Daniel defoe (1660-1731)

Defoe is often called the father of English journalism and the English novel. Swift dismissed him as “an illiterate figure, whose name I forget”. This was hardly fair as Defoe was a man of wide learning, speaking six modern languages and reading seven.

By birth, education and occupations Daniel Defoe was a stranger to the sphere of refined tastes and classical learning that determined the course of English literature in his lifetime. Middle class in his birth, Presbyterian in his religion, he belonged among the hardy tradefolk who, after the Restoration, slowly increased their wealth and towards the end of the 17th century began to achieve political importance. Defoe’s father was a prosperous tallow chandler (later, a butcher) of Flemish descent. As a Nonconformist, or Dissenter, Foe could not send his son to the University of Oxford or Cambridge; he sent him instead to the academy at Newington Green kept by the Reverend Charles Morton to prepare him for the Presbyterian ministry. There Defoe received an education in many ways better and broader than he would have had at an English university. Morton was an admirable teacher, later becoming first vice president of Harvard College; and the clarity, simplicity, and ease of his style of writing – together with the Bible, the works of John Bunyan, and the pulpit oratory of the day helped to form Defoe’s own literary style.

Defoe decided against the ministry and by 1683 had set up as a merchant, though in all his books he is an indefatigable preacher. In 1684, he married Mary Tuffley, the daughter of a well-to-do Dissenting merchant. Defoe called trade his "beloved subject", dealt in many commodities: tile manufacturing, ship insurance, oysters and linen, travelled widely at home and abroad, and became an acute and intelligent economic theorist, in many respects ahead of his time, but misfortune, in one form or another, dogged him continually. He wrote of himself: “No man has tasted differing fortunes more, // And thirteen times I have been rich and poor”.

With Defoe's interest in trade went an interest in politics. He used a number of pseudonyms: Ege Witness, T.Taylor, Andrew Morton, Merchant, Heliostrapolis, Secretary of the Emperor of the Moon. When the Roman Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685, Defoe as a staunch Dissenter joined the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, who tried to take the throne from James. Three years later James fled to France and Defoe rode to welcome the army of William of Orange - "William, the Glorious, Great, and Good, and Kind", as Defoe was to call him. Throughout William Ill's reign, Defoe supported him loyally, becoming his leading pamphleteer. In 1701, in reply to attacks on the “foreign” king, “Dutch William”, Defoe published his vigorous and witty poem The True-Born Englishman, where he proved that trueborn Englishman do not exist, that the English are a mixed race and therefore should not object to the foreign birth of William III.

Foreign politics also engaged Defoe's attention. It had become probable that a European war would break out as soon as the childless king of Spain died. In 1701 five gentlemen of Kent presented a petition, demanding greater defence preparations, to the House of Commons (then Tory-controlled) and were illegally imprisoned. Next morning Defoe, "guarded with about 16 gentlemen of quality", presented the speaker with his famous document Legion's Memorial, which reminded the Commons that “Englishmen are no more to be slaves to Parliament than to a King.” The Kentishmen were released. It was a courageous gesture, but it branded him in Tories’ eyes as a dangerous man who must be brought down.

What did bring him down, and led to a new phase in his career, was a religious question. During the reign of Queen Anne the persecution of the Dissenters began again. Defoe wrote the most famous and skilful of all his pamphlets, The Shortest Way With the Dissenters (1702). His method was ironic: to discredit the High-Church Tories (“High Flyers”) he used the method of negative identity: he wrote as if from their viewpoint but reduced their arguments to absurdity. The pamphlet had a huge sale, but Dissenters and High Churchmen alike took it seriously, and – though for different reasons – were furious when the hoax was exposed. Defoe was prosecuted for seditious libel and arrested. The advertisement offering a reward for his capture gives the only extant personal description of Defoe – an unflattering one, which annoyed him considerably: “a middle-sized spare man, about 40 years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth”. Defoe was advised to plead guilty and rely on the court’s mercy, but he received harsh treatment, and, in addition to being fined, was sentenced to stand three times in the pillory. Although miserably apprehensive of his punishment, Defoe had spirit enough to write the audacious Hymn To The Pillory (1703); and this helped to turn the occasion into something of a triumph, with the pillory garlanded, the mob drinking his health, and the poem on sale in the streets.

Defoe is said to have written over 500 separate works in his time; in the field of journalism he will be remembered chiefly for his work on the Review, the periodical he wrote practically single-handedly from 1704 to 1713. In addition to politics as such, Defoe discussed current affairs in general, religion, trade, manners, morals, and so on, and his work undoubtedly had a considerable influence on the development of later essay periodicals (such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's The Tatler and The Spectator) and of the newspaper press.

In the 1715 he wrote the best known and most popular of his many didactic works, The Family Instructor. However, he achieved literary immortality when he turned his talents to an extended work of prose fiction and produced The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (April 25, 1719), of which four editions were published if four months. A German critic called it a “world-book,” a label justified not only by the enormous number of translations, imitations, and adaptations that have appeared but by the almost mythic power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation with which every reader can in some sense identify himself.

Robinson Crusoe is based on the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scotch sailer. He went to sea in 1704 and was put ashore at his own request on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Pacific. The island was uninhabited and he survived there until his rescue in 1709. Selkirk claimed that he had become a “better Christian” and it was a positive experience. As a journalist Defoe must have heard his story and possibly interviewed him. Selkirk never went back to the Pacific island, as Defoe had Crusoe do in two sequels. Selkirk became known as an eccentric.

