When Defoe revisited in the mid 1720's he claimed that the hostility towards his party was, "because they were English and because of the Union, which they were almost universally exclaimed against."
Reviewed by Philip Zaleski J the best physical description of Daniel Defoe comes to us, fittingly, from a wanted poster: "a middle sized spare man, about 40 years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown-colored hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes and a large mole near his mouth."
This unappealing description was issued by the Earl of Nottingham in 1702 against "Daniel de Foe, alias Defoe," sought for "high crimes and misdemeanor" for publishing an anonymous parody of Tory religious invective. The poster, and the accusation that spawned it, neatly encapsulate much of Defoe's life: a writer on the lam, a lover of aliases, given to anonymous and pseudonymous productions; a middle-class merchant bewigged to pass as an aristocrat; a literary pugilist who scorned the orthodoxies of the day; a man judged by many of his contemporaries to be a ferret, a sneak, a public menace.
this issue that produced his first best-seller, The True-Born Englishman (1700), a poem of high passion and mordant wit defending the reign of the Protestant King William III. It contains the memorable lines:
Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The Devil always builds a chapel there, And 'twill be found upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation.
Defoe's somewhat paradoxical love for both religious righteousness and literary deceit soon led to his undoing. In 1702 he published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, the parody that occasioned the wanted poster quoted above, in which he suggested that the best way to handling religious nonconformists was to hang them. At first many Tories missed the joke and welcomed this splendid final solution. When they discovered that it was all a hoax, they went for Defoe's throat. Three visits to the pillory and a stretch in New gate Prison resulted. According to West, this was one of the great defining moments in his subject's life, a near-martyrdom that, "far from breaking Defoe's spirit,. . . gave him the courage, patience, and resolution he needed during the years ahead."
Defoe's prison term also gave one of his admirers--Robert Harley, Speaker of the House of Commons and a moderate Tory--a chance to intervene on his behalf. Soon enough Defoe was set free by edict of Queen Anne and enlisted as a spy for Her Majesty's Government. Here, too, he stood out from the pack. In 1707 he wrote to his employer:
In my management here [among pro-Catholic Jocosities] I am a perfect emissary. I act the old part of Cardinal Richelieu. I have my spies and my pensioners in every place, and I confess 'tis the easiest thing in the world to hire people here to betray their friends.
Defoe's years as secret-agent-cum-journalist make for the most exciting portions of the biography. West admires his subject and tolerates, even as he tsk-tsks, Defoe's most outrageous behavior--a refreshing change from the current fashion that requires biographers to rip their subjects to shreds. Happily, there is much that deserves admiration, not least Defoe's astonishing industry. He started a weekly newspaper, the Review, and from 1704-1713 wrote each issue in its entirety. He churned out one bizarre book after another: The Dyed of Poland (17'05) transpose^ English politics to Gdansk, while the very title of The Consolidator: Or Memoir of Sundry Transactions in the World of the Moon (also 1705) speaks for itself. For twenty years he wrote and spied; at one time, he ran eight newspapers, penning large portions of each himself. Approaching the watershed of his sixtieth year, his journalistic energies finally began to flag. Small wonder! But rather than retire his pen, Defoe reinvented himself again, and became, in 1719, the world's first novelist.
Here we run up against the mystery already alluded to: How can we explain the miracle of Robinson Crusoe West prepares us for this glorious invention by harping on Defoe's love of subterfuge. For Crusoe, like many of Defoe's earlier works, is a hoax, a novel posing as autobiography ("The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner . . . Written by himself). Defoe's subsequent novels--Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the rest--belong to the same shadowy genre of fiction passing as truth.
Crusoe's format, then, seems well-accounted for. But what of its content? Those who have read the unabridged version know that Crusoe is more than an adventure novel; it is a tale of religious conversion, telling how an isolated man rebuilds Christendom from some bits of flotsam and a repentant heart. Here West provides another clue, demonstrating how, as Defoe aged, he grew more convinced of the dangers of secularism and of the need for religious integrity and a rigorous moral code.
Defoe expounded these ideas in a series of books, written at the same time as Crusoe, including The Family Instructor, Religious Courtship, and Conjugal Lewdness or Matrimonial Whoredom. All three works counsel a strict Christian life, dispensing advice on wayward sons, impious wives, the evil of contraception and abortion, and the danger of exercising the "frolic part" outside of the marriage chamber. As West points out, these texts not only establish Defoe as a champion of Christian virtue--a theme sounded over and over again in Crusoe--but also reveal his domestic happiness, including his love for his wife, Mary.
