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Preface
Daniel Defoe’s enormous oeuvre, produced over four decades, is nothing less than a meeting house for all the major trends and debates of his era. His writings have a capacity, perhaps unmatched, to unlock multiple aspects of his age. To engage fully with Defoe is to access early eighteenth-century British culture, society, and thought in something approaching its entirety, because there are very few areas of human activity that Defoe did not write about. And he wrote in multiple genres, some of which were well established with a rich tradition, like satirical verse and conduct literature, but a number of which were newer or in flux and which his contributions helped to shape, including the travel book, periodical journalism, and not least extended prose fictions that would come to be called novels. He is a pivotal figure in literary history as well as the history of ideas.
What is more, Defoe’s writings respond well to fresh investigation from evolving methods in humanities research, from new directions in the history of the book and of the cultural contexts of science to ecocriticism and global literary studies. Defoe, then, is a touchstone for humanities scholars. He is also one of the few eighteenthcentury British authors with a worldwide reputation, and few undergraduate students of English will complete their programmes without studying him at some point. His fiction is of great interest to scholars and students beyond as well as within eighteenthcentury studies. Postcolonial and eco-critics, for example, see Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a foundational work of imperial ideology; feminist critics wrestle with the constructions of gender in Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724); and historians of medicine, the emotions, and religion turn back to A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, for its lessons on knowledge, feeling, and faith during a public health emergency.
But there is much more to Defoe than the burst of narratives, published in a fertile five-year rush, that have made him a household name. The fact that he was famous—or notorious—in his own day as a major journalist and controversialist, rather than as a ‘literary’ author, deserves to be acknowledged, as does the fact that even if he would have preferred a reputation as a litterateur rather than a provocateur it would have been as a poet rather than a novelist. More generally, Defoe was an important writer on politics and religion, science and nature, economics and trade, and much else. His writings, certainly his best works, usually stem from experience (as well as study). He was a failed merchant, semi-successful political agent, and divinity school dropout, and we feel confident asserting a close relationship between the life and the writings even though our biographical knowledge of Defoe is frustratingly limited in many respects.
For these reasons—the richness and diversity of his output, his impact on numerous genres of writing, the ongoing currency of his ideas to modern society and scholarship— Defoe is an ideal subject for an Oxford Handbook. He wrote so much, and in fields that have since his time been separated out as discrete disciplines, that few professional scholars would dare claim mastery of Defoe’s oeuvre. The risk for the author of a book such as Robinson Crusoe that transcends its author is that the remainder of her or his writings go unnoticed, and when those writings are so voluminous the risk of neglect is only increased. This Handbook therefore tries to give a thorough picture of Defoe’s ideas and writings, their contexts, and their endurance. There is no singular sense of Defoe that guides the volume, but there is a running debate: between Defoe as a defender of tradition and as a prophet of modernity.
Early on in his classic, three-volume history, England Under Queen Anne, G. M. Trevelyan turned to Defoe. ‘When a survey is demanded of Queen Anne’s island, of its everyday life far distant from the Mall and yet farther from the sound of war, our thoughts turn to Daniel Defoe’, he explained. ‘For Defoe was one of the first who saw the old world through a pair of sharp modern eyes’.1 In this way, Trevelyan succeeded in capturing the twin aspects of Defoe’s paramount importance as a writer: while he remains an unrivalled source for the realities of life in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, certain features of his prolific published output seem to bear the stamp of modernity. It was for this latter reason, presumably, that John Robert Moore entitled his influential biography Daniel Defoe, Citizen of the Modern World (1958), while more recently Pat Rogers has reasserted that A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) ‘is a truly central work for our understanding of Britain at a crucial stage of its transition into modernity’.2
There is, however, a danger in privileging the portrait of Defoe as a ‘progressive’ author who held what we might consider to be ‘liberal’ opinions, for his manifest social conservatism precludes any simple depiction of him as some sort of democrat writing before his time. Thus in his eagerness to find ways in which Defoe’s ‘plebeian vitality’ is expressed in his works, Christopher Hill, writing about Robinson Crusoe, concluded that ‘the democratic revolution, defeated in politics, triumphed in the novel’.3 It is now over fifty years since John Richetti drew attention to the ‘teleological bias’ evident in Ian Watt’s classic account, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957).4 While Defoe’s narratives almost certainly widened contemporary readers’ horizons of expectation, the prefaces of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana each strenuously sought in their various ways to distinguish them from the novel as defined in Johnson’s Dictionary ‘A small tale, generally of love’.
