Daniel Defoe was born in 1660,
in London, and was originally christened Daniel Foe, changing his
name around the age of thirty-five to sound more aristocratic. Like
his character Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a third child. His mother
and father, James and Mary Foe, were Presbyterian dissenters. James
Foe was a middle-class wax and candle merchant. As a boy, Daniel
witnessed two of the greatest disasters of the seventeenth century:
a recurrence of the plague and the Great Fire of London in 1666.
These events may have shaped his fascination with catastrophes and
survival in his writing. Defoe attended a respected school in Dorking,
where he was an excellent student, but as a Presbyterian, he was
forbidden to attend Oxford or Cambridge. He entered a dissenting
institution called Morton’s Academy and considered becoming a Presbyterian
minister. Though he abandoned this plan, his Protestant values endured
throughout his life despite discrimination and persecution, and
these values are expressed in Robinson Crusoe. In 1683,
Defoe became a traveling hosiery salesman. Visiting Holland, France,
and Spain on business, Defoe developed a taste for travel that lasted
throughout his life. His fiction reflects this interest; his characters
Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe both change their lives by voyaging
far from their native England.
Defoe became successful as a merchant, establishing his
headquarters in a high-class neighborhood of London. A year after
starting up his business, he married an heiress named Mary Tuffley,
who brought him the sizeable fortune of 3,700 pounds
as dowry. A fervent critic of King James II, Defoe became affiliated
with the supporters of the duke of Monmouth, who led a rebellion
against the king in 1685. When the rebellion
failed, Defoe was essentially forced out of England, and he spent
three years in Europe writing tracts against James II. When the
king was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and
replaced by William of Orange, Defoe was able to return to England
and to his business. Unfortunately, Defoe did not have the same
financial success as previously, and by 1692 he
was bankrupt, having accumulated the huge sum of 17,000 pounds
in debts. Though he eventually paid off most of the total, he was
never again entirely free from debt, and the theme of financial vicissitudes—the
wild ups and downs in one’s pocketbook—became a prominent theme
in his later novels. Robinson Crusoe contains many
reflections about the value of money.
Around this time, Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking
venture. One of his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled
“The True-Born Englishman,” which became popular and earned Defoe
some celebrity. He also wrote political pamphlets. One of these, The
Shortest Way with Dissenters, was a satire on persecutors
of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until
they realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result,
Defoe was publicly pilloried—his hands and wrists locked in a wooden
device—in 1703, and jailed in Newgate Prison.
During this time his business failed. Released through the intervention
of Robert Harley, a Tory minister and Speaker of Parliament, Defoe worked
as a publicist, political journalist, and pamphleteer for Harley
and other politicians. He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and
disguises, reflecting his own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist,
and prisoner. This theme of changeable identity would later be expressed
in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who becomes merchant, slave, plantation
owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing, Defoe often used
a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was incredibly
wide-ranging and productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books
and pamphlets during his life.
Defoe began writing fiction late in life, around the
age of sixty. He published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, in 1719,
attracting a large middle-class readership. He followed in 1722 with Moll Flanders, the
story of a tough, streetwise heroine whose fortunes rise and fall
dramatically. Both works straddle the border between journalism
and fiction. Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story
of a shipwrecked seaman named Alexander Selkirk and was passed off
as history, while Moll Flanders included dark prison scenes
drawn from Defoe’s own experiences in Newgate and interviews with
prisoners. His focus on the actual conditions of everyday life and
avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary
in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel.
Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the
ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple,
direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the
new standard for the English novel. With Robinson Crusoe’s theme
of solitary human existence, Defoe paved the way for the central
modern theme of alienation and isolation. Defoe died in London on
April 24, 1731, of
a fatal “lethargy”—an unclear diagnosis that may refer to a stroke.
