Daniel Defoe

Daniel Foe was born in London around 1660, the son of a Presbyterian tallow chandler. As a Dissenter — a Protestant outside the Church of England — he was barred from Oxford and Cambridge and educated at the Newington Green Academy under Charles Morton, who taught logic, history, and natural philosophy in English rather than Latin. The exclusion was formative; Defoe spent his career writing for a middling commercial readership the universities did not serve. He went into trade — hosiery, wine, brick-making, civet cats for the perfume market — and in 1692 went spectacularly bankrupt for £17,000, a sum that would dog him for decades. He added "De" to his surname around 1695, lengthening Foe into something that sounded better than it was.

His first life was journalism and pamphleteering. He wrote hundreds of pamphlets on every conceivable subject — trade policy, the union with Scotland, the proper treatment of servants, the slave trade, religious toleration — and from 1704 to 1713 produced A Review of the Affairs of France, a three-times-weekly periodical written almost single-handedly. In 1703 he was arrested for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a savage satire in which he ventriloquized a High Church voice demanding the extermination of Dissent. The irony was missed; readers on both sides took it literally; Defoe was convicted of seditious libel, fined, pilloried for three days, and imprisoned at Newgate. The pillory was meant to be a humiliation; according to legend his readers threw flowers.

The pillory bought his second career. To get out of Newgate he agreed to work for Robert Harley as an intelligence agent. From 1704 onward he traveled the country gathering political information and using his journalism to advance Harley's policies — most consequentially the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, which he helped sell to skeptical Scottish opinion while filing secret dispatches to London. He continued this work, with shifting employers, for the rest of his life. He was a propagandist of considerable skill and a spy of demonstrated competence, and his readers did not always know which paper of his they were reading.

The novels came late. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was published when Defoe was about fifty-nine, drawing on the real castaway Alexander Selkirk and on a long Puritan tradition of spiritual autobiography. The novel — a first-person account of a shipwrecked English merchant who survives twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island, masters his environment, converts his rescued companion Friday, and returns rich — became an immediate European bestseller and is conventionally cited as the first English novel, though the claim depends on how strictly one defines the form. He followed it with Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724), all in five years.

The complication is the proximity of the spy to the novelist. Defoe's first-person narrators — Crusoe, Moll, the unnamed narrator of the Journal — are masters of plausible self-presentation, expert at the documentary surface that makes a story trustworthy. He learned that art writing intelligence reports and propaganda. He died in 1731 in lodgings in Ropemaker's Alley, in hiding from creditors, and was buried at Bunhill Fields. His total output runs to more than five hundred separate works. Most are anonymous. The full corpus is still being argued over.