Daniel Defoe
(1660-1731)
Quick Overview

Defoe was born in 1660 in London, England and died on April 24, 1731 also in London.  He is remembered as one of the first English novelist bus was also a  pamphleteer and a journalist.   He is especially remembered as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719-22) and Moll Flanders (1722).

His Life

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His Works (This is just a selection of the 375 works we know he wrote--who can guess how many anonymous pamphlets and other material he also composed.)
 

Links
The Following was taken from 

His Life

An Alternative Biography
Early life.

 Defoe's father, James Foe, was a hard-working and fairly prosperous tallow chandler (perhaps also, later, a butcher), of Flemish descent. By his middle 30s, Daniel was calling himself "Defoe," probably reviving a variant of what may have been the original family name. As a Nonconformist, or Dissenter, Foe could not send his son to the University of Oxford or to Cambridge; he sent him instead to the excellent academy at Newington Green kept by the Reverend Charles Morton. There Defoe received an education in many ways better, and certainly broader, than any 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--may have helped to form Defoe's own literary style.
 
 
 

                   Although intended for the Presbyterian ministry, Defoe decided against
                   this and by 1683 had set up as a merchant. He called trade his "beloved
                   subject," and it was one of the abiding interests of his life. He dealt in many
                   commodities, traveled 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.
 

                   It was true enough. In 1692, after prospering for a while, Defoe went
                   bankrupt for 17,000. Opinions differ as to the cause of his collapse: on his
                   own admission, Defoe was apt to indulge in rash speculations and projects;
                   he may not always have been completely scrupulous, and he later
                   characterized himself as one of those tradesmen who had "done things
                   which their own principles condemned, which they are not ashamed to
                   blush for." But undoubtedly the main reason for his bankruptcy was the
                   loss that he sustained in insuring ships during the war with France--he was
                   one of 19 "merchants insurers" ruined in 1692. In this matter Defoe may
                   have been incautious, but he was not dishonourable, and he dealt fairly with
                   his creditors (some of whom pursued him savagely), paying off all but
                    5,000 within 10 years. He suffered further severe losses in 1703, when
                   his prosperous brick-and-tile works near Tilbury failed during his
                   imprisonment for political offenses, and he did not actively engage in trade
                   after this time.
 
 
 

                   Soon after setting up in business, in 1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley, the
                   daughter of a well-to-do Dissenting merchant. Not much is known about
                   her, and he mentions her little in his writings, but she seems to have been a
                   loyal, capable, and devoted wife. She bore eight children, of whom six lived
                   to maturity, and when Defoe died the couple had been married for 47
                   years.
 
 
 

                   Mature life and works.
 
 
 

                   With Defoe's interest in trade went an interest in politics. The first of
                   many political pamphlets by him appeared in 1683. When the Roman
                   Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685, Defoe--as a staunch
                   Dissenter and with characteristic impetuosity--joined the ill-fated rebellion
                   of the Duke of Monmouth, managing to escape after the disastrous Battle
                   of Sedgemoor. Three years later James had 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
                   III's reign, Defoe supported him loyally, becoming his leading pamphleteer.
                   In 1701, in reply to attacks on the "foreign" king, Defoe published his
                   vigorous and witty poem The True-Born Englishman, an enormously
                   popular work that is still very readable and relevant in its exposure of the
                   fallacies of racial prejudice.
 
 
 

                   Foreign politics also engaged Defoe's attention. Since the Treaty of
                   Rijswijk (1697), it had become increasingly probable that what would, in
                   effect, be 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 defense 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,
                   Robert Harley, with his famous document "Legion's Memorial," which
                   reminded the Commons in outspoken terms that "Englishmen are no more
                   to be slaves to Parliaments than to a King." It was effective: the
                   Kentishmen were released, and Defoe was feted by the citizens of
                   London. It had been a courageous gesture and one of which Defoe was
                   ever afterward proud, but it undoubtedly branded him in Tory eyes as a
                   dangerous man who must be brought down.
 
 
 

                   What did bring him down, only a year or so later, and consequently led to a
                   new phase in his career, was a religious question--though it is difficult to
                   separate religion from politics in this period. Both Dissenters and "Low
                   Churchmen" were mainly Whigs, and the "highfliers"--the High-Church
                   Tories--were determined to undermine this working alliance by stopping
                   the practice of "occasional conformity" (by which Dissenters of flexible
                   conscience could qualify for public office by occasionally taking the
                   sacraments according to the established church). Pressure on the
                   Dissenters increased when the Tories came to power, and violent attacks
                   were made on them by such rabble-rousing extremists as Dr. Henry
                   Sacheverell. In reply, Defoe wrote perhaps the most famous and skillful of
                   all his pamphlets, "The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters" (1702). His
                   method was ironic: to discredit the highfliers by writing as if from their
                   viewpoint but reducing their arguments to absurdity. The pamphlet had a
                   huge sale, but the irony blew up in Defoe's face: 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 was arrested in May 1703. 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-size 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. It is likely that the
                   prosecution was primarily political, an attempt to force him into betraying
                   certain Whig leaders; but the attempt was evidently unsuccessful.
                   Although miserably apprehensive of his punishment, Defoe had spirit
                   enough, while awaiting his ordeal, 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. (see also Index: Whig Party)
 
 
 

                   Triumph or not, Defoe was led back to Newgate, and there he remained
                   while his Tilbury business collapsed and he became ever more desperately
                   concerned for the welfare of his already numerous family. He appealed to
                   Robert Harley, who, after many delays, finally secured his
                   release--Harley's part of the bargain being to obtain Defoe's services as a
                   pamphleteer and intelligence agent.
 