1 G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne: Blenheim (1930; repr. London: Collins, 1965), 13–14.
2 Pat Rogers, Defoe’s Tour and Early Modern Britain: Panorama of the Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 129.
3 Christopher Hill, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, History Workshop Journal, 10 (1980), 6–24 (22).
4 John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 2.
Although he is still occasionally described as the first novelist, and Robinson Crusoe as the first novel, Defoe’s reputation among his contemporaries was not that of a novelist, nor even a writer of fiction. ‘A few days ago died Mr. Daniel Defoe, Sen. a person well known for his numerous and various writings’, The Grub-street Journal reported on 29 April 1731: ‘He had a great natural genius; and understood very well the trade and interest of this Kingdom. His knowledge of men, especially those in high life, (with whom he was formerly very conversant) had weaken’d his attachment to any Party; but in the main, he was in the interest of civil and religious liberty, in behalf of which he appear’d on several remarkable occasions’.5 The obituary went on to mention The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702) as one such occasion, but earlier contemporary references to Defoe’s religious practices were often less than complimentary. ‘He is a profest Dissenter’, one account of the character of the ‘author’ of The Review conceded, ‘tho’ Reckoned of no morals’—therefore ‘His Reputation amongst the fair Dealers of the City is very Foule’.6 The anonymous author of The Review Review’d. In a Letter to the Prophet Daniel in Scotland found it hard to credit Defoe’s own (entirely fictitious) account ‘That some Merchants have employ’d you to contract for ten thousand Pounds of Salt yearly’:
He buy ten thousand Pounds of Salt! He buy ten thousand T—s. And, old Friend, it seems somewhat strange that you, who, when you were here [in London], could not be trusted for ten Pence, should when you are abroad, be trusted for ten thousand Pounds, when the People may easily be inform’d of your Character!7
Defoe was disparaged as ‘a Man of great Rashness and Impudence, a mean Mercenarie Prostitute, a State Mountebank, an Hackney Tool, a Scandalous Pen, a Foul-Mouthed Mongrel, an Author who writes for Bread, and Lives by Defamation, &c.’.8 Contemporary assessments of Defoe’s character appear far removed from the encomiums bestowed upon him by posterity for his numerous accomplishments, whether as brilliant polemicist, pioneer journalist, projector, social observer, creator of Robinson Crusoe, or even as the inventor of the novel.
Yet while the author of works as diverse as The Review (1704–13), The Family Instructor (1715), A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, and A Plan of the English Commerce (1728) seems uniquely qualified as a commentator on his own age, it is equally important not to neglect or discount the manifold visionary features of his writings. Even if they were largely derided or ignored by his contemporaries, the innovative ideas he propounded on a wide variety of subjects—from his first full-length book An Essay
5 The Grub-street Journal, no. 69 (29 April 1731).
6 British Library, Add. MS 28094, ff. 165–6.
7 Quoted in Maximillian E. Novak, ‘A Whiff of Scandal in the Life of Daniel Defoe’, HLQ, 34:1 (1970), 35–42 (37).
8 Quoted in A Just Reprimand to Daniel De Foe. In a Letter to a Gentleman in South Britain (Edinburgh, [1707]), 7.
upon Projects (1697) through to late works like Augusta Triumphans; or, The Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe (1728)—caught the attention of subsequent generations, so that the epithet ‘Ingenious Daniel De Foe’ seems entirely merited.9
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is divided into four parts. Following Brian Cowan’s chapter surveying Defoe’s life and times, the first part contains ten chapters that address the genres and modes in which Defoe wrote. Here will be seen Defoe’s adherence to certain literary traditions and ideas, as well as his experimental and innovative qualities. The second part features fourteen chapters that relate Defoe’s writings to their social and historical contexts, again capturing the admixture of his conservative and progressive outlooks. The third part situates Defoe’s writings with reference to various locations, working outwards from London to Britain, then Europe, and the world. The final part contains five chapters that tackle Defoe’s posthumous critical and creative reception.
