daniel defoe - download.e-bookshelf.de€¦ · william minto,daniel defoe paula r. backscheider...

The Life of Daniel Defoe

A Critical Biography

John Richetti

BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES

General Editor: Claude Rawson

This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of importantauthors, British, European and North American, which will include substantialcritical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish thenotion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places.This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous point-making, but through the practical persuasion of volumes which offer intelligentcriticism within a well-researched biographical context.

Also in this series

The Life of Walter Scott John Sutherland

The Life of William Faulkner Richard Gray

The Life of Thomas Hardy Paul Turner

The Life of Celine Nicholas Hewitt

The Life of Henry Fielding Ronald Paulson

The Life of Robert Browning Clyde De L. Ryals

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer Derek Pearsall

The Life of Daniel Defoe John Richetti

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Rosemary Ashton

The Life of Evelyn Waugh Douglas Lane Patey

The Life of Goethe John R. Williams

The Life of W. B.Yeats Terence Brown

The Life of John Milton Barbara Lewalski

The Life of Samuel Johnson Robert DeMaria, Jr

The Life of Ann Brontë Edward Chitham


A Critical Biography

John Richetti

© 2005 by John Richetti

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton,Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of John Richetti to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted inaccordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, andPatents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richetti, John J.The life of Daniel Defoe/by John Richetti.

p. cm. – (Blackwell critical biographies)Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-631-19529-0 (hard cover : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-631-19529-7 (hard cover : alk. paper)

1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731. 2. Authors, English – 18th century – Biography.3. Journalists – Great Britain – Biography. I. Title. II. Series.

PR3406.R53 2005823¢.5 – dc222005003227

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10 on 12 pt Bemboby SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong

Printed and bound in Indiaby Replika Press Pvt. Ltd, Kundli

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestrypolicy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementarychlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board

used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards.

For further information onBlackwell Publishing, visit our website:

www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents

Preface viAcknowledgments x

1 Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer 12 Early Writings 1697–1703: Projects, Dissent, Poems 313 Political Journalism: 1697–1710 704 Political Agent and Journalist: Queen Anne to the Hanoverians 1135 Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 1436 Robinson Crusoe 1747 Travel, Politics, and Adventure 2138 Crime and Narrative 2349 Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment 268

10 History, Facts, and Literature 30111 Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 337

Notes 362Bibliography 390Index 395

v

Preface

. . . a great, a truly great liar, perhaps the greatest that ever lived.William Minto, Daniel Defoe

Paula R. Backscheider begins her biography of Defoe by saying that “few menseem to be better subjects for a biography than Daniel Defoe.”1 She means thatDefoe’s life is a heroic story of constant struggle to survive, a string of personaland financial disasters, a life that spanned a tumultuous era (1660–1731) of crucialpolitical and historical events that changed the face of Europe, and witnessed theemergence of nothing less than the modern world order, with Britain in his life-time gradually becoming the dominant European imperial power. Defoe has sincethe late eighteenth century attracted many biographers, including most recentlya rival to Backscheider’s life by Maximillian E. Novak.2 Much is known aboutDefoe. There is an extensive factual record of many personal events as well asfinancial, political, and literary circumstances in his life, some of which do himlittle honor and mark him as a flawed human being, at times even distinctly unat-tractive. But in the final analysis, whether one likes this Daniel Defoe is irrele-vant, since almost nothing is known or certain about his inner life except whathe chose to reveal about himself in his writing and in his surviving letters. Thatcorrespondence consists mostly of letters to the powerful early eighteenth-century politician, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whom he served from 1704until 1714 as a secret agent, political operative and advisor. The figure revealedin that correspondence and clandestine relationship is as his biographers havenoted preeminently a master of disguise and deception, a plotter and dissimula-tor. In his public writing as well as in his private correspondence, Defoe is man-ifestly self-serving and self-dramatizing, or at times as in his most elaborate publicapologia, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, tho it be of his Worst Enemies (1714–15),deeply evasive and even mendacious.

vi

We need, therefore, to modify Backscheider’s recommendation of Defoe asthe perfect biographical subject: he is immensely (or even fatally) attractive tobiographers because he lived in exceedingly interesting times, because his volu-minous writings allow us to speculate about the personality that must have beenlurking somewhere behind the various voices that he projected in that endlesslyflowing river of writing that he produced over a long career of over forty years.3

Moreover, there is a clear line to his intellectual development; his wide-rangingand often enough quirky and original mind is very much on display in hiswriting, and his forcefully-expressed ideas and attitudes are there for those whocare to trace them. However, the question of just what Defoe actually wrote isstill an open one. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, his most recent editors andbibliographers, have mounted a largely convincing attack on the canon of Defoe’swriting compiled by scholars since the early nineteenth century that had steadilyexpanded over the years until in J.R. Moore’s Checklist of the Writings of DanielDefoe (1960) it numbered over 570 separate titles. Owens and Furbank haveargued for a skeptical reformation of the expanded canon propounded by severalgenerations of Defoe scholars, who tended to attribute to Defoe any pamphletfrom the early eighteenth century that featured what they saw as their hero’scharacteristic energy and style. Owens’s and Furbank’s new canon of DanielDefoe’s writings is a rational, Protestant reformation of the implicit faith in theirown judgments of earlier Defoe scholar-enthusiasts. I follow Owens’s andFurbank’s de-attribution of some 252 items from the Defoe canon in this book,with one or two exceptions, as will appear.4 But even Furbank and Owens cannotresolve the uncertainty surrounding some of what we think is Defoe’s massiveoutput, and in their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe they list works that are“probably” by Defoe, and in their ongoing collected edition of large numbers of Defoe’s works they and their colleagues in that enterprise reprint and annotate some of those pieces that they mark as merely probable in their Criti-cal Bibliography.5

