Defoe, DANIEL, immortal as the author of Robinson Crusoe, was born most likely in 1660, in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, London. His family belonged originally to Northamptonshire, and his father, James Foe, became a butcher in St Giles's, and was living so late as 1705. It was Daniel who first changed his name to De Foe, or Defoe, about 1703, for unknown reasons. He had a good education at a dissenting academy, but soon abandoned his early idea of becoming a dissenting minister, and engaged in business, apparently as a hose-factor, about the year 1685. Little is known of his early life, but it seems he was out with Mon- mouth, and it is certain that he volunteered into King William's army in 1688, travelled both in France and Spain, and became bankrupt about 1692; his debts, or at least great part of them, he paid up later with a scrupulosity most honourable to him. He next became accountant to the glass-duty commissioners, and secretary to a Tilbury pantile factory. His Essay upon Projects appeared about 1698, and towards the close of William III.'s reign he became noted as an able and busy pamphleteer in support of the king's policy. His vigorous poem, The True-born Englishman, a Satyr (1701), was an attempt to apologise for the king's being a Dutchman by proving the English themselves to be a most composite race. His restless pen was active throughout the bitter struggle under Anne between the High-Church party and the dissenters, and his famous treatise, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703), made him a martyr in the cause. Ostensibly written by a 'high-flyer,' it advocated the extirpation of dissenters with a masterly irony (pace Mr Saintsbury), which at first deceived and then infuriated his opponents, as, in his own words in The Present State of Parties (1712), it 'cut the throat of the whole party.' The House of Commons ordered the book to be burned, and a reward of £50 was offered for his apprehension, from which fortunately we have an exact description of his appearance as 'a middle-sized, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown-coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.' Tried at the Old Bailey in July, he was sentenced to pay a fine of 200 marks, to stand thrice in the pillory, and to be imprisoned during the queen's pleasure. Accordingly, the 'unabashed Defoe' stood in the pillory the last three days of July 1703, in the midst of a sympathetic mob that protected him from insult, and even drank his health. On the same day he suffered appeared his masculine Hymn to the Pillory, which concluded with a noble defiance to the government, expressed in some of his finest lines. During his imprisonment in Newgate he continued an incessant literary activity upon 'occasional conformity' and other points at issue in the great controversy, published a 'true collection' of his writings, and started his Review (19th February 1704—11th June 1713), at first a weekly, after eight numbers a bi-weekly, and after the eighth number of the second volume a tri-weekly newspaper, 'purged from the errors and partiality of newspapers and petty statesmen of all sides.' This was Defoe's largest, if not his most important work, and indeed forms one of the greatest monuments of literary industry ever reared by a single hand, embracing as it does in more than five thousand printed pages essays on almost every branch of human knowledge, and these written during but nine years, in which also, according to Mr Lee, he published no fewer than eighty distinct works, themselves containing as many as 4727 pages. Its 'Scandal Club,' which discussed minor matters of manners, was distinctly the forerunner of the more famous Tatlers and Spectators.
In August 1704 Defoe was released from prison at the instigation of Harley, who, moreover, procured for him pecuniary relief and employment, thus earning for himself the journalist's unceasing gratitude. After a short stay at Bury St Edmunds, he returned to London, maintaining at both places his activity in his Review, and in such admirable pamphlets as Giving Alms no Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation, a masterly denunciation of indiscriminate charity and national workshops—a kind of socialistic scheme propounded by Sir Humphrey Mackworth. Next year (1705) appeared The
Consolidator; or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, a political satire, which some have supposed may have supplied a hint for Gulliver's Travels; and the year after (5th July 1706) his masterpiece of verisimilitude and plausibility, The True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal. Mr Lee, in his life of Defoe (vol. i. pp. 127-8), disproves the old story that this fiction was a mere tour de force, written to sell an unsaleable book, Drelincourt on the Fear of Death, by showing that Drelincourt's book was already popular, being then rapidly running through its third English edition, while Defoe's pamphlet was only attached to its fourth edition by the author's consent. His next work was his Jure Divino, a tedious political satire, in twelve books of poor verse. About the close of 1705 Defoe was sent by Harley on a secret mission to the West of England, and in October of the next year we find him sent to Scotland by Godolphin, to whom Harley had recommended him as a secret agent to promote the Union, and here he lived for sixteen months. His History of the Union appeared in 1709, and in the same year Sacheverell's famous sermon gave him the opportunity of a fling at an old enemy. At the beginning of 1708 Harley's fall had made his political position somewhat precarious, but he found himself able to be a staunch Whig under Godolphin's government, until the fall of the Whigs after the error of Sacheverell's impeachment, and the return to power of his old benefactor Harley (1710), left him under the necessity of arguing that Englishmen should support the country even under a Tory ministry. In the pages of his Review he did his best to preserve the semblance of consistency, but not all his cleverness could save him from the contemporary reproach of being a time-server and a renegade. It is itself significant that his journalism was always anonymous from his second employment by Harley. He played a difficult and dubious part in the strange intrigues that preceded the accession of the House of Hanover, with the result that at length he found himself in a general discredit, which his apology, entitled An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), did not remove. Letters of his found in the State Paper Office in 1864, and printed in Mr Lee's introduction, revealed the fact that in 1718 he was in somewhat equivocal government service, subediting Jacobite and High Church organs, as the Mercurius Politicus, Dormer's News-Letter, and Mist's Journal, in such a dexterous way that 'the sting should be entirely taken out, although it was granted that the style should continue Tory' (second letter). Further, in the same letter he describes his purpose more fully, that these papers 'will be always kept (mistakes excepted) to pass as Tory Papers, and yet be disabled and enervated, so as to do no Mischief, or give any Offence to the Government.' He describes himself further as 'for this Service, posted among Papists, Jacobites, and enraged High Tories—a generation who, I profess, my very Soul Abhors. . . . Thus I bow in the House of Rimmon.' Defoe was not exactly scrupulous in his point of honour, but it is certain he never was a Tory, and it would not be difficult for him to construct an argument by which he could persuade himself that by this dangerous and ambiguous means he was doing good service to the cause of liberty and religion.
