The Life of Daniel Defoe E-Book

John Richetti

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Blackwell Critical Biographies
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 1040

Beschreibung

The Life of Daniel Defoe examines the entire range of Defoe's writing in the context of what is known about his life and opinions. * Features extended and detailed commentaries on Defoe's political, religious, moral, and economic journalism, as well as on all of his narrative fictions, including Robinson Crusoe * Places emphasis on Defoe's distinctive style and rhetoric * Situates his work within the precise historical circumstances of the eighteenth-century in which Defoe was an important and active participant * Now available in paperback

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer

Defoe’s Early Life

Early Writing and Political Polemics

“The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” and After

2 Early Writings 1697–1703: Projects, Dissent, Poems

An Essay Upon Projects

In Defense of Dissent

Poems: Satire, Politics, and Moral Reformation

3 Political Journalism: 1697–1710

Merchant-Writer in the Public Sphere

Harley’s Man:

The Review

Jure Divino, The Consolidator, The Dyet of Poland: Political Satires

4 Political Agent and Journalist: Queen Anne to the Hanoverians

The Secret Agent: Union with Scotland

Political Writing: 1710–15

5 Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31

Defoe the Moralist: Trade, Morality, and Society

The Conduct Books

The Supernatural World: Angels, Devils, and Providence

6

Robinson Crusoe

Defoe and Narrative: An Affinity

Robinson Crusoe, Part I

Action, Adventure, and Identity in

Robinson Crusoe

7 Travel, Politics, and Adventure

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

: The Sequel

Captain Singleton

and Other Pirates

8 Crime and Narrative

Moll Flanders (1722)

Colonel Jack (1722)

9

Roxana

: A

Novel

of Crime and Punishment

Accumulation and Remorse

Anonymity and Identity: Narrative into Novel

10 History, Facts, and Literature

Due Preparations for the Plague and A Journal of the Plague Year

A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6)

11 Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31

After Harley’s Fall: Whig Mole and Periodical Writer, Secrecy and Anonymity

Defoe in Old Age: Moral Censor

Last Years: a Coda

Bibliography

I Collected Editions of the Works

II Bibliographies

III Biographies of Defoe

IV Critical Studies

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Figures

Chapter 01

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

Figure 2 Defoe in the Pillory, by Armytage. National Portrait Gallery

Chapter 03

Figure 3 Jure Divino portrait of Daniel Defoe; engraving by Michiel van der Gucht, 1706, after Jeremiah Taverner. National Portrait Gallery

Chapter 11

Figure 4 The memorial stone, erected in 1870, marking Defoe’s grave in Bunhill Fields, London. Photograph author’s own

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion 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 intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context.

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John Richetti

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The Life of Daniel Defoe

A Critical Biography

John Richetti

This paperback edition first published 2015© 2005 John Richetti

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2005)

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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-13: 978-1-119-04530-4 (paper cover)ISBN-10: 0-631-19529-7 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-119-04530-4 (paper cover)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 book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Daniel Defoe, engraving by Michael Vandergucht, after Jeremiah Taverner, 1706. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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 men seem to be better subjects for a biography than Daniel Defoe.”1 She means that Defoe’s life is a heroic story of constant struggle to survive, a string of personal and financial disasters, a life that spanned a tumultuous era (1660–1731) of crucial political and historical events that changed the face of Europe, and witnessed the emergence of nothing less than the modern world order, with Britain in his life-time gradually becoming the dominant European imperial power. Defoe has since the late eighteenth century attracted many biographers, including most recently a rival to Backscheider’s life by Maximillian E. Novak.2 Much is known about Defoe. There is an extensive factual record of many personal events as well as financial, political, and literary circumstances in his life, some of which do him little honor and mark him as a flawed human being, at times even distinctly unattractive. But in the final analysis, whether one likes this Daniel Defoe is irrelevant, since almost nothing is known or certain about his inner life except what he chose to reveal about himself in his writing and in his surviving letters. That correspondence consists mostly of letters to the powerful early eighteenth-century politician, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whom he served from 1704 until 1714 as a secret agent, political operative and advisor. The figure revealed in that correspondence and clandestine relationship is as his biographers have noted preeminently a master of disguise and deception, a plotter and dissimulator. In his public writing as well as in his private correspondence, Defoe is manifestly self-serving and self-dramatizing, or at times as in his most elaborate public apologia, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, tho it be of his Worst Enemies (1714–15), deeply evasive and even mendacious.