But what of Crusoe's literary brilliance, its startling universality, which led Coleridge to remark that "compare the contemptuous Swift with the contemned De Foe, and how superior will the latter be found. . . . [He] raises me into the universal man. Now this is De Foe's excellence. You become a man while you read"? Here West is of little help. In place of analysis, he offers plot summary. It is pleasant to discover a Defoe biography that rises above the special-interest interpretations offered by Rousseau, Marx, Virginia Wolf, et al., but one wishes that West, who is obviously sympathetic to Defoe's religiosity, had done more to explore its role in his subject's greatest work. He does advance one pet theory, asserting, contrary to all prevailing Crusoe criticism, that the true-life tale of Alexander Selkirk was not the genesis for Defoe's masterpiece. The contention is amusing and smartly argued, but hardly makes up for West's clumsiness at literary discussion--a serious flaw in an otherwise solid book.
Defoe ended his professional years as he began them, writing a string of curiosities that include General History of the Pirates (1726) and The Universal History of Apparitions (1729). Daniel Dafoe „ Robinson Crusoe“ p.231 „ Ginriff Publisher“ He died clone in a London boarding house, hiding from debtors. The cause of death was given as "lethargy," an ailment that would have surely killed a man of such compressed energies. He left behind 566 books and pamphlets as well as abundant evidence, if such be needed, of the infinite mystery of the human person. For who can fathom this liar, spy, and wearer of masks, this incomparable literary genius, this tireless exponent of Christian goodness? Which aspect reigned supreme we will never know, but we can be sure, from a letter written a year before his death, where Defoe placed his hope: "Be it that the passage is rough and the day stormy, by which way so ever He pleases to bring me to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul in all cases:
Philip Zaleski is editor of The Best Spiritual Writing 1998 and author, most recently, of Gifts of the Spirit. His article "The Strange Shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe" appeared in the May 1995 issue of First Things.
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Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660, probably in September, third child and first son of James and Mary Defoe. Daniel received a very good education, as his father hoped he would become ministers, but Daniel wasn't interested. His family was Dissenters, Presbyterians to be precise, and those sects were being persecuted a bit at this time, so maybe Daniel had the right idea. He was always very tolerant of others' religious ideas himself.
His mother died when he was ten, and his father sent him to a boarding school, after which he attended Morison's Academy, as he could not graduate from Oxford or Cambridge without taking an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. He was a very good student, and his teacher, the Reverend Mr. Norton himself, would later show up as a character in some of Daniel's fiction. Daniel graduated in 1679, and by then he'd pretty much decided against the ministry, though he wrote and spoke in favor of the Dissenters all his lives.
By 1683, Daniel was a successful young merchant, with a storefront in an upscale part of London and no real ideas of becoming a writer at all. On New Year's Day, 1684, he married Mary Truffle, an heiress whose dowry amounted to Ј3,7004. Later that year, he joined the army of the rebel Duke of Monmouth, who was attempting to take the throne from James Us. When the rebellion failed, Daniel and many other troops were forced into semi-exile. He traveled around the continent for three years, off and on, as both tourist and merchant, and wrote very dangerous, very anti-James II pamphlets. Daniel was very pleased when William and Mary took charge, and wrote in favor of William in particular, but he was in the minority there.
Daniel went bankrupt in 1692. He ended up owing over Ј17,000, and though he paid off all but Ј5,000 within ten years, he was never again free of debt. Though he still considered himself a merchant, first and foremost, writing suddenly became a more prominent part of his life. In 1701, he wrote a poem? Called the True-Born Englishman which became the best-selling poem ever at that time. It was so well-known that he signed several of his later works as The True-Born Englishman, and everyone knew exactly what that meant. Still, it was only a pamphlet, which made Daniel the lowest form of writer as far as his contemporaries were concerned. He also started taking on a few "unofficial" government jobs, most notably an assignment to Scotland. There was at that time a movement to finally unify England and Scotland, a movement which was very misunderstood by the average Scotsman. So Daniel tried to explain things to them calmly.
There's really no way of telling how well the Scotland thing worked. The next real event in his life was when he was pilloried in July 17039. His crime, posted on a sign above his head, was that he wrote a pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. You may recall that Daniel himself had been labeled a Dissenter. This pamphlet, in true Jonathan Swift-style, made several outrageous suggestions for dealing with Dissenters, particularly those who practiced "occasional conformity". It sold well, and the High Flyers (the group which persecuted the Dissenters the most) in particular loved it, until someone told them it was satirical. Then they had Daniel pilloried. It wasn't quite as nasty of a punishment as it could have been, though-- the crowd respected their True-Born Englishman too much to throw rotten tomatoes at him, the usual custom. He was the only person ever pilloried who later went on to become a national hero.
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