In the autumn of 1706 Daniel Defoe, the notorious satirist, pamphleteer, and convicted libeler, was posted to Scotland on an undercover mission. “I have Compass’t my First and Main step happily Enough, in That I am Perfectly Unsuspectd as Corresponding with anybody in England,” he reported to his paymaster in London, Robert Harley, the government’s northern secretary, who had dispatched him to gather intelligence and gauge support for a political union between the nations. Spying, Defoe told Harley, was an expensive business; in the space of two months, he “Really [had] spent a great Deal of your Money and am like to do More.” But he was worth every penny; few men, he assured his employer, could match his chameleonlike abilities to ingratiate and blend in:
I have faithfull Emissaries in Every Company And I Talk to Everybody in Their Own way. To the Merchants I am about to Settle here in Trade, Building ships &c. With the Lawyers I Want to purchase a House and Land to bring my family & live Upon it (God knows where the Money is to pay for it). To day I am Goeing into Partnership with a Membr of parliamt in a Glass house, to morrow with Another in a Salt work. With the Glasgow Mutineers I am to be a fish Merchant, with the Aberdeen Men a woollen and with the Perth and western men a Linen Manufacturer…. I am all to Every one that I may Gain some.
Defoe could “Talk to Everybody in Their Own way” because at the age of forty-six he had experience in or opinions about almost every branch of human endeavor. To read him now, as Nicholas Seager and J.A. Downie argue in their gigantic Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe, is to glimpse “early eighteenth-century British culture, society, and thought in something approaching its entirety.”
Their volume, comprising essays by thirty-seven scholars, surveys the range of his fiction, nonfiction, and journalism against their historical background. Defoe wrote economic tracts, verse satires, political pamphlets, conduct books, essays on plans and schemes and improvements, accounts of natural disasters, travelogues, and fictional narratives. In The Review (1704–1713), one of several periodicals he owned or contributed to, he wrote more than four million words on subjects as diverse as the war with France, the benefits of global commerce, religious tolerance, the question of refugees, the treatment of debtors, the print trade, the playhouses, premonitions, and witches. His most famous novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), is in part a cautionary tale about the dangers of specialization. Its hero finds himself alone on an island with only what he can salvage from his broken ship, and survives by becoming everything he needs—“an architect, a carpenter, a knife grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker,” even “a clergyman.”
Defoe had almost as many occupations as Crusoe. Since the early nineteenth century, he has been known primarily as a novelist, but writing was only one of an array of hustles by which he tried to keep himself afloat. He was born Daniel Foe in the City of London in 1660, the son of James Foe, a tallow chandler and respected tradesman. (The first printing of his name as “De Foe” appears in 1695: he added the prefix himself, feeling it conferred a certain distinction.) In 1681 he abandoned the course of training he had embarked on to be a Presbyterian minister in order to follow his father into a secular career in commerce. Marriage to a wealthy cooper’s daughter, Mary Tuffley, enabled him to set up as a wholesale hosier, or stockings salesman, then to branch out into importing and exporting tobacco, wine, spirits, snuff, and cloth.
Over time, his commercial interests grew more creative. He traded in indentured labor, organizing the shipping of convicts to Maryland; had an ill-fated spell as the proprietor of a brick and tile factory in Essex (which he was forced to sell shortly before a hurricane hit England in November 1703, creating a vast demand for building materials); and contemplated more than once the practicalities of a voyage to South America to found a new colonial settlement. (“The Kingdome of Chili is Perticularly Proper for an English Collony,” he informed Harley in 1711.) He made madcap, ruinous investments: in 1692 he purchased seventy civet cats for £850—perfume could be manufactured using the cats’ musk—and invested in a diving bell invention for recovering sunken treasure. “My Head began to be full of Projects and Undertakings beyond my Reach; such as are indeed often the Ruine of the best Heads in Business,” he has Crusoe remark early in Robinson Crusoe, as he prepares to abandon a cozy, profitable plantation in Brazil for adventure at sea.
Defoe believed experience, even bad experience, made him an authority. “He always thought he could give everyone in the world good advice,” Paula Backscheider, one of his biographers, observes in an essay in the Oxford Handbook. Much of what he wrote was didactic, explicitly instructing people on how to live. In “Advice from the Scandal Club” (1704–1705), a regular section of the Review responding to readers’ letters, he provided tips on “Poetry, Marriage, Drunkenness, Whoring, Gaming, Vowing, and the like.” (“The Gentleman that seems under some difficulty for being concern’d in robbing an Orchard, shall have an Answer in our next.”) His conduct books—The Family Instructor (1715, 1718, and 1727), Religious Courtship (1722), and others—contained practical wisdom alongside what he called “needful Censure of preposterous and immodest Actions.”