9 He was styled thus on the title-page of the sale catalogue of his library in November 1731. The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne’s Sales Catalogue, ed. Helmut Heidenreich (Berlin: W. Hildebrand, 1970).
PART I: GENRES
Backscheider
25. Defoe and Ecology
Lucinda Cole
26. Defoe and London
PART III: PLACES
Brean S. Hammond 27. Defoe and Britain
Adam Sills
28. Defoe’s Europe: Allies and Enemies
Andreas K. E. Mueller
29. Defoe and Colonialism
Markman Ellis
30. Defoe and the Pacific
Robert Markley
31. Africa and the Levant in Defoe’s Writings 562
Rebekah Mitsein and Manushag N. Powell
PART IV: AFTERLIVES
32. The Celebrated Daniel De Foe: Publication History, 1731–1945 583
Nicholas Seager
33. Defoe’s Critical Reception, 1731–1945
Kit Kincade
34. Attribution and the Defoe Canon 629
Benjamin F. Pauley
35. Habits of Gender and Genre in Three Female Robinsonades, 1767–1985 645
Rivka Swenson
36. Defoe on Screen: Robinson Crusoe, The Red Turtle, and Animal Rights
Robert Mayer
List of Figures
1.1 Frontispiece, Daniel Defoe, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man (1703). Courtesy of McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, shelf mark PR3401 1703. 13
1.2 Frontispiece, Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino: A Satyr. In Twelve Books. By the Author of The True-Born Englishman. Courtesy of Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, shelf mark PR3404 .J89. 14
1.4 Frontispiece, P. Hills’s pirated edition of Jure Divino (1706). Courtesy of Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, shelf mark PR3404 .J89 1706. 18
1.5 Frontispiece, Benjamin Bragg’s piracy of Jure Divino (1706). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, shelf mark Ik D362 706Je. 19
1.6 George Bickham, The Whig’s Medly (1711). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, shelf mark 711.00.00.01+. http://hdl.handle.net/ 10079/digcoll/549567. 21
3.1 Frontispiece by [John] Clark and [John] Pine to Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Personal copy of Geoffrey Sill. 54
4.1 Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor, Volume II (1718), 180–3. Boston Public Library, Defoe 27.77 v.2. 80
32.2 Frontispiece, The History of the Plague Year in London, in the Year 1665 (1819). Personal copy of Nicholas Seager. 598
32.3 Frontispiece, The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Boston Public Library, Defoe 27.26. 603
32.4 Frontispiece, Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, ed. G. A. Aitken, 16 vols (1895), vol. 13. Keele University Library. 604
36.1 The Red Turtle (2016), dir. Michaël Dudok de Wit. 670
Abbreviations
The place of publication for pre-1900 works is London, unless stated. Biblical references are to the Authorized Version. References to Defoe’s writings use the 44-volume Works wherever possible (the series and individual volumes are listed below), except for the novels, which are widely available. Full references are given within chapters, except for the following abbreviations.