Certainly, the bulk of the story of Robinson Crusoe comes from Defoe’s own prodigious imagination. Robinson Crusoe is a mariner - actually a slave trader - who goes to sea at the age of 19 despite parental warnings. He suffers a number of misfortunes at the hands of pirates and the elements. Finally Crusoe is shipwrecked off South America in the Caribbean Sea. Salvaging needful things from the ship, including the Bible, he manages to survive on the island. “The Country appear'd so fresh,” he writes in his journal, “so green, so flourishing, every thing being in a constant Verdure, or Flourish of Spring, that it looked like a planted garden.” Aided with his enterprising behaviour, Crusoe adapts into his alien environment. Defoe embellishes the narrative of Crusoe’s residence on the island with many incidents of his imagination. The author tells in minute detail how with the help of a few utensils and stores saved from the wreck and the exercise of infinite ingenuity, Crusoe built himself a house, domesticated goats, and made a boat. After several lone years Crusoe sees a strange footprint in the sand. Savages arrive for a cannibal feast. One of their prisoners manages to escape. Crusoe meets later the frightened native, christens him Man Friday and teaches him English. Later an English ship arrives. Crusoe rescues the captain and crew from the hands of mutineers and returns to England. He marries and promises before the end of the novel to describe his adventures in Africa and China.

Defoe’s strongly held Puritan beliefs posed something of a problem for him as a writer because fiction was equal to lying, as it was something untrue. He resolved this problem by insisting that what he wrote was a “history of fact”, and in each of his works there was a moral or didactic purpose which may serve as a example to others. Robinson Crusoe purports to be the narration of authentic fact. In writing Robinson Crusoe Defoe was not conscientiously writing a novel; he was writing a spoof-autobiography which was to be taken by his readers as fact. Crusoe sums up all the travel books written before. It is in its way a scientific book; its geographical facts are as accurate as the knowledge of his day could make them. Defoe produces the illusion of reality by employing a mass of circumstantial detail. Crusoe stays on the island for 28 years 2 months and 19 days. The exactitude is characteristic: the reader accepts the improbable because he can follow Crusoe’s adventures from day to day and from year to year. Besides the physical world, the reader is privy to all the thoughts and torments of Robinson who, in true Puritan fashion, examines his every action and thought in relation to God. The fact that he often goes against what he perceives as the voice of God makes him all the more human and alive. The stress is put all the time not on the dangers surrounding the hero but on Crusoe the man himself, a truly heroic figure, a man dominating nature. Before being isolated on the uninhabited island Crusoe passes through many other adventures, including a period of slavery to the Barbary corsairs. Even before the shipwreck the reader is prepared that something extraordinary is to happen to Crusoe: it is in character.

Crusoe is practical, energetic and enterprising as the typical English bourgeois, a representative of the then progressive class. His practicality is intimately connected with his Protestant religious beliefs and the notion of personal responsibility they inculcated. The sense of partnership between God and man is with Crusoe all the time and he holds that God helps those who help themselves.

Within a year of publication of Crusoe a parody of it had appeared, ending with the assertion that Defoe was a liar. He retorted that the book was in fact allegorical, every important passage corresponding to an event in his own life. In a sense it is true. The story of Crusoe is more than the adventures of a castaway on an uninhabited island. It is a hymn to man who is tempered by calamities and difficulties but doesn’t lose his faith in himself.

Sequels to the story, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), in which Crusoe revisits the island and loses Friday in an attack by savages, and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1729), did not gain wide recognition. But so real has the legend become that there are some people today on the Island of Tobago who claim that they are the hereditary descendents of Crusoe.

In Robinson Crusoe as in his other most important novels, Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), and Colonel Jack (1722), Defoe displays his finest gift as a novelist - his insight into human nature. The men and women he writes about are all placed in unusual circumstances; they are all, in one sense or another, solitaries; they all struggle, in their different ways, through a life that is a constant scene of jungle warfare. They are also ordinary human beings, however, and Defoe, writing always in the first person, enters into their minds and analyzes their motives. His novels are given verisimilitude by their matter-of-fact style and their vivid concreteness of detail. Their main defects are shapelessness, an overinsistent moralizing, and naiveté.

In his lifetime Defoe’s novels brought him little esteem from the polite world, but they gratified the less cultivated readers in the City or the servants’ hall. With Robinson Crusoe popular literature was born. Defoe was able to use all his greatest gifts: the ability to re–create the milieu vividly through the cumulative effect of carefully observed details; a skill in writing relaxed prose, the language of actual speech, which seems to reveal the consciousness of the first-person narrator; his wide knowledge of the society in which he lived, both the trading bourgeoisie and the rogues who preyed on them; and his absorption in the spectacle of lonely human beings, whether Crusoe on his island or Moll Flanders in England and Virginia, somehow bending a stubborn and indifferent environment to their own ends of survival and profit. He was interested in the mere process of living and there is something of himself in all his protagonists: enormous vitality, humanity, and ingenuity. Defoe spoke for and to the members of his own class. Like them, he was engrossed by property and success, and his way of writing made all he touched seem true.

One of the great virtues if Defoe’s writing is the quality of his prose – vigorous, homely, racy – with no affectation of fine writing, yet always adequate. In his Complete English Tradesman (1726) he recommends a plain style: “Easy, plain and familiar language is the beauty of speech in general, and it is the excellency of all writing, on whatever subject, or to whatever persons they are we write or speak. The end of speech is that men might understand one another’s meaning”. The homely style is particularly appropriate when put into the mouth of such middle-class or lower-class personages as Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders.

In 1724 Defoe published his last major work of fiction, Lady Roxana, though in the closing years of his life, despite failing health, he remained active and enterprising as a writer. Defoe's last years were clouded by legal controversies over allegedly unpaid bonds dating back a generation, and it is thought that he died in hiding from his creditors. His character Moll Flanders, born in Newgate Prison, speaks of poverty as “a frightful spectre,” and it is a theme of many of his books.