 650–68 ; Maximillian E. Novak , Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) ; Novak, Transformations, Ideology and the Real ; Geoffrey Sill , Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 1713–1719 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1983) .

  Charles Gildon , The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D---- de F--, of London (1719), 2–3 , 33.

  George Parker , ‘The Allegory of Robinson Crusoe’, History 10:37 (1925), 11–25 ; and most recently in Michael Prince , The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019) ; Novels , iii. 11.

  Laura A. Curtis , The Elusive Daniel Defoe (London: Vision, 1984) .

  J. P. Kenyon , Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) , 57.

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