We need, therefore, to modify Backscheider’s recommendation of Defoe as the perfect biographical subject: he is immensely (or even fatally) attractive to biographers because he lived in exceedingly interesting times, because his voluminous writings allow us to speculate about the personality that must have been lurking somewhere behind the various voices that he projected in that endlessly flowing 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-ranging and often enough quirky and original mind is very much on display in his writing, and his forcefully-expressed ideas and attitudes are there for those who care to trace them. However, the question of just what Defoe actually wrote is still an open one. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, his most recent editors and bibliographers, have mounted a largely convincing attack on the canon of Defoe’s writing compiled by scholars since the early nineteenth century that had steadily expanded over the years until in J.R. Moore’s Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1960) it numbered over 570 separate titles. Owens and Furbank have argued for a skeptical reformation of the expanded canon propounded by several generations of Defoe scholars, who tended to attribute to Defoe any pamphlet from the early eighteenth century that featured what they saw as their hero’s characteristic energy and style. Owens’s and Furbank’s new canon of Daniel Defoe’s writings is a rational, Protestant reformation of the implicit faith in their own judgments of earlier Defoe scholar-enthusiasts. I follow Owens’s and Furbank’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 cannot resolve the uncertainty surrounding some of what we think is Defoe’s massive output, 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 Critical Bibliography.5

Robinson Crusoe continued to be read through the eighteenth century and in some quarters was highly regarded. Boswell records that Dr. Johnson, for one, admired it greatly and commended Defoe, “allowing a considerable share of merit to 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’s Progress it was one of only three books that its readers “wished longer.”6 Otherwise, Defoe seems to have been little read or remembered in the years after his death. The revival of systematic interest in his life and works dates from George Chalmers (1742–1825), an antiquarian who published a Life of Defoe in 1785 in which 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 as a “historian who … had few equals in the English language.” 7 Despite several centuries of literary and bibliographical criticism since Chalmers, and of repeated biographical investigation, however, the inner man, the personality, the actual Defoe, remains an elusive and even a mysterious figure. As Furbank and Owens put it, “much of the trouble in understanding Defoe and consequently in fixing the canon of his writings, stems from the fact that the personality he presents to us in his writings is completely a construction, allowing us to guess only dimly at the ‘real’ Defoe.”They may be stretching things, since Defoe did not construct his public personae out of whole cloth, and there is always some relationship between 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 personality most of the time and not an outright disguise. Still, Furbank and Owens observe that Defoe is thus an impalpable and essentially a textual presence who “courts exposure and yet hides his personality, so that we get no such feeling of him as a person as we do with Swift or Pope.”8

This study will, by choice and by necessity, dwell on the ultimate mystery surrounding Defoe the person, on that gap between Defoe’s writing (in so far as it can be identified as his beyond a reasonable doubt) and the motives and feelings 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 profile of Daniel Defoe, nor will biographical speculation accompany my treatment of Defoe’s writings in any exact way that might claim simple relationships between life events and writing, although doubtless they existed and are worth reaching for. That biographer’s hunger for knowledge of the whole man has led in the past to a good deal of fanciful speculation, usually framed as a question that slides from the interrogative to the assertive: “What must Defoe have thought?” becomes “Surely Defoe was thinking.” It seems to me that our lack of information about Defoe’s inner life combined with a literary output that even if defined conservatively 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 one might say with Vladimir Nabokov that “the best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”9 Given Defoe’s penchant for stylistic mimicry, from The Shortest Way with the Dissenters to the voices he assumes so convincingly in his longer fictions, that is in his case quite an adventure. To be sure, Defoe’s writing has rich local contexts and particular occasions; it is always involved in religious, political, economic, and moral controversies of the day, and we do know enough about his life to call it an adventure, a picaresque tale, almost, of strife and struggle in the commercial, political, and literary arena of his time. Most of his writing is polemical journalism about a wide variety of subjects, directly and practically provoked by contemporary developments and involving Defoe in urgent speculation about his country’s uncertain and perilous future. However obscure his personal and private life, in his writing Defoe has a clear and specific intellectual profile and public persona in the early decades of the English eighteenth century, and there isn’t a contemporary issue from 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 what Furbank and Owens in a nice phrase have called “a quite exceptional torrent of vituperation.”10