Robinson Crusoe continued to be read through the eighteenth century and insome quarters was highly regarded. Boswell records that Dr. Johnson, for one,admired it greatly and commended Defoe,“allowing a considerable share of meritto a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well,” and Mrs.Thrale remembered him saying that along with Don Quixote and The Pilgrim’sProgress it was one of only three books that its readers “wished longer.”6 Other-wise, Defoe seems to have been little read or remembered in the years after hisdeath. The revival of systematic interest in his life and works dates from GeorgeChalmers (1742–1825), an antiquarian who published a Life of Defoe in 1785 inwhich he called him “one of the ablest and most useful writers of our island.”Chalmers concentrated on Defoe’s achievements as a “commercial writer . . .fairly entitled to stand in the foremost ranks among his contemporaries” and asa “historian who . . . had few equals in the English language.”7 Despite several

vii

Preface

centuries of literary and bibliographical criticism since Chalmers, and of repeatedbiographical investigation, however, the inner man, the personality, the actualDefoe, remains an elusive and even a mysterious figure. As Furbank and Owensput it, “much of the trouble in understanding Defoe and consequently in fixingthe canon of his writings, stems from the fact that the personality he presents tous in his writings is completely a construction, allowing us to guess only dimlyat the ‘real’ Defoe.”They may be stretching things, since Defoe did not constructhis public personae out of whole cloth, and there is always some relationshipbetween these public poses and what must have been his own attitudes and ideas,and we should remember that a persona is an aspect of the actual personalitymost of the time and not an outright disguise. Still, Furbank and Owens observethat Defoe is thus an impalpable and essentially a textual presence who “courtsexposure and yet hides his personality, so that we get no such feeling of him asa person as we do with Swift or Pope.”8

This study will, by choice and by necessity, dwell on the ultimate mysterysurrounding Defoe the person, on that gap between Defoe’s writing (in so faras it can be identified as his beyond a reasonable doubt) and the motives andfeelings that must have propelled or at least shaped much of it. I will not attempt,however, to construct a coherent interior life or confident psychological profileof Daniel Defoe, nor will biographical speculation accompany my treatment ofDefoe’s writings in any exact way that might claim simple relationships betweenlife events and writing, although doubtless they existed and are worth reachingfor. That biographer’s hunger for knowledge of the whole man has led in thepast to a good deal of fanciful speculation, usually framed as a question that slidesfrom the interrogative to the assertive: “What must Defoe have thought?”becomes “Surely Defoe was thinking.” It seems to me that our lack of informa-tion about Defoe’s inner life combined with a literary output that even if definedconservatively is staggering in its extent marks him more than other eighteenth-century authors as a man whose life consists of his own words. Of Defoe onemight say with Vladimir Nabokov that “the best part of a writer’s biography isnot the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”9 Given Defoe’s pen-chant for stylistic mimicry, from The Shortest Way with the Dissenters to the voiceshe assumes so convincingly in his longer fictions, that is in his case quite anadventure.To be sure, Defoe’s writing has rich local contexts and particular occa-sions; it is always involved in religious, political, economic, and moral controver-sies of the day, and we do know enough about his life to call it an adventure, apicaresque tale, almost, of strife and struggle in the commercial, political, and lit-erary arena of his time. Most of his writing is polemical journalism about a widevariety of subjects, directly and practically provoked by contemporary develop-ments and involving Defoe in urgent speculation about his country’s uncertainand perilous future. However obscure his personal and private life, in his writingDefoe has a clear and specific intellectual profile and public persona in the early

Preface

viii

decades of the English eighteenth century, and there isn’t a contemporary issuefrom those years that he didn’t write about. He was certainly one of the best-known and also one of the most reviled writers of his day, attracting whatFurbank and Owens in a nice phrase have called “a quite exceptional torrent ofvituperation.”10

Much of the book that follows will like many others before it seek to traceDefoe’s views as they are expressed in his voluminous writings and to evaluatetheir force and resonance for him and his contemporaries, many of whom werehis antagonists in the paper wars and bitter political-religious controversy of theearly years of the century, especially the tumultuous reigns of William III andQueen Anne from 1688 to 1714. I am chiefly concerned to evaluate his specif-ically literary achievements, to describe the still attractive and perennially inter-esting features of his writing, and I mean not just the novels for which he isnow still remembered but a representative sample of his entire life’s work in proseand in verse.11

To write a critical biography of Defoe and his works is to traverse nearly fiftyof the most important years in British and European history. Defoe was at thecenter of those events, or at least he inserted himself and his readers into thoseevents by the force and fecundity of his writing and the energy of his intellect.The real Defoe, the only man fully available for analysis and something like fullunderstanding as far as I am concerned, is the veritable writing machine thatprocesses those events and in so doing projects a richly varied and even contra-dictory persona.This book will try to observe that dynamic intersection betweenevents, ideas, and writing that has come down to us as Daniel Defoe.

ix

Preface

Acknowledgments

More years ago than I care to admit, Professor Claude Rawson commissionedthis book, and I am grateful to him and to Andrew McNeillie, Emma Bennett,and Karen Wilson at Blackwell, all of whom not only encouraged me over thevery long haul that it took me to complete it but patiently and generously, withnever a cross word, endured many delays and difficulties in its writing. ClaudeRawson also provided excellent editorial advice, and the final product is all thebetter for his sensitive guidance. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Saul Stein-berg, thanks to whose bounteous philanthropy toward his alma mater, I hold theA.M. Rosenthal Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. The resourcesconnected with that chair have helped me in many tangible ways to completemy work on this book. I want as well to thank another Penn alumnus, LeonardSugarman, whose generosity in endowing the Leonard Sugarman Term Profes-sorship at Penn, which I had the honor to hold for ten years, supported myresearch in the early years of this project.

I have learned a great deal over the years from my fellow students of DanielDefoe, especially from Paula Backscheider and Maximillian Novak, whose bio-graphies were indispensable for me as I wrote this book. I have also cause to begrateful for the friendly encouragement as well as the scholarship of John Bender,David Blewett, Leo Damrosch, Bob De Maria, J. Paul Hunter, Michael McKeon,Al Rivero, Michael Seidel, George Starr, and Cynthia Wall. Many years ago whenI set out to write about eighteenth-century fiction as a graduate student, I wasgenerously and crucially supported when I nearly lost heart for my task by mylate mentor at University College London, the great Defoe scholar, James R.Sutherland, who set the highest standards of scholarship imaginable and to whosepioneering work and elegant biography of Defoe I am deeply indebted. And mywife, Deirdre David, sustained me in countless ways through the years that thisbook was taking shape and slowly coming into being.

x

Acknowledgments

Some parts of chapters 5 and 6 were published in slightly different form inmy essay, “Secular Crusoe:The Reluctant Pilgrim Revisited,” which appeared inEighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms, Essaysin Honor of J. Paul Hunter, eds., Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: Uni-versity of Delaware Press, 2001). I am grateful to the University of DelawarePress for permission to reprint that material.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend, Edward Said, forwhom any praise I could give would be inadequate to his accomplishments andvirtues: a precious friend “hid in death’s dateless night” whose like I shall not seeagain.

xi

Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee! Englandhas better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than Defoe.

George Borrow, Lavengro

Defoe’s Early Life

On approaching my subject, the first and most obvious feeling is regret, that anauthor whose powers of narration . . . whose simple naturalness in his relations ofhuman intercourse, and in the charm of reality which he imperceptibly spread overthe commonest incidents . . . should not have employed his masterly pen in tellingthe story of his own life to posterity.