Although Mr Lee maintains that he wrote busily in the journals almost to the close of his life, henceforward his interest for us is mainly literary. In 1715 appeared the first volume of the Family Instructor, and four years later the first volume of the immortal Robinson Crusoe, which at once leaped into that popularity which it will never cease to retain. The same year appeared the second volume, and the year after the greatly inferior sequel.
Defoe's realistic imagination worked most freely on a basis, however slight, of fact, and this was found for him in the four years' solitary residence of a marooned sailor, Alexander Selkirk, on the island of Juan Fernandez. Perhaps no man at fifty-eight in the whole history of literature ever devised a more splendid masterpiece of creative imagination than this marvellous story, which carries with it the irresistible conviction of very truth. In 1720—his most prolific year—he gave to the world the Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell; the famous Memoirs of a Cavalier, the most real and truthful of all our historical romances, which the great Chatham accepted as genuine history; and Captain Singleton, a book of such brilliancy, vigour, and interest as would alone have given a reputation to any other writer. His next great creative year was 1722, in which he issued The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, which is at least a marvel of the novelistic art; The Journal of the Plague Year, better known by the title in the second edition, A History of the Plague, a fresh masterpiece of verisimilitude and reality; and the History of Colonel Jack, which, though unequal throughout, and actually feeble towards its close, is in its commencement, and in episodes here and there, the most charming and, perhaps, the greatest of all his books. Later works were Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress (1724), a weaker Moll Flanders; A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26); A New Voyage round the World (1725); The Complete English Tradesman (1725-27), a glorification of mere money-getting, which Charles Lamb condemned for its 'vile and debasing tendency'; The Political History of the Devil (1726), which may be grouped with his System of Magic (1726) and Essay on the Reality of Apparitions (1727). The only other works that may here be mentioned are his Religious Courtship (1722), and The Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed (1727), which reveal the strangely limited and vulgarly profit-and-loss character of his conception of religious duty. His Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business (1725) is an amusing diatribe upon the insolence of domestic servants—a subject to which he frequently recurs.
Meantime Defoe had been prospering in his affairs. He built himself 'a very handsome house' at Stoke-Newington, where he amused himself with gardening and the company of his three daughters. A mystery not yet satisfactorily explained hangs around his last days. His affairs seem to have fallen into confusion, one of his sons had behaved undutifully, and he was under apprehensions of some trouble, which may, however, have been due merely to a degree of mental derangement. He died 'of a lethargy' in Ropemakers' Alley, Moorfields, 26th April 1731, and was buried in Bunhill Fields.
Defoe remains one of our greatest English writers, and his greatness is of a kind unlikely to be disturbed by a competitor. His immense vitality and energy, clearsightedness, and ready power of forcing plain arguments either in prose or verse to an irresistible conclusion, make him the typical journalist—to be surpassed only by Swift at his best; but it is to a much rarer quality than this that he owes his fame—his incomparable realism and faithfulness in fiction, the secret of which must be looked for not in his singularly plain and direct language, his simple-looking but most effectively artistic digressions, or his perfect though artless preservation of dramatic propriety, but in that subtle and impalpable genius which informs his style. For his character he was slight, and perhaps somewhat low in his moral perceptions; but with all his political inconsistencies he remained true to the principles of the Revolution.
See the Lives by George Chalmers (1786), Walter Wilson (1830), Chadwick (1859), Lee (1869), and Wright (1894); the studies by Scott, Lamb, Hazlitt, Forster, Leslie Stephen, and Professor Minto. The best approximations to complete editions of Defoe's works have been those of Scott and Hazlitt.