After his three days in the pillory Defoe went into Negate Prison. Robert Harley. 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer brokered his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent. He set up his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France in 1704, supporting the Harley ministry. The Review ran without interruption until 1713. When Harley lost power in 1708 Defoe continued writing it to support Go dolphin, then again to support Harley and the Tories in the Tory ministry of 1710 to 1114. After the Tories fell from power with the death of Queen Anne. Defoe continued doing intelligence work for the Whig government.
Defoe's famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), tells of a man's shipwreck on a desert island and his subsequent adventures. The author may have based his narrative on the true story of the shipwreck of Alexander Selkirk. (Sec Robinson Crusoe: Selkirk as the inspiration for Crusoe).
Defoe's next novel was Captain Singleton ( 720), amazing for its portrayal of the redemptive power of one man's love for another. Hans Turley has recently shown how Quaker William's love turns Captain Singleton away from the murderous life of a pirate, and the two make a solemn vow to live as a male couple happily ever after in London, disguised as Greeks and never speaking English in public, with Singleton married to William's sister as a ruse.
Defoe wrote an account of the Great Plague of 1665: A Journal of the Plague Year.
He also wrote Moll Flanders (1722), a picaresque first-person narration of the fall and eventual redemption of a lone woman in 17th century England. She appears as a whore, bigamist and thief, lives in The Mint, commits adultery and incest, yet manages to keep the reader's sympathy. This work and Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress (1724) offer remarkable examples of the way in which Defoe seems to inhabit his fictional (yet "drawn from life") characters, not least in that they are women.
Daniel Defoe died on April 21. 1731 and was interred in Bun hill Fields. London. [edit] Defoe and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707
No fewer than 545 titles, ranging from satirical poems, political and religious pamphlets and volumes have been ascribed to Defoe. His ambitious business ventures saw him bankrupt by 1692, with a wife and seven children to support. In 1703 he published an ironic attack on the high Tories, and was prosecuted for seditious libel, sentenced to be pilloried, fined 200 marks, and be detained at the Queen's pleasure. In despair he wrote to William Paterson. the London Scot, and founder of the Bank of England and part instigator of the Darien Disaster, who was in the confidence of Robert Hartley, leading Minister and spymaster in the English Government. Hartley accepted Defoe's services and released him in 1703. He immediately published The Review, which appeared weekly, then three times a week, written mostly by himself. This was the main mouthpiece of the Government promoting the Act of Union 1707.Short biography geared toward a him.
Defoe began his campaign in The Review and other pamphlets aimed at English opinion, claiming correctly that it would end the threat from the North, gaining for the Treasury an "inexhaustible treasury of men" a valuable new market increasing the power of England. By September 1706 Hartley ordered Defoe to Edinburgh as a secret agent, to do everything possible to help secure acquiescence of the Treaty. He was very conscious of the risk to himself Thanks to books such The Letters of Daniel Defoe, (edited by GH Healey, Oxford 1955) which are readily far more is known about his activities than is usual with such agents.
His first reports were of vivid descriptions of violent demonstrations against the Union. "A Scots rabble is the worst of its kind," he reported. Years later John Clerk of Penacook, a leading Unionist, wrote in his memories that,
"He was a spy among us, but not known as such, otherwise the Mob of Edinburgh would pull him to pieces."
Defoe being a Presbyterian, who suffered in England for his convictions, was accepted as an adviser to the Assembly of the Church and Parliamentary Committees. He told Hartley that he was "privy to all their folly", but "Perfectly unsuspected as with corresponding with anybody in England." He was then able to influence the proposals that were put to Parliament and reported back: "Having had the honor to be always sent for the committee to whom these amendments were referred, I have had the good fortune to break their measures in two particulars via the bounty on Corn and proportion of the Excise."
Yet Defoe was also a devout Presbyterian, faithful husband, doting father, and genius of the first order, a man who invented both modern journalism and the modern novel in his furious forty-year career. His greatest achievement, Robinson Crusoe, is a masterpiece of religious prose that has appeared in over 1,200 editions in English alone, has been translated into almost every known language, and continues to instruct delighted readers, as it has for nearly three hundred years, on the basics of Christian civilization by means of one of the most exciting adventure stories ever penned.
How to reconcile the two Defoe's? This is the mystery that any biographer must confront, and one that Richard West only partially resolves.