William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings

Tourists in London in search of the Barbican Center are likely to walk downDaniel Defoe Place, past a high-rise apartment building in that housing complexcalled “Defoe House,” just across from “William Shakespeare Tower.” Of thesetwo writers, Defoe has the greater claim to be memorialized in that part ofLondon. Among the major eighteenth-century English writers, most of whomlike Swift, Gay, and Johnson were of provincial origins, he is almost unique as aLondoner born and bred (Pope was born in the City but grew up in Binfield,near Windsor). Although the landscape of his childhood has been transformedover the centuries, Defoe was born in 1660 or 1661 not far from the towerblock of flats and the street that now bear his name, in the City of London, inthe parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate (close to where in those years Milton, old

1

1

Dissenter, Merchant,Speculator, Writer

and blind, was living, on Jewin Street). His parents were Alice and James Foe, hisfather a prosperous tallow chandler or candle manufacturer who in his later yearsbranched out into overseas trade in other merchandise on a larger scale andbecame a fairly prominent person in the City of London business community.The Foes were descended from yeoman stock in Northamptonshire; Defoe’sfather had emigrated to London from Etton in that county. During Defoe’s child-hood, they lived in Swan Alley, in St. Stephen’s parish, near St. Paul’s Cathedral(the old one, before Christopher Wren built his masterpiece) and the RoyalExchange.

Defoe’s childhood years at the heart of the City of London were full of trans-forming events for England: the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660;the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1664–7 in which Dutch ships sailed up theThames and destroyed much of the English fleet; the great bubonic plague thatin 1665 killed over 70,000 people in the city; and then the Great Fire in Sep-tember 1666 that destroyed most of the wooden houses of medieval London andlaunched a building boom in brick and stone. It is tempting to speculate aboutthe boy Daniel in those years caught up in these great events, especially since he

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer

2

Figure 1 Defoe House in the Barbican center, London. Photograph author’s own

later wrote about the plague year so memorably in A Journal of the Plague Year(1722). Unfortunately, virtually nothing is known about Defoe’s childhood,although his mother seems to have died when he was ten or eleven, and we doknow that he was sent to primary school in Dorking in Surrey at a school keptby the Rev. James Fisher, a dissenting minister.1 Frank Bastian suggests that thedeath of Defoe’s mother when he was so young was an important, even a defin-ing event in his life. He derives Defoe’s “self-sufficiency and initiative” from anadolescence deprived of a close mother-son relationship.2

Looking back in 1705 in the Review, Defoe remembered a childhood in whichhe absorbed the anxieties of his fellow religionists when many feared that Poperywould come in and take away the English scriptures. “How many Honest butover-frighted People, set to Work to Copy the Bible into Short-Hand, lest whenPopery come in, we should be Prohibited the use of it, and so might secure itin little Compass? At which Work, I my self then, but a Boy, work’d like a Horsetill I wrote out the whole Pentateuch, and then was so tyr’d, I was willing torun the Risque of the rest” (December 22, 1705).3 This anecdote may remindus of the daily strain of belonging to a persecuted religious minority. The Foeswere dissenters, Protestants who did not conform to the prescribed rituals andexact beliefs of the established national church, the Church of England. Like agood number of others, especially among the merchant and trading classes inLondon, the Foes had followed their pastor, Dr. Samuel Annesley, and his con-gregation in refusing to conform after the 1660 Restoration of the Stuart monar-chy and the Church of England to the Act of Uniformity, promulgated on St.Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, 1662.This act replaced the much looser and morelenient Elizabethan (1559) Act of Uniformity. The newly-revised Book ofCommon Prayer, prepared in Convocation of the Church of England clergy theprevious December, was according to the terms of the Act to be used exclusivelyin church services, with every clergyman instructed to “openly and publiclybefore the congregation . . . declare his unfeigned assent and consent” to every-thing in the book. Moreover, any cleric who refused to do so was stripped ofhis office, which the Act added was valid only if the incumbent had been epis-copally ordained.4 There was more persecution to come. In 1664, the Conven-ticle Act was passed (followed in 1670 by an even harsher Conventicle Act) thatprohibited more than five people meeting together to conduct any sort ofworship except using the official Prayer Book, and from then until 1672 a seriesof acts referred to as the Clarendon Code (after Charles II’s Lord Chancellor,the historian, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon) tightened the screws on religiousnonconformity and initiated a veritable reign of terror and persecution for dis-senting Protestants in England. As James Sutherland put it, as a result of theseedicts the dissenters were “a desperate people, harassed by severe laws, and at themercy of bullies and informers and of all who happened to bear them any per-sonal grudge.”5

3


Defoe himself later estimated in 1707 that over 3,000 ministers left the Churchrather than conform to the Act.6 N. H. Keeble cites a lower estimate of fifteenor sixteen hundred by William Hooke, a former chaplain of Cromwell’s, and henotes that Richard Baxter, the great Protestant divine, put the figure at about2,000.7 Whatever the actual number, this clerical exodus was a key moment inthe history of English religious dissent. Even with this large defection from theestablished church, Protestant dissenters (excluding Catholics) were always a dis-tinct minority in England, no more than about 5 percent of the population.8 Butfrom the Stuart Restoration through the reign of Queen Anne (1703–14) andbeyond, they played an important and controversial role in English religious andpolitical life, at a time when those two realms were interdependent, indeed inex-tricable. Defoe’s life from his earliest years is profoundly involved in the complexfate of being an English dissenter during these turbulent times. An angry mar-ginality and a lingering resentment of the ruling elite, as well as of isolated auto-didacticism, such as one finds expressed in much of his writing, might well betraced to his growing up among this embattled minority.9

The historian David Ogg has suggested that as a persecuted and disenfran-chised minority, excluded to a large extent from public life, dissenters tended towork in commerce in the emerging new financial order that was to transformBritain. They achieved, says Ogg, success and power disproportionate to their numbers.10 Defoe embarked as a young man on a commercial career suchas was open to dissenters, on a much more ambitious scale than his father, anda series of spectacular failures as a wholesale merchant and entrepreneur wouldpropel him for sheer physical survival into his life as a political operative and polemical journalist, where his identity as a dissenter (who dissented in his turn from much of what most dissenters of his class thought) would shapehis career.