Much of the book that follows will like many others before it seek to trace Defoe’s views as they are expressed in his voluminous writings and to evaluate their force and resonance for him and his contemporaries, many of whom were his antagonists in the paper wars and bitter political-religious controversy of the early years of the century, especially the tumultuous reigns of William III and Queen Anne from 1688 to 1714. I am chiefly concerned to evaluate his specifically literary achievements, to describe the still attractive and perennially interesting features of his writing, and I mean not just the novels for which he is now still remembered but a representative sample of his entire life’s work in prose and in verse.11

To write a critical biography of Defoe and his works is to traverse nearly fifty of the most important years in British and European history. Defoe was at the center of those events, or at least he inserted himself and his readers into those events 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 full understanding as far as I am concerned, is the veritable writing machine that processes those events and in so doing projects a richly varied and even contradictory persona. This book will try to observe that dynamic intersection between events, ideas, and writing that has come down to us as Daniel Defoe.

Notes

1

. Paula Backsheider,

Daniel Defoe: His Life

(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. xi.

2

. Maximillian E. Novak,

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

3

. Throughout the biographical chapters of this book, I depend for the facts on James Sutherland’s still reliable and readable biography,

Defoe

(London: Methuen & Co., 1937), as well as on Backscheider’s and Novak’s exhaustive accounts of the life. I am also indebted to F. Bastian’s

Defoe’s Early Life

(Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981) and to the invaluable notes in George Harris Healey’s edition of

The Letters of Daniel Defoe

(Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1933).

4

. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank,

Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore’s Check

-

list

(London and Rio Grande, Ohio: The Hambledon Press, 1994), p. vii. Although the book that follows treats a good proportion of the works now more or less confidently assigned to Defoe, there are many works that I do not discuss or for that matter even mention. I hope the works I have chosen, some of them prominent in Defoe’s career, and some of them (like the novels) by common consent his best and most interesting, provide a representative sample.

5

.

The Works of Daniel Defoe

, general editors, W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999–) projected to comprise 44 volumes, is featured in the following chapters. It is an invaluable contribution to Defoe scholarship and one of the heroic scholarly endeavors of our time.

6

.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson

, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; first published 1904), p. 928. Hesther Lynch Piozzi,

Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of his Life

(1786), in

Johnsonian Miscellanies

, 2 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966; first published 1897), I, 332.

7

. George Chalmers’ Life of Defoe, afterword to

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

, London, 1804 [first published in 1785], p. 446, p. 454). The story of Defoe’s biography (and bibliography) in the careers of Chalmers and the pioneering biographers and bibliographers who followed him – Walter Wilson, William Lee, James Crossley, W.P. Trent, and J.R. Moore – is well told by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens in their

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe

(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1988), pages 51–124. And see also for more on bibliographical problems their

A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe

(London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998).

8

. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens,

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe

, p. 137. In his excellent book on Defoe’s

Tour

, Pat Rogers notes that “we have grown so accustomed to the testimonies of authors that [Defoe’s] anonymity comes to seem almost sinister.” Rogers observes here as well that since he never mentions his novels in his correspondence, our ignorance of Defoe extends from the externals of his biography to his methods as a writer. See Pat Rogers,

The Text of Great Britain:Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour

(Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1998), p. 61.

9

. Vladimir Nabokov,

Strong Opinions

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 155. Nabokov makes the remark to an interviewer.

10

. “General Editors’ Preface,”

Writings on Travel, Discovery, and History by Daniel Defoe, vol. 1: A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Volume I,

ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), p. 2.