The enigma begins with Defoe's birth. We remain uncertain about his year or place of birth, although 1661 in the parish of St. Giles, Cripple gate, seems likely. Raised a Dissenter--a Presbyterian in an Anglican nation--he was barred from Oxford and Cambridge and instead received three years of higher education under the Reverend Charles Morton, a future vice-president of Harvard University who drilled his pupils in science, modern tongues, and the intricacies of English rhetoric. Defoe learned his lessons well. He took away with him a superb prose style and a burning resentment of the upper classes who had denied him entrance to Oxbridge, coupled with a scarcely-disguised just to join their ranks--a blend of envy and hatred common among young middle-class men even today.
As West suggested, this ambivalence toward social betters was one of Defoe's driving obsessions. Another was his terror of debt and his sense of being hounded by creditors, as well as by literary and political opponents. Defoe relished the harsh world of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century business, when capitalism was coming of age; unfortunately, he had an uncanny knack for investing in projects that left him in ruins. He traded in cows, bricks, tobacco, honey, land, diving bells, and even civet cats, almost always for a loss. By his early thirties, Defoe had squandered his wife's considerable dowry, was in debt for 17,000 pounds, and had declared bankruptcy--an act that barred him for life from public service. West describes the aftermath with typical empathy: "The torment of mind he suffered . . . condemned him to a life of misery, fear, loneliness, and remorse, from which he could only escape through prayer, the love of his family, and eventually by writing books."
Defoe responded to the crisis with characteristic ingenuity: He decided to switch careers and become journalist--and not just any journalist. As West enthuses, "He was the first master, if not the inventor, of almost every feature of modern newspapers, including the leading article, investigative reporting, the foreign news analysis, the agony aunt, the gossip column, the candid obituary, and even the kind of soul-searching piece which Fleet Street calls the 'Why, Oh Why."1
This new venture unleashed the best and worst in Defoe. On the one hand, he delighted in subterfuge. He wrote bogus letters to the editor, bogus travelogues, bogus histories; he worked as a journalistic double agent, writing for Tory journals while in the employ of the Whigs; he delighted in printing anti-Catholic drivel (and spent a lifetime seething about "Popish Plots," including, so he thought, the Great London Fire of 1666); he raked up scandal wherever he could, insulting enemies and shocking friends.
On the other hand, he vigorously defended his faith and accepted a prison term as the price of principle. Although it is not always acknowledged by his biographers--West does better here than many--Defoe's professional life focused on the place of religion in personal and public life. All his writings, from novels to marriage manuals, from occult studies to political broadsides, stem from the viewpoint of a devout Dissenter fighting for survival in an Anglican nation. It was for Scotland he used different arguments, even the opposite of those he used in England, for example, usually ignoring the English doctrine of the Sovereignty of Parliament, telling the Scots that they could have complete confidence in the guarantees in the Treaty. Some of his pamphlets were purported to be written by Scots, misleading even reputable historians into quoting them as evidence of Scottish opinion of the time. The same is true of a massive history of the Union which Defoe published in 1709 and which some historians still treat as a valuable contemporary source for their own works. Defoe took pains to give his history an air of objectivity by giving some space to arguments against the Union, but always having the last word for himself.
He disposed of the main Union opponent, Andrew Fletcher of Slaton, by just ignoring him. Nor does he account for the deviousness of the Duke of Hamilton, the official leader of the Squadron Volant against the Union, who finally acted against his comrades in the decisive stages of the debate. Hamilton was to lead an Anti-Union Rebellion of 1708, where Covenanters had marched from Galloway (and were betrayed at Dumfries) to unite with Jacobites at Edinburgh. A Highland Army camped outside Edinburgh were given the keys by the town guard to let them in. The Illustrious Duke failed to turn up, due to a toothache, and the French frigates in the Forth had to turn back.
Defoe made no attempt to explain why the same Scottish Parliament which was so vehement for its Independence from 1703 to 1705 became so supine in 1706. He received very little reward from his paymasters and, of course, no recognition for his services by the government. He made use of his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, where he actually admitted that the increase of trade and population in Scotland, which he had predicted as a consequence of the Union, was "not the case, but rather the contrary."
Defoe's description of Glasgow (Glaschu) as a "Dear Green Place" has often been misquoted as a Gaelic translation for the town. The Gaelic Glass could mean grey or green, chu means dog or hollow. Glaschu probably actually means 'Green Hollow'. The "Dear Green Place", like much of Scotland, was a hotbed of unrest against the Union. The local Tron minister urged his congregation "to up and anent for the City of God". The 'Dear Green Place' and "City of God" required government troops to put down the rioters tearing up copies of the Treaty, as at almost every merchant cross in Scotland.
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