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Defoe could smuggle advice in anywhere. In A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1726), his near-comprehensive traveler’s guide to the nation’s towns, villages, manufactures, and customs, he pauses regularly to counsel and hector. In Norwich the weaving trade has, he remarks, “reviv’d incredibly” since the enacting of protectionist legislation in 1721; between 1719 and 1721 he had been the cause’s chief publicist. In the New Forest he stops to lay out “a Proposal made a few Years ago to the late Lord Treasurer… for Re-peopling this Forest”; he had personally advised on the practicalities of establishing an agricultural settlement for German Protestant refugees in 1709. (The Treasurer at the time, Lord Godolphin, ignored him; in the Tour, Defoe makes it clear that he has not forgotten. “Where the Mistake lay, is none of my Business to enquire.”)
Even his fictional narratives can’t help sharing wisdom. In Roxana (1724), his tale of an enterprising brewer’s-wife-turned-courtesan who shuttles between wealthy male patrons, there is a pause in the story as Roxana receives an extended lesson on compound interest from a financier: “He prov’d to me, that in ten Year I shou’d double the 1000 l. per Annum, that I laid by.” (Defoe liked to be thought of as knowledgeable about money management.) In his A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a historical novel masquerading as an eyewitness account of the London plague of 1665, the grim descriptions of “Swellings” and “Torment” are a warning to contemporary readers to be on their guard and learn from past mistakes. Deathbed anecdotes and vivid descriptions of burial pits are “Instructing,” H.F., the Journal’s “author,” explains; he will spare us none of his “Observations without Doors,” in case they may prove useful.
The parts of his diary we don’t strictly need he edits out. “What I wrote of my private Meditations I reserve for private Use.” There’s a similar queasiness regarding “Meditation,” or explorative, noninstrumental writing, in Robinson Crusoe. On his island, Crusoe puts pen to paper not to encourage self-reflection, he tells us, but to relieve it—“to deliver my Thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my Mind.” By journaling he will learn, somehow, “a little to relish my Condition.”
Defoe’s protagonists, fortunately, don’t listen to good advice, their own or other people’s. His novels instead are structured by bad decision-making, serial acts of perversity; they feed off characters who don’t or won’t know, time and again, their own good. H.F., otherwise pragmatic, refuses to leave London, the plague epicenter, despite mounting evidence that he should. Crusoe, “the wilful Agent of all my own Miseries,” “born to be my own Destroyer,” repeatedly opts not to stay on dry land. Jack, the hero of Colonel Jack (1722)—a novel about a pickpocket who bounces between England, Scotland, France, Virginia, Antigua, and Cuba, thieving, fighting, and getting rich—occasionally “stops short” as a young man, wondering whether he is “going wrong,” but “these little things wore off again as often as they came on.” Likewise the light-fingered Moll in Moll Flanders (1721), for whom multiple brushes with the law are no deterrent.
As for Roxana, her story is one of absurd iteration, disastrous choices knowingly made. “If ever Woman in her Senses rejected a Man of Merit, on so trivial and frivolous a Pretence, I was the Woman,” she remarks on turning down a marriage offer from an impeccably credentialed Dutch merchant. He and the other men in the novel—a jeweler, a lord, a glamorous Parisian prince, a man who might be King Charles II—appear and disappear, serving her compulsion like rats in the experiment of the plot. By the time she comes to deal with the Dutchman, she is in on the joke about her own patterns. “I could not but smile however, to myself, that he shou’d make so many Circles, and round-about Motions, to come at a Discourse which had no such rarity at the Bottom of it.”
The speed with which she moves is typical of Defoe’s plotting. At the heart of his fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it. Money, forever circulating, is the medium of transformation and crisis. In Paris, the rich jeweler who has been posing as Roxana’s husband is murdered by thieves; after his death, terrified of “being expos’d and ruin’d” by his real wife and family, Roxana turns for help to the Dutch merchant, who concocts a plan to transport her and her dubious fortune abroad. Much turns on the problem of how she is to manage, keep secret, and move the growing quantities of jewels, plate, and cash in her possession.