11

. A tremendous amount of commentary and criticism, books and essays both scholarly and popular, surrounds Defoe and his work, especially of course

Robinson Crusoe

, as well as the other novels that he wrote. In the following chapters, I make no effort to respond to the bulk of that commentary. That would be exhausting and pointless for both me and my readers. Rather, I choose a few commentators, especially in the chapters that deal with the novels, whose work has in my view been influential on current thinking about the importance and significance of Defoe’s work and who have helped me to articulate my own understanding of Defoe. I refer the interested reader to the bibliography at the end of this volume as well as to the following useful annotated bibliography: John Stoler,

Daniel Defoe: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1900–1980

(New York: Garland Press, 1984).

Acknowledgments

More years ago than I care to admit, Professor Claude Rawson commissioned this 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 the very long haul that it took me to complete it but patiently and generously, with never a cross word, endured many delays and difficulties in its writing. Claude Rawson also provided excellent editorial advice, and the final product is all the better for his sensitive guidance. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Saul Steinberg, thanks to whose bounteous philanthropy toward his alma mater, I hold the A.M. Rosenthal Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. The resources connected with that chair have helped me in many tangible ways to complete my work on this book. I want as well to thank another Penn alumnus, Leonard Sugarman, whose generosity in endowing the Leonard Sugarman Term Professorship at Penn, which I had the honor to hold for ten years, supported my research in the early years of this project.

I have learned a great deal over the years from my fellow students of Daniel Defoe, especially from Paula Backscheider and Maximillian Novak, whose biographies were indispensable for me as I wrote this book. I have also cause to be grateful 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 when I set out to write about eighteenth-century fiction as a graduate student, I was generously and crucially supported when I nearly lost heart for my task by my late mentor at University College London, the great Defoe scholar, James R. Sutherland, who set the highest standards of scholarship imaginable and to whose pioneering work and elegant biography of Defoe I am deeply indebted. And my wife, Deirdre David, sustained me in countless ways through the years that this book was taking shape and slowly coming into being.

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

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

1Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer

Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee! England has 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 an author whose powers of narration … whose simple naturalness in his relations of human intercourse, and in the charm of reality which he imperceptibly spread over the commonest incidents … should not have employed his masterly pen in telling the 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 down Daniel Defoe Place, past a high-rise apartment building in that housing complex called “Defoe House,” just across from “William Shakespeare Tower.” Of these two writers, Defoe has the greater claim to be memorialized in that part of London. Among the major eighteenth-century English writers, most of whom like Swift, Gay, and Johnson were of provincial origins, he is almost unique as a Londoner born and bred (Pope was born in the City but grew up in Binfield, near Windsor). Although the landscape of his childhood has been transformed over the centuries, Defoe was born in 1660 or 1661 not far from the tower block of flats and the street that now bear his name, in the City of London, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate (close to where in those years Milton, old and blind, was living, on Jewin Street). His parents were Alice and James Foe, his father a prosperous tallow chandler or candle manufacturer who in his later years branched out into overseas trade in other merchandise on a larger scale and became a fairly prominent person in the City of London business community. The Foes were descended from yeoman stock in Northamptonshire; Defoe’s father had emigrated to London from Etton in that county. During Defoe’s childhood, 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 Royal Exchange.

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

Defoe’s childhood years at the heart of the City of London were full of transforming 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 the Thames and destroyed much of the English fleet; the great bubonic plague that in 1665 killed over 70,000 people in the city; and then the Great Fire in September 1666 that destroyed most of the wooden houses of medieval London and launched a building boom in brick and stone. It is tempting to speculate about the boy Daniel in those years caught up in these great events, especially since he later wrote about the plague year so memorably in (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 do know that he was sent to primary school in Dorking in Surrey at a school kept by the Rev. James Fisher, a dissenting minister. Frank Bastian suggests that the death of Defoe’s mother when he was so young was an important, even a defining event in his life. He derives Defoe’s “self-sufficiency and initiative” from an adolescence deprived of a close mother-son relationship.