Writer, born in London, UK. The son of a butcher, he was educated at a dissenting academy, travelled widely in Europe, and set up in the hosiery trade. In 1688 he joined William III's army, and strenuously supported the King's party. In 1702 his satire The Shortest Way with the Dissenters raised much anger with Dissenters and High-Churchmen alike, and he was imprisoned at Newgate for seditious libel, where he continued his pamphleteering. On his release in 1704 he started The Review, writing it single-handed, three times a week, until 1713. During this time, his political conduct became highly equivocal; he supported, rejected, then supported again the Tory minister, Harley. After the accession of George I (1714) he returned to the writing of fiction, and achieved lasting fame with Robinson Crusoe (171920). His other major works include A Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders (both 1722), and Roxana (1724).
Daniel Defoe (1659/1660 [?] – April 24 [?], 1731) was an English writer, journalist and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain.
Biography
He was born Daniel Foe, probably in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, London.
After leaving school and deciding not to become a dissenting minister, Defoe entered the world of business as a general merchant, dealing at different times in hosiery, general woolen goods, and wine. In 1684 Defoe married a woman by the name of Mary Tuffley. In 1692, Defoe was arrested for payments of £700 (and his cats were seized), though his total debts may have amounted to £17,000.
Following his release, he probably traveled in Europe and Scotland, and it may have been at this time that he traded in wine to Cadiz, Porto, and Lisbon. By 1695 he was back in England, using the name "Defoe", and serving as a "commissioner of the glass duty", responsible for collecting the tax on bottles.
Defoe's pamphleteering and political activities resulted in his arrest and placement in a pillory on July 31, 1703, principally on account of a pamphlet entitled "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters", in which he ruthlessly satirised the High church Tories, purporting to argue for the extermination of dissenters.
After his three days in the pillory, Defoe went into Newgate Prison. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, brokered his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent. Within a week of his release from prison, Defoe witnessed the Great Storm of 1703, which raged from 26-27 November, the only true hurricane ever to have made it over the Atlantic Ocean to the British Isles at full strength. The event became the subject of Defoe's first book, The Storm (1704). When Harley lost power in 1708 Defoe continued writing it to support Godolphin, then again to support Harley and the Tories in the Tory ministry of 1710 to 1714. After the Tories fell from power with the death of Queen Anne, Defoe continued doing intelligence work for the Whig government.
Daniel Defoe died on April 24 or 25, 1731 and was interred in Bunhill Fields, London.
Gideon Defoe, widely believed to be a direct descendant of Daniel Defoe , has recently become a published author in his own right, issuing two novels, with a third scheduled for release in September 2006. Whether or not in fact Daniel Defoe is a direct forebear of Gideon Defoe, it is worth noting that the latter's work explores similar themes of adventure, seafaring, piracy, and circumstances exotic to most ordinary Englishmen.
Novels and other works
Defoe's famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), tells of a man's shipwreck on a desert island and his subsequent adventures.
In 1703 Defoe wrote The True-born Englishman, which supported the king and chastised the people against the discrimination of foreigners.
Defoe's next novel was Captain Singleton (1720), amazing for its portrayal of the redemptive power of one man's love for another.
He also wrote Moll Flanders (1722), a picaresque first-person narration of the fall and eventual redemption of a lone woman in 17th century England. Both this work and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724) offer remarkable examples of the way in which Defoe seems to inhabit his fictional (yet "drawn from life") characters, not least in that they are women.
A later work that is often read as if it were non-fiction is his account of the Great Plague of London in 1665: A Journal of the Plague Year, a complex historical novel published in 1722.
A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain is another work that has kept its value.
The Political History of the Devil (1726) sounds like a joke or satire. But the general scholarly opinion is that Defoe really did think of the Devil as a participant in world history.
Defoe and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707
No fewer than 545 titles, ranging from satirical poems, political and religious pamphlets and volumes have been ascribed to Defoe (Note: in their Critical Bibliography (1998), Furbank and Owens argue for the much smaller number of 276 published items). In despair he wrote to William Paterson, the London Scot, and founder of the Bank of England and part instigator of the Darién scheme, who was in the confidence of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, leading Minister and spymaster in the English Government. Harley accepted Defoe's services and released him in 1703.
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 of the Treaty.
His first reports were of vivid descriptions of violent demonstrations against the Union.
Defoe being a Presbyterian, who suffered in England for his convictions, was accepted as an adviser to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and committees of the Parliament of Scotland.
For Scotland he used different arguments, even the opposite of those he used in England, for example, usually ignoring the English doctrine of the Sovereignty of Parliament, telling the Scots that they could have complete confidence in the guarantees in the Treaty. 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.
He disposed of the main Union opponent, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, by just ignoring him.
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 made use of his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, where he actually 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".
Defoe's description of Glasgow (Glaschu) as a "Dear Green Place" has often been misquoted as a Gaelic translation for the town.
When Defoe revisited in the mid 1720s 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".
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