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Daniel Defoe...

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DANIEL DEFOE (1660-1731) Daniel Defoe was a stranger to the sphere of refined tastes and classical learning that dominated polite literature during his life-time. He belonged among the hardy Nonconformist tradesfolk who, after the Restoration, slowly increased their wealth and toward the end of the seventeenth century began to achieve political importance. He began adult life as a small merchant and for a while prospered, but in 1692 he found himself bankrupt. This was the first of his many financial crises that drove him to make his way by whatever means presented themselves. He seems always to have found the way to reconcile his dealings with his genuine Nonconformist piety. His restless mind was fertile in "projects," both for himself and for the country, and his itch for politics made the role of passive observer impossible for him. An ardent Whig, he first gained notoriety by political verses and pamphlets, and for one of them, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters" (1702), in which he ironically defended Anglican oppression, he was sentenced to jail. He was released through the influence of Robert Harley, who recognized in Defoe a useful ally. For the next eleven years Defoe served his benefactor secretly as a political spy and confidential agent, traveling throughout England and Scotland, reporting and perhaps influencing opinion. As founder and editor of the Review, he endeavored to gain support for Harley's policies, even when, in 1710, Harley became head of a Tory ministry. After the fall of the Tories in 1 714, he went over to the triumphant Whigs and served them as loyally. When he was nearly sixty, Defoe's energy and inventiveness enabled him to begin a new career. Robinson Crusoe, which appeared in 1719, is the first of a series of tales of adventure for which Defoe is now admired, but which brought him little esteem from the polite world. In Robinson Crusoe and other tales that followed, Defoe was able to use all his greatest gifts: the ability to re-create a milieu vividly, through the cumulative effect of carefully observed, often petty details; a special skill in writing easy-going prose, the language of actual speech,

which seems to reveal the consciousness of the first-person narrator; a wide knowledge of the society, the trading classes and the rogues who preyed on them; and an absorption in the spectacle of lonely human beings, whether Crusoe on his-island or Moll Flanders in England and Virginia, somehow bending a stubborn and indifferent environment to their own ends of survival or profits. There is something of himself in all his protagonists: enormous vitality, humanity, and a scheming and sometimes sneaky ingenuity. In these fictitious autobiographies of adventurers or rogues Defoe spoke for and to the members of his own class. Like them, he was engrossed by property and success, and his way of writing made all he touched seem true....