Defoe’s Works
Appeal Daniel Defoe, An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715)
Correspondence The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe, ed. Nicholas Seager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Letters The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. G. H. Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955)
Novels Daniel Defoe, Novels, 10 vols, gen. eds P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007–8)
i. Robinson Crusoe, ed. W. R. Owens
ii. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. W. R. Owens
iii. Serious Reflections . . . of Robinson Crusoe, ed. G. A. Starr
iv. Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. N. H. Keeble
v. Captain Singleton, ed. P. N. Furbank
vi. Moll Flanders, ed. Liz Bellamy
vii. A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. John Mullan
viii. Colonel Jack, ed. Maurice Hindle
ix. The Fortunate Mistress, ed. P. N. Furbank
x. A New Voyage Round the World, ed. John McVeagh
PEW Daniel Defoe, Political and Economic Writings, 8 vols, gen. eds P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000)
i. Constitutional Theory, ed. P. N. Furbank
ii. Party Politics, ed. J. A. Downie
iii. Dissent, ed. W. R. Owens
iv. Union with Scotland, ed. D. W. Hayton
v. International Relations, ed. P. N. Furbank
Abbreviations
vi. Finance, ed. John McVeagh
vii. Trade, ed. John McVeagh
viii. Social Reform, ed. W. R. Owens
RDW Daniel Defoe, Religious and Didactic Writings, 10 vols, gen. eds P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005–6)
i. The Family Instructor, Volume I, ed. P. N. Furbank
ii. The Family Instructor, Volume II, ed. P. N. Furbank
iii. A New Family Instructor, ed. W. R. Owens
iv. Religious Courtship, ed. G. A. Starr
v. Conjugal Lewdness, ed. Liz Bellamy
vi. The Poor Man’s Plea, etc., ed. J. A. Downie
vii. The Complete English Tradesman, Volume I, ed. John McVeagh
viii. The Complete English Tradesman, Volume II, ed. John McVeagh
ix. The Commentator, ed. P. N. Furbank
x. The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. W. R. Owens
Review Defoe’s Review (1704–13), 9 vols, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004–11)
SFS Daniel Defoe, Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural, 10 vols, gen. eds P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003–4)
i. The True-Born Englishman and Other Poems, ed. W. R. Owens
ii. Jure Divino, ed. P. N. Furbank
iii. The Consolidator, etc., ed. Geoffrey Sill
iv. Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager, etc., ed. P. N. Furbank
v. The Conduct of Christians made the Sport of Infidels, etc., ed. David Blewett
vi. The Political History of the Devil, ed. John Mullan
vii. A System of Magick, ed. Peter Elmer
viii. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, ed. G. A. Starr
TDH
Daniel Defoe, Writings on Travel, Discovery and History, 10 vols, gen. eds P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001–2)
i–iii. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Volumes I–III, ed. John McVeagh
iv. A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, etc., ed. P. N. Furbank
v. Due Preparations for the Plague, ed. Andrew Wear
vi. Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, ed. N. H. Keeble
vii–viii. The History of the Union of Great Britain, ed. D. W. Hayton
Backscheider, Daniel Defoe
Others
Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
BJECS British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Downie, Robert Harley and the Press
ECF
ECS
J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Eighteenth-Century Studies
EHR English Historical Review
Furbank and Owens,
Critical Bibliography
Furbank and Owens,
Political Biography
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998)
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006)
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
JECS Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
MLR Modern Language Review
Novak, Daniel Defoe
Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
N&Q Notes and Queries
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PBSA Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
PQ Philological Quarterly
RES Review of English Studies
Richetti, Life of Daniel Defoe
John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)
SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
SP Studies in Philology
Notes on Contributors
Sharon Alker is Mary A. Denny Professor of English and General Studies at Whitman College. With Holly Faith Nelson, she is coauthor of Besieged: The Post War Siege Trope, 1660–1730 (2021) and coeditor of James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (2009) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (2012).
Paula R. Backscheider is the Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar at Auburn University. She is the author of Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (1986), Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989), Reflections on Biography (1999), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (2005), Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel (2013), and Women in Wartime: Theatrical Representations in the Long Eighteenth Century (2021).
Paul Baines is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), The Long 18th Century (2004), Edmund Curll, Bookseller (2007, with Pat Rogers), and Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe/ Moll Flanders: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2007). He is the coeditor of The Poems of Alexander Pope (2019).
Liz Bellamy teaches English at City College Norwich and the Open University. She is the author of Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1998), Samuel Johnson (2005), and The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century (2019), as well as editor of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (2008) and British It-Narratives, 1750–1830: Money (2012).
Rebecca Bullard is Senior Tutor at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (2009), editor of a special issue of Etudes anglaises entitled ‘Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: A Gazetteer’ (2019), and coeditor of The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, Vol. I: The Early Plays (2016) and of The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 (2017).
Lucinda Cole is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign. She is the author of Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (2016) and articles in English Literary History, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation entitled ‘Animal, All Too Animal’ (2011).
Brian Cowan is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History at McGill University. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), editor of The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012), and coeditor of The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (2021).