In 1662, the Foes’ minister, Samuel Annesley, established his dissenting meetinghouse at Little St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate. Annesley became a prominent Presbyter-ian divine, and Defoe memorialized him in a poem (“The Character of the LateMr. Samuel Annesley, by Way of Elegy”) when he died in 1697. Defoe’s biogra-phers have assumed that he attended Annesley’s services as an adult, or at theleast maintained an acquaintance with him.11 Much more is known about theinfluence on Defoe of another prominent dissenting divine, Charles Morton, towhose dissenting academy at Newington Green, just north of London, he wassent when he turned 16. Students who would not declare their adherence to the Church of England were barred from attending the English universities atOxford and Cambridge. A network of dissenting academies, as they were called,had evolved as a substitute system of higher education. Morton’s school likeothers of its kind was conceived as an alternative education for the sons of pros-perous dissenters who were intended for the ministry, as Defoe seems to havebeen. A distinguished scholar and a former fellow of Wadham College, Oxford,


4

Morton later emigrated to America and became the first president of HarvardCollege.

Near the end of his life, in a work that survived in manuscript but was notprinted until 1890, The Compleat English Gentleman, Defoe looked back with greatsatisfaction to his unorthodox education at Morton’s academy. He argues in thattreatise that it would be much better for the education of gentlemen “if theywere taught in English, and if all the learned labours of the masters of the agewere made to speak English, to be levell’d to the capacities of the more unlearn’dpart of man-kind, who would be encourag’d by that means to look into thosehappy discoveryes in Nature, which have been the study and labour of so manyages.” Let us have more translation into English of works both modern andancient, he urges, to follow the example of the French.Then,“it must be grantedmen might be made schollars at a much easier expence as well of labour as ofmoney than now, and might be truly learned and yet kno’ nothing of the Greekor the Latin.”12 The Compleat English Gentleman offers a familiar complaint againstthe traditional curriculum: “If then a man may be learned in all the wisdomeand knowledge of God so as to be a complete Christian, and that without theknowledge of either Latin or Greek, I see not reason to scruple saying he maybe a complete phylospher [sic] or a complete mathematician, tho’ he has no skillin the learned languages.”13 During his years as a journalist in the fractious publicarena, Defoe was often subjected to taunts from opponents for his lack of clas-sical learning, borne out by occasional ungrammatical Latin scraps and tags inhis journalism, and he was always defensive on that score. For example in theReview of May 31, 1705 he challenged his rival periodical journalist, John Tutchin,who had in the Observator ridiculed his bad Latin, to a translation contest: “bythis he shall have an Opportunity to show the World, how much De Foe theHosier, is inferior in Learning to Mr.Tutchin the gentleman.” And earlier in thisnumber, he declared: “I have no Concern to tell Dr. B – I can read English, orto tell Mr. Tutchin I understand Latin, Non ite Latinus sum ut Latine loqui – Ieasily acknowledge my self Blockhead enough, to have lost the Fluency ofExpression in the Latin, and so far Trade has been a Prejudice to me; and yet Ithink I owe this Justice to my Ancient Father, yet living, and in whose Behalf I freely Testifie that if I am a Blockhead, it was no Bodies Fault but my own;he having spar’d nothing in my Education, that might Qualifie me to Match the accurate Dr. B – or the Learned Observator.” When in 1710 Swift in theExaminer attacked the Review’s author as “illiterate,” Defoe responded at lengthand with great dignity, defining himself as a man of the world rather than what he called a “Learned Fool”: “we have abundance of Learned Fools in theWorld, and Ignorant Wise-Men – How often have I seen a Man boast of hisLetters, and his Load of Learning, and be Ignorant in the common necessaryAcquirements, that fit a Man either for the Service of himself or his Country”(December 16, 1710). Many years later, he was still harping on this grievance:

5


“Will nothing make a man a schollar but Latin and Greek?” he has a characterask in a dialogue in The Compleat English Gentleman. His interlocutor replies thatscholars are nothing but pedants, “a kind of mechanicks in the schools, for theydeal in words and syllables as haberdashers deal in small ware.”14 Defoe’s aggrievedpersonality is still on display here in his old age, and the reduction of so-calledscholars to dealers in haberdashery is a reprise of the jeers Defoe endured fromrival polemicists all his life about being a hosier. But he balances this resentfulcomplaint with what is clearly his memory of Morton’s effectively modern pedagogy, conducted in English and including current subjects such as Locke’sphilosophy and Newton’s physics.

He calls Morton “a tutor of unquestion’d reputacion for learning . . . a critickin the learned languages, and even in all the oriental tongues,” who set out tocorrect the mistaken prejudices of “school learning” by lecturing in English andrequiring “all the exercises and performances of the gentlemen, his pupils, to bemade in English.”15 Defoe describes Morton’s “class for eloquence” in which thepupils “declaim’d weekly in the English tongue, made orations, and wrot epistlestwice every week upon such subjects as he prescrib’d to them or upon such asthey themselves chose to write upon.” His evocation of these school exercisesthrows a good deal of light on how Morton’s educational approach may havenot only trained Defoe as a disciplined writer of muscular and direct Englishprose but helped to prepare him for his life of writing in many voices and mul-tiple personae.

Sometimes they were Ministers of State, Secretaries and Commissioners at home,and wrote orders and instruccions to the ministers abroad, as by order of the Kingin Council and the like.Thus he taught his pupils to write a masculine and manlystile, to write the most polite English, and at the same time to kno’ how to suittheir manner as well to the subject they were to write upon as to the persons ordegrees of persons they were to write to; and all equally free of jingling bombastin stile, or dull meanness of expression below the dignity of the subject or the char-acter of the writer. In a word, his pupils came out of his hands finish’d orators,fitted to speak in the highest presence, to the greatest assemblies, and even in Parliament, Courts of Justice, or any where; and severall of them come afterwardto speak in all those places and capacityes with great applause.16

The dissenting academies were mainly training schools for clergymen, andDefoe was clearly meant by his family to follow that calling. But as he remarkedyears later in the Review for October 22, 1709, “It was my Disaster first to beset a-part for, and then to be set a-part from the Honour of that Sacred Employ.”We can’t be sure just how true this claim is (the comment is a throwaway linein an issue of the Review and hardly a full autobiographical statement) nor in


6

this case why he turned away from this calling to enter the secular world ofcommerce, although his comments years later in a tract called The Present Stateof the Parties in Great Britain: Particularly An Enquiry into the State of the Dissentersin England and the Presbyterians in Scotland (1712) about the state of the dissent-ing clergy may be his retrospective rationalization of his youthful decision.17

