| |
| |
Daniel De Foe (1660?–1731)
 The
son of a London butcher, and educated at a Dissenters' academy,
he was typical of the new kind of man reaching prominence in
England in the 18th cent.—self-reliant, industrious, possessing
a strong notion of personal and moral responsibility. Although
intended for the Presbyterian ministry, he had by 1683 set
himself up as a merchant dealing in many different commodities.
In spite of his own considerable savings and his wife's dowry,
Defoe went bankrupt in 1692. Although he paid his creditors, he
was never entirely free from debt again.
Defoe's first important publication was An Essay upon Projects
(1698) but it was not until the poem The True-born Englishman
(1701), a defense of William III from his attackers, that he
received any real fame. An ill-timed satire early in Queen
Anne's reign, The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), an ironic
defense of High Church animosity against nonconformists,
resulted in Defoe's being imprisoned. He was rescued by Robert
Harley and subsequently served the statesman as a political
agent.
Defoe has been called the father of modern journalism; during
his lifetime he was associated with 26 periodicals. From 1704 to
1713 he published and wrote a Review, a miscellaneous journal
concerned with the affairs of Europe; this was an incredibly
ambitious undertaking for one man.
He was nearly sixty when he turned to writing novels. In 1719 he
published his famous Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, followed by two less engrossing sequels. Based
in part on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe
describes the daily life of a man marooned on a desert island.
Although there are exciting episodes in the novel—Crusoe
rescuing his man Friday from cannibals—its main interest derives
from the way in which Crusoe overcomes the extraordinary
difficulties of life on the island while preserving his human
integrity. Robinson Crusoe is considered by some critics to be
the first true novel in English.
Defoe's great novels were not published under his name but as
authentic memoirs, with the intention of gulling his readers
into thinking his fictions true. Two excellent examples of his
semihistorical recreations are the picaresque adventure Moll
Flanders (1722), the story of a London prostitute and thief, and
an account of the 1665 great plague in London entitled A Journal
of the Plague Year (1722).
|
|
|
