Daniel Foe, better known by his pseudonym Daniel Defoe (London, England; October 10, 1660 - Moorfields, London, England; April 24, 1731) was an English writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, known throughout the world for his novel Robinson Crusoe, and seen as one of the early proponents of the English novel.

Biography

Daniel DeFoe was probably born on Fore Street, in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, London.

His father, James Foe (1630-1707), as a member of the butchers' guild known as The Worshipful Company of Butchers, worked as a merchant using tallow as a material for creating waxes.

Defoe later added the aristocratic-sounding "De" to his name, and on occasion claimed descent from the family of De Beau Faux. His parents were dissident Presbyterians, so considered because their religious beliefs did not fully coincide with those of the Church of England.

His mother Annie passed away when he was ten years old.

In 1667, he received his first teachings at Dorking, then at Stoke Newington Green, at the Academy for Dissidents directed by Charles Morton (1627-1698), who would be vice president of Harvard University.

After leaving the academy, and deciding that he did not want to be a minister, Defoe entered the world of business in general, trading items as diverse as hosiery, common woolen items, or wine products. Despite his ambitions and the fact that he would buy a country estate and a boat, he was seldom debt-free, for which he was imprisoned.

On 1 January 1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley (1659-1752) at St Botolph's Aldgate. She was the daughter of a London merchant, receiving a dowry of £3,700-a huge amount by the standards of the day.

In 1685, Defoe joined the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion (1685) but gained a pardon, by which he escaped the Bloody Assizes of Judge George Jeffreys (1645-1689).

Once freed, he probably traveled to Scotland, and it is quite possible that it was during this period that he traded wine with the cities of Cadiz, Porto, and Lisbon.

In 1688 he supported William III of Orange (1650-1702) in the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689). Around 1695 he returned to England, under the name of "Defoe", and acting as "commissioner of taxes on glass", in charge of collecting those who taxed the bottles. In 1696 he ran a brick and tile business in Tilbury, Essex.

Defoe's first notable publication was An Essay Upon Projects, a series of proposals for social and economic improvement, published in 1697. From 1697 to 1698, he defended the right of King William III to a standing army during disarmament, after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) had ended the Nine Years' War (1688-1697).

His most successful poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701), defended William against xenophobic attacks from his political enemies in England, and English anti-immigration sentiments more generally.

The death of William III in 1702 once again created a political upheaval, as the king was replaced by Queen Anne who immediately began her offensive against Nonconformists.

Defoe was a natural target, and his pamphleteering and political activities resulted in his arrest and placement in a pillory on 31 July 1703, principally on account of his December 1702 pamphlet entitled The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church, purporting to argue for their extermination. In it, he ruthlessly satirised both the high church Tories and those Dissenters who hypocritically practised so-called "occasional conformity", such as his Stoke Newington neighbour Sir Thomas Abney (1640-1722). It was published anonymously, but the true authorship was quickly discovered and Defoe was arrested.

He was charged with seditious libel and found guilty in a trial at the Old Bailey in front of the notoriously sadistic judge Salathiel Lovell (1631-1713).

Lovell sentenced him to a punitive fine of 200 marks, to public humiliation in a pillory, and to an indeterminate length of imprisonment which would only end upon the discharge of the punitive fine. According to legend, the publication of his poem Hymn to the Pillory caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects.

The truth of this story is questioned by most scholars, although John Robert Moore (1890-1973) later said that "no man in England but Defoe ever stood in the pillory and later rose to eminence among his fellow men".

After his three days in the pillory, Defoe went into Newgate Prison. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, brokered his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent for the Tories. In exchange for such co-operation with the rival political side, Harley paid some of Defoe's outstanding debts, improving his financial situation considerably.

Within a week of his release from prison, Defoe witnessed the Great Storm of 1703, which raged through the night of 26/27 November. It caused severe damage to London and Bristol, uprooted millions of trees, and killed more than 8,000 people, mostly at sea. The event became the subject of Defoe's The Storm (1704), which includes a collection of witness accounts of the tempest.

Many regard it as one of the world's first examples of modern journalism.

In the same year, he set up his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France, which supported the Harley Ministry, chronicling the events of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714). The Review ran three times a week without interruption until 1713. Defoe was amazed that a man as gifted as Harley left vital state papers lying in the open, and warned that he was almost inviting an unscrupulous clerk to commit treason; his warnings were fully justified by the William Gregg affair.

When Harley was ousted from the ministry in 1708, Defoe continued writing the Review to support Godolphin, then again to support Harley and the Tories in the Tory ministry of 1710-1714. The Tories fell from power with the death of Queen Anne, but Defoe continued doing intelligence work for the Whig government, writing "Tory" pamphlets that undermined the Tory point of view.

Not all of Defoe's pamphlet writing was political. One pamphlet was originally published anonymously, entitled A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury the 8th of September, 1705. It deals with interaction between the spiritual realm and the physical realm and was most likely written in support of Charles Drelincourt's The Christian Defense against the Fears of Death (1651).

It describes Mrs. Bargrave's encounter with her old friend Mrs. Veal after she had died. It's clear from this piece and other writings that the political portion of Defoe's life was by no means his only focus.