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Her own freedom of movement, circulating from husband to fake-husband, patron to patron, makes her rich and keeps stasis at bay: taking up temporary residence in aristocratic or royal quarters, sequestering herself in the country during pregnancies, embarking on an incognito version of a grand tour, she is mobile in a way that wives—“forc’d,” she says, “to sit still and bear it” or find themselves turned out of doors—never are. To give in and marry the long-suffering merchant would, she points out, merely be “buying my Lodging too dear a great deal.” (Roxana, characteristically, “lodges” in places rather than making a home for herself: lodging is temporary, homemaking permanent.)
The problem with movable things is that they can come back when you least expect it. At the Grand Dauphin’s residence in Paris, in the company of her prince, and still posing as the jeweler’s legal widow, Roxana is “confounded” to see “Mr.—, my first Husband, the Brewer,” prancing around in a gendarme parade. Through her maid, she learns that he is badly in debt and “a most scoundrel Character”; she cannot run the risk of being recognized and exposed. Taking precautions, she has him followed and requests “a perfect Journal of all his Motions, from Day to Day”:
I found an Opportunity to see what a most insignificant, unthinking Life, the poor indolent Wretch…now liv’d; how he only rose in the Morning, to go to-Bed at Night; that…he was a meer motionless Animal, of no Consequence in the World; that he seem’d to be one, who, tho’ he was indeed, alive, had no manner of Business in Life, but to stay to be call’d out of it.
What’s curious about this deeply unpleasant paragraph is the way it seems to mirror Roxana back to herself. In his “unthinking,” “Animal” motions, the way he seems to float through the world, insignificant, as if weightless (“there was nothing of Weight in any thing he said,” her maid reports), her husband is more like her than she knows. She too only rises “in the Morning, to go to-Bed at Night,” though she is better at monetizing it. The “Journal of his Life,” as she calls it, is empty, while hers, Defoe’s novel, is full to bursting, but full by dint of good looks and male susceptibility rather than anything meaningful or real. You can, Defoe suggests, be too mobile, too temporary. After the escape from Paris, on a ship bound for Rotterdam, he imagines her literally blown away—driven off course by the wind, lighter than air.
What makes Defoe’s fictions fictional, regardless of how suffused they are with history and fact, is their voice: the way each is narrated and configured by an imaginary, dominant consciousness. Moll’s character, E.M. Forster observed, “fills the book that bears her name,” distinctive as “a tree in a park”—brisk, firm, slangy. (“Why, says I to him, this has been a hellish Juggle,” is her businesslike response to discovering that her expectations of marital riches have been dashed.) Roxana is a study in dryness, revealing a mind often bored by the little prevarications and politenesses that sex work involves: “I told him, he was unkind…that he forc’d me to Blush, by being too much oblig’d, and the like; all which I knew was very agreeable to him.”
She and Crusoe can both be known by the metaphors they use to understand the world. In Roxana’s eyes, to marry a man after you’ve had sex with him is “to befoul one’s self, and live always in the Smell of it.” Crusoe compares his escape from drowning to that of “a Malefactor who has the Halter about his Neck, is tyed up, and just going to be turn’d off, and has a Reprieve brought to him.” Both images say a lot about guilt and the ways it forces itself underground.
Even writing as himself, Defoe was charactered. “I Am come now to the Conclusion of the Sixth Volume of this Work; tho’ like a teeming Woman, I have thought every Volume should be the last,” he writes in a 1709 preface to his Review. “Where it will end now, and when, God only knows.” (He liked to be known as “Mr. Review” or “the Author of the Review,” the embodiment of the paper. In one of his satires he nods back to himself as “that Scandalous Scribler, the Review.”) In a late work of theological inquiry, The Political History of the Devil (1726), the gravity of the subject doesn’t prevent him from giving us moments of calculated silliness, as when he speculates what Satan must think of those who claim to be possessed: “Certainly the Devil must take it very ill, to have all their demented, lunatick Tricks charg’d upon him.”
You hear the same tone—blunt, demotic, wry—in the political satires he published under his own name, which offer tough love as a means of moral reformation. In The True-Born Englishman (1700–1701), a popular, much-reprinted verse satire attacking the xenophobia and small-mindedness of the English, he takes apart the claims of hereditary nobility: “Great Families of yesterday we show,/And Lords, whose Parents were the Lord knows who.” (“Lords” brings imposing and magnificent ideas to mind; “the Lord knows who” is in a very different register.) Indignation gets into his language and ripens it, as when he compares England to a kind of historical latrine of breeding: “We have been Europe’s Sink, the Jakes where she/Voids all her Offal Out-cast Progeny.”