Oddly enough in the light of his later idealized evocation in The Compleat EnglishGentleman of Morton’s school, Defoe here has little good to say of the dissent-ing academies in general and even less that is positive of their students, althoughhe specifically if disingenuously (listing Daniel Defoe among its distinguishedalumni) exempts his own alma mater from blame. Otherwise, Defoe describesthe dissenting academies as a poor alternative to the established universities,noting that they are “without publick libraries, without polite conversation,without suited authority, without classes to check and examin one another, andabove all, without time to finish the youth in the studies they apply to.”18 Healso paints a dismal picture of the sort of second-rate young men who are gen-erally sent to these academies, often those whose fathers have died or who haveno family resources to depend upon and take to the calling as a last economicresort. Finally, he ridicules the training most receive at the academies, a weakparody of classical education whereby some students “have all their readings inLatin or in Greek, that, at the end of the severest term of study, nay, were toperform a quarantine of years in the schools, they come out unacquainted withEnglish, tho’ that is the tongue in which all their gifts are to shine.”19

Some biographers have speculated that Defoe suffered a crisis of faith as ayoung man after three years or so at Morton’s and so gave up his clerical voca-tion. Maximillian Novak suggests that Defoe must have felt isolated at school inNewington Green, cut off from the exciting events unfolding in London suchas the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis of 1680 and 1681, when Charles IIdissolved parliament as it sought to exclude his brother James from the succes-sion to the throne. Novak goes so far as to say that Defoe witnessed events con-nected with these crises while on vacation in London from Morton’s Academyand his blood was fired, so that the “chances are that he may found his fascina-tion with the political events of the time had diminished his zeal for becominga clergyman.”20 Whatever his reasons for choosing a secular career, Defoe’s youth-ful piety is probably not in question, especially since there exists a manuscript inhis hand dating from 1681 of verse religious meditations. These Meditations, notpublished until 1946, are conventional enough but strongly expressive of genuinedevotion. They include, as in this representative example, moments of personaldoubt as well as affirmation and acceptance of God’s preeminence:

How is it Then That ISo Much Aversion To My Duty Find

7


That Tho’ I Own it DueAnd in A Sort performe it To

Yet Lord! How Little does my Act Explain My MindHow Freely I Obey

Lusts That No Title To my Service Kno’And Such as I my Self can hardly Sho’

Why I Should Serve or These should SwayAh My Degenerate Heart

How Freely can it With its Freedom PartAnd Hug the Tyrants yt Destroy

Her Truer Interest and Ecclypse her joy21

We shall never know for sure just what prompted his decision to forsake aclerical vocation, and it may be that Defoe’s progressively modern education atMorton’s, reading Locke and studying Newton, had as much to do with histurning away from a religious calling as the lure of action in the political world.There is in Defoe’s writing from his earliest productions an intellectual confi-dence, a self-satisfaction bordering on arrogance, that would have made thedependence of a dissenting minister upon the good will of his congregation intol-erable. Such interesting but quite unverifiable conjecture is the pattern of Defoe’slife as we know it, where there is usually on view for the aspiring biographer a teasing mixture of intellectual and political circumstances with half-glimpsedpersonal motives and self-dramatizations. For the rest of Defoe’s life, his workexpresses a consistent mixture of secular modernity, with all that implies abouthuman agency and autonomy, and an apparently sincere religious conviction (andscriptural frame of reference) that humbly submits to providential arrangementsand accepts supernatural mysteries. It may be that this early decision to forsakewhat he perhaps saw as the second-rate prospects of the dissenting pulpit for theworldly ambitions of the mercantile exchange is the beginning of this key tensionin Defoe’s life and mind between an early form of secular modernity and quitestrongly held orthodox Christian beliefs.

His early days as a merchant are not clearly visible in the historical record buthave been reconstructed in large part from anecdotes and remarks in his laterwritings.We know that he quickly became a wholesale dealer in hosiery and animporter of wine, tobacco, and other goods. He entered into a partnership withtwo brothers, James and Samuel Stancliffe, who dealt in haberdashery, althoughas Sutherland observes he always strenuously denied in the face of contemptu-ous references to him as a hosier that he kept a retail shop and served behind acounter.22 As Novak remarks, “so little is known of Defoe’s business ventures”and so much about his writing and political life that “it is easy enough to ignorethis part of his life entirely.”23 What can’t be ignored is the importance of theseearly commercial experiences in which Defoe learned first hand the cut and


8

thrust of commercial wheeling and dealing, the risks and potentially great rewardsof speculative ventures, of adventure capitalism. Those early years of his com-mercial career took place in what historians have called the “financial revolu-tion” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in which modernfinancial practices began to emerge and when Great Britain began to take shapeas an essentially commercial rather than an agricultural nation. Trade and com-merce were to be among Defoe’s favorite topics as a writer, and his educationin these topics began in practical experience in these years. He thought of themerchant as the new hero of the new age and its commercial ethos, and he fre-quently grew eloquent on the subject. Here is one famous celebratory passagefrom the Review:

A True-Bred Merchant . . . Understands Languages without Books, Geographywithout Maps, his Journals and Trading-Voyages delineate the World; his ForeignExchanges, Protests and Procurations, speak all Tongues; he sits in his Counting-House, and Converses with all Nations, and keeps the most exquisite and exten-sive part of human Society in a Universal Correspondence. ( January 3, 1706)

He may also in the 1680s have traveled to France, Holland, Italy, and Spainon business, or so it would appear from fairly detailed comments he makes aboutparticular places in those countries later in his life. We know from his familiar-ity with much of Britain displayed in his A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of GreatBritain (1724–6) that starting from his young manhood he traveled extensivelyin his own country.

On 1 January, 1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley, the nineteen-year old daugh-ter of Joan and John Tuffley, a rich wine cooper, and with his bride he receivedan enormous dowry of £3,700 (about £400,000 or nearly $800,000 in currentpurchasing power), which helped set up the young Defoe in the wholesale trade.Four years later, in 1688, he was admitted to his father’s livery company, theButchers, and by then he was apparently a thriving young professional merchant,with houses in town and in the country. Almost nothing is known of Mary,except that she bore seven or perhaps eight children, of whom six lived to adult-hood. For biographers, this is a particularly frustrating aspect of Defoe’s privatelife, since we know that over the next forty years or so Defoe was away from home much of the time, possibly traveling in Europe on business, certainlyriding around a good deal of Britain on political as well as commercial business.In the years from 1704 leading up to the Union of England and Scotland (1707), he was on the road and in Scotland itself (in 1706) just about all thetime as a secret agent for the government. Sutherland’s comment that “there issome reason for supposing that his marriage was not one of the more romanticunions of the seventeenth century” is as plausible as it is amusing, especially givenDefoe’s harshly practical views on sex and marriage to be found in his later

9


writings.24 More sentimentally inclined biographers have found more affectionin Defoe’s marriage by reading the commonplace book, his personal collection of quotations and historical narratives called Historical Collections, that he presented to his future wife, complete with a flowery preface to Clarinda fromBellmour.