In despair during his imprisonment for the seditious libel case, Defoe wrote to William Paterson, the London Scot and founder of the Bank of England and part instigator of the Darien scheme, who was in the confidence of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, leading minister and spymaster in the English Government.

Harley 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 English Government promoting the Act of Union 1707.

Defoe began his campaign in The Review and other pamphlets aimed at English opinion, claiming 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, Harley ordered Defoe to Edinburgh as a secret agent to do everything possible to help secure acquiescence in the Treaty of Union. He was conscious of the risk to himself. Thanks to books such as The Letters of Daniel Defoe, far more is known about his activities than is usual with such agents.

His first reports included vivid descriptions of violent demonstrations against the Union. "A Scots rabble is the worst of its kind", he reported. Years later John Clerk of Penicuik, a leading Unionist, wrote in his memoirs that it was not known at the time that Defoe had been sent by Godolphin: to give a faithful account to him from time to time how everything past here. He was therefor a spy among us, but not known to be such, otherways the Mob of Edin. had pull him to pieces.

Defoe was a Presbyterian who had suffered in England for his convictions, and as such he was accepted as an adviser to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and committees of the Parliament of Scotland. He told Harley that he was "privy to all their folly" but "Perfectly unsuspected as with corresponding with anybody in England".

For Scotland, he used different arguments, even the opposite of those which he used in England, usually ignoring the English doctrine of the Sovereignty of Parliament, for example, 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.

In 1709, Defoe authored a rather lengthy book entitled The History of the Union of Great Britain, an Edinburgh publication printed by the Heirs of Anderson. The book was not published anonymously and cites Defoe twice as being its author. The book attempts to explain the facts leading up to the Act of Union 1707, dating all the way back to 6 December 1604 when King James I was presented with a proposal for unification. 

This so-called "first draft" for unification took place 100 years before the signing of the 1707 accord, which respectively preceded the commencement of Robinson Crusoe by another ten years.

Defoe made no attempt to explain why the same Parliament of Scotland 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 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".

The extent and particulars are widely contested concerning Defoe's writing in the period from the Tory fall in 1714 to the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Defoe comments on the tendency to attribute tracts of uncertain authorship to him in his apologia Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), a defence of his part in Harley's Tory ministry (1710-1714). Other works that anticipate his novelistic career include The Family Instructor (1715), a conduct manual on religious duty; Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager (1717), in which he impersonates Nicolas Mesnager, the French plenipotentiary who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht (1713); and A Continuation of the Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1718), a satire of European politics and religion, ostensibly written by a Muslim in Paris.

From 1719 to 1724, Defoe published the novels for which he is famous (see below). In the final decade of his life, he also wrote conduct manuals, including Religious Courtship (1722), The Complete English Tradesman (1726) and The New Family Instructor (1727). He published a number of books decrying the breakdown of the social order, such as The Great Law of Subordination Considered (1724) and Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business (1725) and works on the supernatural, like The Political History of the Devil (1726), A System of Magick (1727) and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). His works on foreign travel and trade include A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1727) and Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis (1728). Perhaps his greatest achievement, apart from the novels, is the magisterial A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain (1724-1727), which provided a panoramic survey of British trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

Death

Daniel Defoe died on April 24, 1731, probably while in hiding from his creditors. He was often in debtors' jail. The cause of his death was labeled lethargy, but he likely experienced a stroke.

He was buried at Bunhill Fields, outside the limits of the medieval city of London, in what is now the borough of Islington, where a monument to his memory was erected in 1870.

Bibliography

• Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989).
• Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (UP of Kentucky, 2015).
• Baines, Paul. Daniel Defoe-Robinson Crusoe/Moll Flanders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
• Di Renzo, Anthony. "The complete English tradesman: Daniel Defoe and the emergence of business writing." Journal of technical writing and communication 28.4 (1998): 325-334.
• Furbank, Philip Nicholas, and William Robert Owens. A political biography of Daniel Defoe(Routledge, 2015). online
• Gollapudi, Aparna. "Personhood, Property Rights, and the Child in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Daniel Defoe's Fiction." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28.1 (2015): 25-58.
• Gregg, Stephen H. Defoe's Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men (Routledge, 2016).
• Guilhamet, Leon. Defoe and the Whig Novel: A Reading of the Major Fiction (U of Delaware Press, 2010).
• Hammond, John R. ed. A Defoe companion (Macmillan, 1993).
• Marshall, Ashley. "Fabricating Defoes: From Anonymous Hack to Master of Fictions." Eighteenth-Century Life 36.2 (2012): 1-35. Historiography
• Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (2001) excerpt
• O'Brien, John. "The Character of Credit: Defoe's" Lady Credit," The Fortunate Mistress, and the Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain." ELH 63.3 (1996): 603-631. online
• Novak, Maximillian E. Realism, myth, and history in Defoe's fiction (U of Nebraska Press, 1983).
• Richetti, John. The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (2015).
• Rogers, Pat (1971). "Defoe in the Fleet Prison". The Review of English Studies. 22 (88): 451-455. doi:10.1093/res/XXII.88.451. JSTOR 513276.
• Sutherland, J.R. Defoe (Taylor & Francis, 1950), older scholarly biography.