Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) was an English writer, journalist, merchant and government agent, best known for the novel Robinson Crusoe. [1] He produced several hundred works across fiction, political pamphleteering, economics and travel writing, and his realistic first-person narratives are commonly credited with helping to establish the novel as a form in English. He also ran the influential periodical The Review and is regarded as a founder of English journalism. [2]
Early life
Defoe was born around 1660 in the ward of Cripplegate in London, the son of James Foe, a tallow chandler and member of the Butchers' Company; he added the aristocratic-sounding "De" to his name in middle life. [1] The family were Presbyterian Dissenters, excluded from the universities, and he was educated instead at Charles Morton's dissenting academy at Newington Green, where the curriculum included modern subjects and plain English prose.
He entered trade as a young man, dealing in hosiery and wine, and travelled in Europe.
Merchant, rebel and pamphleteer
Defoe joined the Duke of Monmouth's unsuccessful rebellion against James II in 1685 and escaped punishment. He welcomed the accession of William of Orange in 1688 and became one of the king's most energetic defenders in print. In 1692 his business collapsed and he was declared bankrupt for a very large sum, a debt that shadowed the rest of his life. [2]
He turned increasingly to writing. An Essay upon Projects (1697) proposed schemes for insurance, banking, road building and the education of women. The True-Born Englishman (1701), a verse satire ridiculing xenophobic attacks on the Dutch-born king, was extremely popular.
In 1702 he published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an anonymous pamphlet imitating a High Church extremist calling for the suppression of Dissenters. When the irony was recognised he was prosecuted for seditious libel, fined, pilloried for three days and imprisoned in Newgate. [1] His release was arranged by Robert Harley, for whom he then worked as a political writer and intelligence agent, notably in Scotland around the Union of 1707.
Journalism
From 1704 to 1713 Defoe wrote and largely produced The Review, a periodical appearing up to three times a week that combined political commentary with essays on trade and manners. Its sustained analysis of public affairs was a model for later journalism, and he continued to write for and edit other publications under shifting political patrons. [2]
The novels
Defoe came to prose fiction late. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719 when he was about sixty, presents the memoir of a mariner shipwrecked alone on an island, told with a circumstantial realism that led many first readers to take it for fact. [3] It was an immediate success and has been continuously in print ever since; it also reflects the assumptions of its era about empire and enslavement, most visibly in Crusoe's relationship with Friday.
Further narratives followed rapidly: Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), the story of a woman's survival through theft and marriage, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a reconstruction of the 1665 epidemic presented as eyewitness testimony, Colonel Jack and Roxana (1724). [4] He also produced A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, a detailed survey of the country's economic life.
Later life and legacy
Defoe's last years were troubled by debt and litigation, and he died on 24 April 1731 in lodgings at Moorfields, London, apparently while avoiding a creditor. [1]
His documentary first-person narration influenced the English novel and reportage alike, and Robinson Crusoe became one of the most adapted and translated stories in world literature. [3]