In 1703 he was convicted of seditious libel for the publication of a prose satire, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters. He was fined, made to stand in the pillory for three days (a dangerous business in the early eighteenth century: exposed to the public outdoors, you could be maimed or killed by hurled projectiles—rotten eggs, stones, dead kittens), and imprisoned in Newgate for several months. The Shortest-Way made him vulnerable for two reasons. It dealt with an inflammatory subject—the persecution by the state of minority religious groups (Dissenters), including Defoe’s fellow Presbyterians—and it pulled off an audacious act of ventriloquism. Defoe didn’t attack High Church bigotry in his own voice: instead, as Swift would do a couple of decades later in A Modest Proposal, he donned the mask of his political enemy. “THEY [the Dissenters] are not so Numerous as the Protestants in France, and yet the French King effectually clear’d the Nation of them at once, and we don’t find he misses them,” he has his Tory speaker remark.
The accuracy of the ventriloquism comes through in details of language and tone: the screeching, hyperbolic note of Defoe’s High Church rhetoric (“’Twou’d be more rational for us, if we must spare this Generation, to summon our own to a general Massacre”); the grimness of the comparisons (Dissenters are like beasts, to be “knock’d on Head by all possible ways of Violence and Surprize”); the false reasonableness of his speaker’s manner (no one is “supposing that all the Dissenters in England shou’d be Hang’d or Banish’d”). No wonder Defoe’s own Presbyterian community failed to spot the irony.
When it came to politics, Defoe thought in blood. The only real difference, as he saw it, between the revolution against Charles I during the Civil War and the more recent deposition of James II in 1688 was that Charles had had his head cut off—his was a “wet Martyrdom,” James’s a “dry.” “King Charles lost his Life, because he did not run away; and his Son, King James, sav’d his Life, because he did run away.” What David Roberts, in his scholarly edition of A Journal of the Plague Year, calls Defoe’s “characteristic focalization of extreme circumstance through banal perception” was part of the practical, material way he saw the world.
In A Journal of the Plague Year his favored mode for conveying what the outbreak looked and felt like is factual, statistical. Real parish bills of mortality from the period punctuate the novel: so many dead this week in St. Giles’s, so many in Stepney or Whitechapel; so many more babies lost in childbirth than in an ordinary month. We know precisely how many bodies were buried, and how deep, in the “great Pit in the Church-Yard” of H.F.’s own parish, Aldgate, during a dreadful fortnight in September; we know the lines quack doctors used to sell their wares. (“INCOMPARABLE Drink against the Plague.”) Attention to detail is survival. At the butcher’s, H.F. explains, customers bring exact change and lift their joints of meat off the hooks themselves, for safety. “The Butcher would not touch the Money, but have it put into a Pot full of Vinegar which he kept for that purpose.”
For Crusoe, forced to construct a way of life from scratch, matters of fact are everything, and there is no such thing as time misspent in recording them. The problem of how to sharpen his tools costs him, he tells us, “as much Thought as a Statesman would have bestow’d upon a grand Point of Politicks,” and bears the same importance. Practicalities are intrinsically interesting: whether his tent is pitched north or north-north-west; the yardage of the enclosure he builds; how rapidly he can fire the muskets that protect it. If you record everything, plot can get lost, but it’s typical of Defoe’s commitment to presenting his fictions as true stories that he isn’t afraid of inconsequentiality. “Rain all Day,” Crusoe notes in his journal for December 25. (Walter Scott called this his “exact and circumstantial delineation”: “De Foe was not an author who would leave the slightest event untold.”)
He was drawn to facts that might be thought meaningless, random, outside the scaffolding of a story or argument. In A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain he peers into churches and pauses to note the inscriptions on the tombs of unremarkable, private individuals—at Winchester Cathedral, that of an unnamed mother and child, one dead of “a Fever, and the other of a Dropsy,” “bury’d in the same Grave.” In London he is pleased to list by name the four principal insurance companies in the City. Touring the Essex marshes, he learns of a farmer living with his “five and Twentieth Wife,” whose son is already on his fourteenth.
Not all of his facts and details point only to themselves. Embedded in urban life as he was, he understood that appearances mattered and that people used small particulars of dress or comportment to telegraph who they were to the world. (He once commented of the inhabitants of ancient Carthage that they “dress’d well, and valued themselves upon it.” He had “an eye for fashion,” Backscheider notes.) Like the realist novelists of the nineteenth century who studied him, he used details metonymically in his fictions, as legible signs that suggest more nebulous aspects of character and situation. Moll intends to marry a tradesman, but not one you can instantly read as such, she tells us; you don’t want a man with the telltale “mark of his Apron-strings upon his Coat, or the mark of his Hat upon his Perriwig.” Much better to have someone who will “become a Sword.”