Another biographical mystery from these years is Defoe’s part in Monmouth’srebellion. In June of 1685, the popular Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate sonof Charles II, landed on the south western coast of England at Lyme Regis tolead an abortive revolt against his uncle, the new and in some quarters unpop-ular Catholic King of England, James II. In his Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715),Defoe claimed that he “had been in arms under the Duke of Monmouth,” andthat is borne out by his appearance in 1687 on a list of thirty-three people pardoned for their part in the late rebellion.25 Monmouth’s forces were cut topieces in a disastrous encounter at Sedgemoor, near Bristol, on 6 July, 1685, andMonmouth himself was executed a few weeks later. Three of Defoe’s classmatesfrom Morton’s school were among those captured after the battle and executed,so it is likely that Defoe was among the dispersed remnants of the defeated army.Somehow and against all odds, he evaded the pursuing victors and the brutalproscription of rebels in the western provinces that followed the defeat of therevolt, administered by the infamous Chief Justice, Judge Jeffreys, who presidedover the “Bloody Assizes” in which hundreds were hanged (some of their corpseshung along the roadsides) or transported to the colonies as slaves.26 As Backschei-der notes, very few of the rebel soldiers were from the City of London, so Defoe’sardor for the Protestant cause was genuine as well as courageous.27 At the sametime, his decision to risk the fatal consequences of rebellion is striking and maypredict his future rashness in the commercial world. These events lend credenceto Novak’s analysis of the instability of his youthful personality: “The youthfulDefoe, who abandoned his business interests and his young wife to fight for theDuke of Monmouth, was hardly the steady, dependable tradesman Defoe some-times idealized.”28 Many years later, in his The Complete English Tradesman (1727),Defoe depicted very vividly the psychological strains of the commercial life, andthe irascible Defoe his enemies would evoke during his career seems always tohave been an aspect of his personality.

Defoe may have sought refuge in Holland for a while after this disaster, alongwith other Englishmen implicated in the rebellion. Bastian says that it seems likelythat he spent part of his exile in Rotterdam, where he speculates he may havebeen in contact with the established Scottish community there.29 What we know for certain is that he was back in London before too long after the defeatof Monmouth’s army, actively pursuing his commercial career during the late1680s and 1690s. Once again, our knowledge of his business dealings is tantaliz-ingly sketchy, although certain facts are clear along with some spectacular


10

failures and, eventually, two bankruptcies. He had an interest in a passenger ship that sailed to America, the Batchelor, and in a cargo ship, the Desire. Mainly,he was an importer/exporter of whatever might turn a profit, and he seems to have played for high stakes, perhaps recklessly but certainly in the end unluckily. If we consider some cautionary passages from The Complete EnglishTradesman (1727) that seem to derive from his own chastening experiences as a young man of business, we can construct a plausible profile of Defoe as notonly a reckless speculator in trade but also as a merchant distracted from hisproper business by his intellectual and political interests as well as his literary aspirations.

One of those distractions, and not just for Defoe, came with the crisis that began in 1685 with the accession of Charles II’s Catholic brother, James II, to the throne and peaked in 1688 when James was forced to flee to France, where under Louis XIV’s protection and active support he and his family continued for many years to claim the throne now occupied by James’s son-in-law, the Dutch Prince William of Orange, and his daughter, Mary,and then in 1702 by James’s other Protestant daughter, Queen Anne. This rival claim to the English throne from the Stuart dynasty was for the next 60 years or so a genuine and constant threat, and there were several nearly-successful attempts by the Stuarts and their French protectors to seize power.It’s worth remembering that the English monarchical succession was in theseyears extremely precarious. The situation in 1688 was extremely unstable: awidely-distrusted Catholic monarch was replaced by a widely-distrusted Protestant king related by marriage and blood to the ruling Stuart family (KingsCharles and James were his uncles). As far as Defoe was concerned, this dynas-tic shift was the most important political moment in his life, and we will see inall of his writing his sustaining enthusiasm for the Protestant cause, alreadyevident in his reckless support of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, and hiseloquent articulations in the years to come of the ideology of property, parlia-mentary privilege, and modified kingly prerogative that supported this bourgeoisRevolution, with its refusal of the absolute monarchy James seemed bent onestablishing.

The contemporary historian, John Oldmixon, provides a vivid description ofthe young Defoe (as well as a partisan attack on him and his political masters)as part of the ceremonies in the City of London that welcomed the new kingon October 29, 1689 on Lord Mayor’s Day:“a royal regiment of volunteer horse,made up of the chief citizens, who being gallantly mounted and richly accou-tred, were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attendedtheir majesties from Whitehall. Among these troopers, was Daniel Foe, at thattime a hosier in Freeman’s Yard, Cornhill; the same who afterwards was pillory’dfor writing an ironical invective against the Church, and after that list in the

11


service of Mr. Robert Harley, and those brethren of his, who past the Schismand Occasional bills, broke the Confederacy, and made a shameful and ruinouspeace with France.”30

Early Writing and Political Polemics

The wonder which remains is at our pride,To value that which all wise men deride.For Englishmen to boast of generation,Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.A True-Born Englishman’s a contradiction,In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.A banter made to be a test of fools,Which those that use it justly ridicules.

Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman

Defoe did much more than ride in parades to honor William. Novak calls Defoethe “enthusiastic propagandist, political theorist, and economic prophet” of thenew order.31 He also became especially in his own eyes the champion of WilliamIII, whose memory he continued to revere all his life in his writing and in whosedefense he wrote his most famous or at least until Robinson Crusoe his mostpopular work, the January 1701 poem “The True-Born Englishman,” designedto counter what Defoe saw as the pernicious slanders and xenophobic attack onWilliam and his Dutch advisors in the Whig journalist John Tutchin’s poem,“The Foreigners.” Tutchin’s poem was only one of many assaults on William’spersonality and his policies. Unlike many in his adopted country, William was concerned with the balance of power in Europe and struggled in those years to convince the political nation that Britain needed a large army to counterthe expansionist ambitions of Louis XIV of France. In addition, many English-men resented the influence and power of William’s Dutch advisors, and it waseven whispered that he had homosexual relationships with two of them, his closeconfidants, Hans Willem Bentinck (the Earl of Portland) and Arnout Joust vanKeppel (the Earl of Albemarle). In An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715)Defoe looked back to his rage at the “vile abhor’d pamphlet, in very ill verse”in which the author “fell personally upon the King himself, and then upon theDutch nation; and after having reproach’d His Majesty with crimes that his worstenemy could not think of without horror, he sums up all in the odious name of FOREIGNER.” And he follows by describing with customary falsemodesty the intimacy with the King that came as a result of the effectiveness ofhis poem:


12

How this poem was the occasion of my being known to his majesty; how I wasafterwards receiv’d by him; he employ’d; and how, above my capacity of deserving,rewarded, is no part of the present case, and is only mention’d here as I take alloccasions to do for the expressing the honour I ever preserv’d for the immortaland glorious memory of that greatest and best of princes, and who it was myhonour and advantage to call master as well as sovereign, whose goodness to me Inever forget; and whose memory I never patiently heard abused, nor ever can doso; and who had he liv’d, would never have suffered me to be treated as I havebeen in the world.32

Although he was in the poems and pamphlets he wrote during William’s reignan eloquent supporter of the king’s policies and was probably rewarded for hisefforts, whether Defoe was actually an intimate counselor of William’s is like somuch else in his life uncertain. We have only his word for it. In 1704 as he entered Robert Harley’s service, he sounds pretty convincing (and charac-teristically shrewd) when he recalls some advice he offered to William: “IRemember Sir when haveing had the honour to Serve the Late King William ina kind like this, and which his Majtie had the Goodness to Accept, and OverVallue by Far, Expressing some Concern at the Clamour and Power of The Party, at his Express Command I had the heart or Face or what Elce you will Please to Call it, to give my Opinion in Terms like These: ‘Your Majtie Must Face About, Oblige your Friends to be Content to be Laid by, and Put Inyour Enemyes, Put them into Those Posts in which They may Seem to beEmploy’d, and Thereby Take off the Edge and Divide The Party.”33 “The True-Born Englishman” provided for years a heroic nom de plume for Defoe, and hisdebut as an author rather than the producer of occasional or fugitive pieces ismarked by the publication of his poems and pamphlets in the volume he en-titled A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman (2vols, 1703–5).

The European political scene in those years was hugely troubled by the ques-tion of the Spanish Succession: the vast Holy Roman Empire presided over byCharles V (1500–58) had after his death been divided into Spanish and Austrianbranches, and the last of his successors, Carlos II (1661–1700) of Spain, at thedegenerated end of the Habsburg line, physically feeble and mentally retarded,was childless. Louis XIV of France had married Maria Theresa, elder daughterof Philip IV (1605–65), Carlos’s father. Louis claimed in the last years of the seventeenth century that his eldest son, the Dauphin, was the legitimate succes-sor to the Spanish throne and its empire. But there were rival claims from twoothers: the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, a great grandson ofPhilip IV, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, who had married a youngerdaughter of Philip and claimed the right of succession to the Spanish throne forhis son, the Archduke Charles, later Emperor Charles VI. Britain and Holland

13


were alarmed by Louis’s claim, since if successful it would add the vast Spanishdominions in America and in Italy and Sicily to the French empire and makeFrance the most powerful country in Europe; but they were united with Louisin opposing the Emperor’s claim, since that would have restored the unifiedpower of the old Habsburg Holy Roman Empire.These dynastic rivalries led tothe War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) in which Louis XIV invaded theGerman Palatinate (western Germany), defeated the Dutch in various battles inthe Low Countries, and marched into Catalonia but was himself defeated at seaat La Hogue by the British.

In the end, with the participants exhausted and a stalemate in place, the warconcluded in the Peace of Ryswick, signed in 1697, between the French andBritain and her allies, notably of course the States General (the Netherlands).Louis recognized William as the king of Great Britain, but he continued to harborJames II and his family and to support their claim to the throne through theearly years of the eighteenth century when a French-supported invasion ofBritain was a constant and real threat. The Peace was followed by the First Partition Treaty (1698), which divided the Spanish empire between Louis’s sonand the electoral prince of Bavaria, the six-year-old Joseph Ferdinand, with theArchduke Charles receiving only Milan. Carlos II of Spain then declared that hisentire empire should go to the electoral prince, but that prince died late in 1699.So in March 1700 a Second Partition Treaty was signed, with the French Dauphinto receive Spain’s Italian possessions and the Archduke Charles to rule Spain, theLow Countries, and the Spanish American empire.34 Finally, on 1 November,1700, Carlos II of Spain died, and his will surprised everyone and terrifiedWilliam and his allies by leaving his empire to the Duke of Anjou, Louis’s grand-son. Very quickly, Louis put aside the second Partition Treaty and accepted thewill.That acceptance of Carlos’s will and the enormous growth in French powerthat it signified precipitated the War of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1701 with Britain, Holland, and the Emperor ranged against the French.This war would last until 1714 and would provide the occasion for a good dealof Defoe’s most impassioned journalism during those years when the fate ofEurope and the destiny of Britain hung in the balance, as he tried to explain to his readers in the Review, who were he clearly felt badly informed aboutforeign affairs.

Meanwhile, in Britain, where conservative and isolationist opinion tended tolook inward and to be wary of European power struggles, William found it dif-ficult to muster sufficient support for his efforts to contain Louis. The parlia-ments of 1698 and 1701 were dominated by those who called themselves Tories,and they were extremely reluctant to provide money for the large army requiredfor William’s challenge to the expanding power of Louis. Whether Great Britainshould have a large “standing army” with a professional officer corps, or whether


14

as Tory opinion favored the country should depend on the militia and the lead-ership of amateur officers recruited from the gentry was to remain a controver-sial issue for many years. In March of 1701, the House of Commons condemnedthe Second Partition Treaty, and a month later impeached Portland, Somers,Orford, and Halifax, the Whig lords who had helped to negotiate it. Publicopinion, to some extent, came to William’s rescue when the freeholders of Kentmet at Maidstone and presented in May of that year a petition to the Commonsto supply the king with what was needed to assist his allies in Europe. In part,it read:

We most humbly implore this Honourable House to have regard to the voice ofthe people! that our religion and safety may be effectually provided for, that yourloyal addresses may be turned into bills of supply, and that His most sacred Majesty(whose propitious and unblemished reign over us we pray God may long continue!)may be enabled powerfully to assist his allies, before it is too late.35

The five gentlemen who presented this Kentish Petition were immediatelyimprisoned by the Tory-controlled House of Commons.36 Defoe responded tothese events boldly by drawing up what he entitled “Legion’s Memorial” (1701),which he presented in person to Robert Harley, the Speaker of the House; if we believe the pamphlet Defoe wrote shortly after, “The History of the KentishPetition” (1701), this is what happened: “ ‘twas delivered by the very Person whowrote it, guarded with about Sixteen Gentlemen of Quality, who if any notice had been taken of him, were ready to have carried him off by Force.”37