 
 

                   Defoe certainly served his masters with zeal and energy, traveling
                   extensively, writing reports, minutes of advice, and pamphlets. He paid
                   several visits to Scotland, especially at the time of the Act of Union in
                   1707, keeping Harley closely in touch with public opinion. These trips bore
                   fruit in a different way two decades later: in 1724-26 the three volumes of
                   Defoe's admirable and informative Tour Through the Whole Island of
                   Great Britain were published, in preparing which he drew on many of his
                   earlier observations.
 
 
 

                   Perhaps Defoe's most remarkable achievement during Queen Anne's
                   reign, however, was his periodical, the Review. He wrote this serious,
                   forceful, and long-lived paper practically single-handedly from 1704 to
                   1713. At first a weekly, it became a thrice-weekly publication in 1705, and
                   Defoe continued to produce it even when, for short periods in 1713, his
                   political enemies managed to have him imprisoned again on various
                   pretexts. It was, effectively, the main government organ, its political line
                   corresponding with that of the moderate Tories (though Defoe sometimes
                   took an independent stand); but, 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.
 
 
 

                   Later life and works.
 
 
 

                   With George I's accession (1714), the Tories fell. The Whigs in their turn
                   recognized Defoe's value, and he continued to write for the government of
                   the day and to carry out intelligence work. At about this time, too (perhaps
                   prompted by a severe illness), he wrote the best known and most popular
                   of his many didactic works, The Family Instructor (1715). Not all the
                   writings so far mentioned, however, would have procured literary
                   immortality for Defoe; this he achieved when in 1719 he turned his talents
                   to an extended work of prose fiction and (drawing partly on the memoirs of
                   voyagers and castaways such as Alexander Selkirk) produced Robinson
                   Crusoe. A German critic has 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.
 
 
 

                   Here (as in his works of the remarkable year 1722, which saw the
                   publication of Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and
                   Colonel Jack) Defoe displays his finest gift as a novelist--his insight into
                   human nature. The men and women he writes about are all, it is true,
                   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 all become, to some extent,
                   obsessive. 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; the latter may seem unselective, but
                   it effectively helps to evoke a particular, circumscribed world. Their main
                   defects are shapelessness, an overinsistent moralizing, occasional
                   gaucheness, and naiveté. Defoe's range is narrow, but within that range he
                   is a novelist of considerable power, and his plain, direct style, as in almost
                   all of his writing, holds the reader's interest.
 
 
 

                   In 1724 he published his last major work of fiction, Roxana, though in the
                   closing years of his life, despite failing health, he remained active and
                   enterprising as a writer.
 
 
 

                   Assessment.
 
 
 

                   A man of many talents and author of an extraordinary range and number
                   of works, Defoe remains in many ways an enigmatic figure. A man who
                   made many enemies, he has been accused of double-dealing, of dishonest
                   or equivocal conduct, of venality. Certainly in politics he served in turn both
                   Tory and Whig; he acted as a secret agent for the Tories and later served
                   the Whigs by "infiltrating" extremist Tory journals and toning them down.
                   But Defoe always claimed that the end justified the means, and a more
                   sympathetic view may see him as what he always professed to be, an
                   unswerving champion of moderation. At the age of 59 Defoe embarked on
                   what was virtually a new career, producing in Robinson Crusoe the first
                   of a remarkable series of novels and other fictional writings that resulted in
                   his being called the father of the English novel.
 
 
 

                   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.
 
 
 

                   (R.P.C.M./Ed.)
 
 
 

                   BIBLIOGRAPHY.
 
 
 

                   The most up-to-date and fully documented biography is Paula R.
                   Backscheider, Daniel Defoe (1989). Also recommended are James
                   Sutherland, Defoe (1937, reprinted 1971); John Robert Moore, Daniel
                   Defoe, Citizen of the Modern World (1958); and F. Bastian, Defoe's
                   Early Life (1981).
 
 
 

                   Critical studies include Arthur Wellesley Secord, Studies in the Narrative
                   Method of Defoe (1924, reprinted 1970); Maximillian E. Novak,
                   Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962, reprinted 1976),
                   Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963), and Realism, Myth, and History
                   in Defoe's Fiction (1983); G.A. Starr, Defoe & Spiritual
                   Autobiography (1965, reissued 1971); Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe
                   and Middle-class Gentility (1968); James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A
                   Critical Study (1971); John J. Richetti, Defoe's Narratives (1975);
                   Everett Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel (1975); Paul K. Alkon, Defoe
                   and Fictional Time (1979); Geoffrey M. Sill, Defoe and the Ideas of
                   Fiction, 1713-1719 (1983); Laura A. Curtis, The Elusive Daniel
                   Defoe (1984); Ian A. Bell, Defoe's Fiction (1985); Virginia Ogden
                   Birdsall, Defoe's Perpetual Seekers: A Study of the Major Fiction
                   (1985); Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition & Innovation
                   (1986); and John J. Richetti, Daniel Defoe (1987).
 
 
 

                   The fullest bibliography of Defoe's works is John Robert Moore, A
                   Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe, 2nd ed. (1971); but P.N.
                   Furbank and W.R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988),
                   questions the attribution of many anonymous works to Defoe. Annotated
                   bibliographies of criticism include Spiro Peterson, Daniel Defoe (1987),
                   covering 1731-1924; and John A. Stoler, Daniel Defoe (1984), covering
                   1900-1980.