Moll’s slipperiness is indicated by her costuming, her ability to appear rich or poor, powerful or downtrodden. Roxana, who survives by inventing an identity for herself, is likewise conscious of the smallest aspects of presentation. To receive her prince a second time, she attires herself “in a kind of half-Mourning” (just enough to remind him she’s a widow), dispensing with the less attractive aspects of her weeds and dressing her hair “with Advantage.” When, at a ball in London, she dons “the Habit of a Turkish Princess,” an “extraordinary fine” costume set with gold, pearls, and diamonds, to impress Charles II’s court, there is one sly detail that trumps the rest: “They were not true Diamonds; but no-body knew that but myself.” Their fakeness is the ultimate sign of her character. “The Thing,” as she observes in another context, “spoke it self.”
Reading Defoe, you are often conscious of an odd doubleness of vision, like looking through a microscope and a telescope at once. His way of seeing the world is myopic and deeply material, but he is also at pains to show the larger situation within which the seeing and the world exist. As a child, growing up in a pious household and attending a dissenting academy, he was among men and women who had chosen faith above career advancement and personal safety, and they taught him to take the long view. The confessional matters he debated in his satires and the pages of the Review weren’t theoretical to him. Being forced to conform to Anglicanism—or, worse, Catholicism, in the event of a successful Jacobite rebellion—spelled disaster not only in this world but also in the next. The choices he and others made would redound in the hereafter. “Giving to the Poor,” he argues in the Review, is “lending to the Lord, who will certainly repay it.”
Defoe being Defoe, he couldn’t think about the unworldly except in worldly ways. (“Lending to the Lord” is all very well, but “when the Stock-jobbers get any Interest in Heaven, there’s no doubt but they’ll sell it,” he says wryly.) He was fascinated by the Devil but tended to glimpse him, characteristically, in secular places and situations. In his political and economic journalism, as the scholar John Mullan notes, “the Devil often crops up,” influencing the financial markets, egging on the Tories. The Political History of the Devil considers the practicalities of his hellish management: Does he have a “particular Empire of his own,” Defoe wonders, “to which he retreats upon proper Occasions” and “where he entertains his Friends”? Are the various witches and astrologers who serve him like “Extraordinary Men at the Custom-House,” “kept at a Call” for when he is “more than ordinarily full of Business”? Does he have his own “Historiographer Royal” to maintain the “Archives of Hell”?
Anchoring his faith in the known shapes and facts of the world, Defoe was scornful of literal-minded credulity. The Devil would never spend his time in Hell if it really were “such a Place as we are taught to understand it to be”—like “a great Mouth with horrible Teeth” and “a Stream of Fire coming out of it,” and all the demons busy tormenting souls, “broiling them upon Gridirons.” In A Journal, he has H.F. point out that the comets seen before the plague and the Great Fire of 1666 were probably not divine “Warnings,” since “natural Causes are assign’d by the Astronomers for such Things.” He is disdainful of those who believe disease strikes directly “from Heaven,” rather than “by the Breath, or by the Sweat” of the infected.
But he believed firmly in what it all meant. Over the course of his life, Defoe survived five spells—at least—in prison; exposure to disease; the pillory; lengthy and arduous travels up and down the country and abroad; and the stress and exhaustion of continually being on the run from his creditors. (He also narrowly escaped being hunted down and hanged for his part in the failed Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.) Profound questions about what came next were never far from his mind. In Roxana Amy, the maid, believing she is about to drown at sea during a bad storm, is more terrified of the perdition death will bring than death itself: “I am undone for Ever! ay, Madam, for Ever! to all Eternity! O I am lost!” Nothing awakens the conscience more than disaster. Storms are a test, plagues a “sermon.” One of the most melancholy passages in A Journal is H.F.’s description of the “penitent Confession[s]” made by despairing men and women, alone in their houses, with no one to hear or absolve them:
People might be heard even into the Streets as we pass’d along, calling upon God for Mercy, thro’ Jesus Christ, and saying, I have been a Thief, I have been an Adulterer, I have been a Murderer, and the like; and none durst stop to make the least Inquiry into such Things, or to administer Comfort.
The situation is particular, the memory precise; but what it may mean is vast beyond understanding.