“Legion’s Memorial” is a stirring piece of classic Whig rhetoric, sounding polit-ical themes that Defoe will rehearse many times in his career. Its title and itsmenacing last line come from the gospels, echoing the answer the man possessedby an “unclean spirit” gives to Jesus: “My name is Legion: for we are many”(Mark 5:9). In language that in 1701 with the events of the last century still freshin everyone’s mind would have resonated with rebellion, Defoe proclaims that“Englishmen are no more to be Slaves to Parliaments, than to a King.”38 Next tothe mild and submissive language of the Kentish petitioners, the pamphlet is con-sistently threatening, even revolutionary in addressing the House of Commons:“You are not above the Peoples Resentments, they that made you Members may reduce you to the same rank from whence they chose you; and may giveyou a taste of their abused kindness, in Terms you may not be pleas’d with.”39

As Sutherland remarked of “Legion’s Memorial,” it is “a document that must still evoke a gasp of astonishment from any one who has the least historical imagination.”40

Defoe is speaking for the Kentish petitioners here, but even in “The Historyof the Kentish Petition” he displays that fractiousness that was to become his

15


signature as a polemicist (in an exceedingly fractious and combative age): “TheAuthor of the following Sheets is not afraid to let the World know, that he is sosure every thing related in this Account is Literally and Positively true, that hechallenges all the Wit and Malice the world abounds with, to confute the mosttrifling Circumstance.”41 Outraged by the insults to the petitioning freeholdersof Kent, Defoe displays at the end of the pamphlet the freewheeling wit thatwould very soon get him in the deepest of trouble and change his life: the rightto petition is so fundamental, he argues, that no tribunal or legislature he canthink of denies it, even the most tyrannical: “nay, the Inquisition of Spain doesnot forbid it, the Divan of the Turks allows it, and I believe if Sathan himself kepthis Court in publick, he would not prohibit it.”42

Such dangerously outspoken political journalism was still in 1701 an avoca-tion for Defoe the harried merchant, although it is astonishing just how muchwriting he managed in those years. In the early 1690s Defoe’s business careerhad plunged him into bankruptcy and the threat of debtors’ prison. That disas-ter was preceded, apparently, by a number of lawsuits against him; some eighthave been documented between 1688 and 1694. As Sutherland recounts a fewof these, they involved disagreements and charges of sharp dealing from some of his business associates, complicated in some cases by the uncertainties of lateseventeenth-century international and colonial trade such as French privateerscapturing vessels during the War of the Grand Alliance, bad sailing weather, andother unprofitable accidents. A few years later in the Preface to An Essay uponProjects, he remarks on “the losses and casualties which attend all Trading Nationsin the World, when involved in so Cruel a War as this” and adds that he has suf-fered great losses.43 He seems to have lost large sums of money insuring shipsand cargoes that were captured by French privateers during the war. Defoe clearlyplayed for high stakes and lost, but he also seems to have dealt at times from thebottom of the deck. In other more serious cases, Defoe was accused of fraud,and in the most grimly amusing of his financial entanglements he was involvedin a botched project to farm civet cats in Stoke Newington for their secretions,used in making perfume. Sued by the person from whom he had borrowed themoney to buy the cats, he sold them to his widowed mother-in-law, Mary Tuffley,who in turn sued him when it turned out that Defoe did not really have titleto the cats, having used the money he had borrowed initially to pay a creditor.44

As Paula Backscheider, not always a judgmental biographer, remarks in heraccount of Defoe’s shady deals in these years, he cheated his friends and relativesand “his conduct was reprehensible.”45 At last, in 1692 Defoe was forced to declarebankruptcy to the tune of £17,000 (a staggering sum, almost two million poundsor about three and three quarter million dollars in current purchasing power).He lost his country house and had to give up that special sign of wealth andstatus, his coach and horses. The rest of his assets were forfeited to help pay hiscreditors.


16

But by coming to rapid terms with his creditors, Defoe spent only a few daysin the Fleet Prison and in the King’s Bench Prison for his debts, and his heroicefforts in the years that followed to pay off his huge debt are remarkable. By1705 he had reduced his debt down to £5000, even though he was not afterbankruptcy legally bound to pay back the sums.46 In 1703 Defoe was not aboveclaiming moral superiority out of his principled efforts to pay his creditors infull. In “A Dialogue between a Dissenter and the Observator,” he has his rivaljournalist, John Tutchin, report that he has heard from one of those creditors: “Icompounded with him, and discharg’d him fully; and several years afterward hesent for me, and tho’ he was clearly discharg’d, he paid me all the Remainder ofhis Debt voluntarily, and of his own accord.”47 Bankruptcy and the unjust andillogical laws governing its punishment were to become almost obsessive topicsof Defoe’s journalism. Only more financial disaster provoked by other trials thatyear prevented him from repaying all of his past obligations. In the interveningyears, he struggled with some success to make money again and to re-establishhimself as a merchant. In part, this rehabilitation was a matter of exploiting hisconnections. Through the influence of one of William’s courtiers, CharlesMontagu (now Earl of Halifax and Chancellor of the Exchequer), he wasappointed the accountant to Dalby Thomas, one of Defoe’s patrons, a prominentfinancier who was one of the commissioners for the new duty on glass; and thispost brought in a steady and reliable hundred pounds a year until 1699, whenthe duty was cancelled.48 Defoe himself in his 1715 apologia pro vita sua,An Appeal to Honour and Justice, describes some “misfortunes in business”that “unhing’d me from matters of trade,” and notes that he was “without the least application of mine . . . sent for to be accomptant to the commissionerof the glass duty.”49 We can be pretty sure that Defoe’s claim that such an officewas unsolicited is disingenuous and that this welcome appointment did not comeout of the blue. This moment is suggestive of two complementary forces inDefoe’s life that we will see articulated again at key moments: patronage anddependence on the powerful along with independent and aggressive entrepre-neurial action. Like the characters in the fictions he would write many yearslater, Defoe was clearly a strong individual, but he needed to operate within the prevailing system of power and patronage.The result is often a curious com-bination of assertive independence and self-abasing servitude (presumably amatter of customary courtesy) to the powerful politicians who controlled hisdestiny.

Defoe’s most serious and for a time successful project to regain prosperitycame when on some marshland that he owned near Tilbury in Essex he established with money that he had received for his services to King William afactory for the manufacturing of bricks and Dutch style curved roof tiles (called pantiles), both materials much in demand in those years as London rebuiltafter the devastation of the Great Fire and expanded rapidly during the late

17


daniel defoe - download.e-bookshelf.de€¦ · william minto,daniel defoe paula r. backscheider...

Documents