Daniel Defoe
1659/60–1731

Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was born in 1659 or 1660 in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, London, the son of James Foe a butcher, the change to Defoe being made by Daniel in 1703. He had a good education at a dissenting academy and was in business as a hose-factor in 1685. He apparently travelled to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, was out with Monmouth, was in King William’s army in 1688; he became bankrupt in 1692, but later paid up his debts. He next became accountant to the glass-duty commissioners and secretary in a tile factory. His Essay upon Projects appeared in 1697 and he became noted as an able pamphleteer in support of the king’s policy – as in his vigorous poem, The True-born Englishman (1701). His restless pen was active throughout the bitter struggle under Anne between the High-Church party and the Dissenters; and his famous treatise, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), first deceived and then infuriated his opponents. The House of Commons ordered the pamphlet to be burned ; and, when tried at the Old Bailey in July, he was sentenced to pay 200 marks, to stand in the pillory three times, and to be imprisoned during the queen’s pleasure. While in prison he wrote his Hymn to the Pillory. In Newgate he continued to write controversially and after his release he started his Review (February 1704–June 1713), at first a weekly, then a bi-weekly and finally a tri-weekly newspaper. This was his largest, if not his most important work, embracing, in over five thousand pages, essays on almost every branch of human knowledge. During the same nine years he published eighty distinct works. His Scandal Club was the forerunner of the Tatlers and Spectators. In November 1703 Defoe was released from prison through Harley, who got him employment. Giving Alms no Charity (1704) was a masterly denunciation of indiscriminate charity and national workshops. In 1705 came The Consolidator, a political satire, which perhaps gave a hint for Gulliver’s Travels, and in 1706 The True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal, which was thought to be founded on fact, or supposed fact. Jure Divino was a tedious political satire in twelve books of poor verse. In 1704–05 Defoe was sent by Harley on secret missions in England; in 1706–07 he was in Scotland as a secret agent to promote the Union. His History of the Union appeared in 1709. After Harley’s fall (1708) he found himself able to be a staunch Whig under Godolphin; but on Harley’s return to power (1710) he once more supported a Tory ministry. In his Review he strove to preserve the semblance of consistency; and playing a dubious part in the intrigues that preceded the accession of the House of Hanover he found himself in a general discredit which his Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715) did not remove. In 1718 he was in equivocal government service, too ingeniously sub-editing Jacobite and High-Church organs. Defoe was not scrupulous in his point of honour, but it is certain he never was a Tory. In 1715 appeared the first volume of the Family Instructor, and on 25th April 1719, the first volume of the immortal Robinson Crusoe, which, founded on the adventures of Alexander Selkirk (q.v.), at once leapt into popularity. Perhaps no man in the whole history of literature ever devised, at fifty-eight, a more splendid masterpiece of creative imagination. The same year appeared the second volume, and in 1720 the greatly inferior sequel. In this his most prolific year he also gave to the world the Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell, the famous Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Captain Singleton, a book of great brilliancy. In 1772 he issued Moll Flanders, a marvel of the novelistic art; A History of the Plague and the History of Colonel Jack, unequal, but in parts the most charming of all his books. Later works were Roxana (1724), a weaker Moll Flanders; A Tour through Great Britain (1724-26); A New Voyage round the World (1725); The Complete English Tradesman (1725-27); The Political History of the Devil (1726); Essay on the Reality of Apparitions (1727); Religious Courtship (1722); The Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed (1727); Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business (1725). He died in Ropemaker’s Alley, Moorfields on 26 April 1731, and was buried in Bunhill Fields. He remains one of our greatest English writers, a brilliant journalist, an incomparable realist, the master of a simple but subtle and artistic style.