J. A. Downie is Emeritus Professor of English at Goldsmith, University of London. He is the author of Robert Harley and the Press (1979), Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (1984), To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678–1750 (1994), and A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (2009), as well as editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2016).
Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary’s, University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (1996), The History of Gothic Fiction (2000), and The Coffee House: A Cultural History (2004). He is the coauthor of Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World (2019), and editor of Eighteenth-Century Coffee House Culture, 4 vols (2006) and Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 4 vols (2010).
Katherine Ellison is Professor of English at Illinois State University. She is the author of Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (2006) and A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals (2016), and coeditor of Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe (2014) and A Material History of Medieval and Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy (2017).
Brean S. Hammond is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (1984), Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (1997), Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–1789 (2006, with Shaun Regan), Jonathan Swift (2010), and Tragicomedy (2021), as well as editor of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and Other Plays (2004) and The Double Falsehood (2010) in the Arden Shakespeare.
D. W. Hayton is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742: Politics, Politicians and Parties (2004), The AngloIrish Experience, 1680–1730: Religion, Identity and Patriotism (2012), and Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (2019). He is the coeditor of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715 (2002), Jonathan Swift’s Irish Political Writings after 1725: A Modest Proposal and Other Works (2018), and The Correspondence of the Brodrick Family of Surrey and County Cork, Volume One: 1680–1714 (2019).
Joseph Hone is Academic Track Fellow in English Literature at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (2017), The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers (2020), and Alexander Pope in the Making (2021), as well as the coeditor of the forthcoming Jonathan Swift in Context
Jeffrey Hopes is retired Professor of English Studies at l’Université d’Orléans. He is the author of Gulliver’s Travels (2001) and of articles in journals including Literature and History, Etudes anglaises, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He is the coeditor of Discours critique sur le roman, 1650–1850 (2010) and Théâtre et nation (2011).
Kit Kincade is Professor of English at Louisiana State University. She is the editor of Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (2007) and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (2010), and coeditor of Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe (2014).
Christopher F. Loar is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University. He is the author of Political Magic: Technology and Sovereign Violence in British Fiction, 1650–1750 (2014) and of articles in Studies in English Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Restoration, Genders, and Philological Quarterly.
Kate Loveman is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Reading Fictions 1660–1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (2008), Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660–1703 (2015), and articles in Journal of Social History, English Historical Review, and Review of English Studies. She is the coeditor of The Diary of Samuel Pepys (2018).
Robert Markley is W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1988), Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (1993), Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (2005), The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (2006), and Kim Stanley Robinson (2019).
Ashley Marshall is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (2013), Swift and History: Politics and the English Past (2015), and Political Journalism in London, 1695–1720: Defoe, Swift, Steele and their Contemporaries (2020), and the editor of Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics: Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson (2015).
Robert Mayer is Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (1997) and Walter Scott and Fame: Authors and Readers in the Romantic Age (2017), the editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen (2002), and coeditor of Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman (2007).
Marc Mierowsky is Lecturer in English and McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of articles in The European Journal of Humour Research, Comedy Studies, and The Seventeenth Century. He is coeditor of a forthcoming edition of Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress (2024, with Nicholas Seager).
Rebekah Mitsein is Associate Professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (2022), as well as articles in Studies in Travel Writing, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture
Andreas K. E. Mueller is Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe’s Verse (2010) and of articles in Eighteenth-Century Life, Philological Quarterly, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation. He is the coeditor of Positioning Daniel Defoe’s Non-Fiction: Form, Function, Genre (2011) and Robinson Crusoe After 300 Years (2021).
Holly Faith Nelson is Professor of English at Trinity Western University. With Sharon Alker, she is coauthor of Besieged: The Post War Siege Trope, 1660–1730 (2021) and coeditor of James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (2009) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (2012). She is also coeditor of Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe (2014), Games of War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift (2019), and Borderlands: The Art and Scholarship of Louise Imogen Guiney (2021).
Maximillian E. Novak is Distinguished Research Professor (Emeritus) at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962), Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963), Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction (1983), Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (2001), and Transformations in Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s Other Narratives (2014). He is the coeditor of Defoe’s An Essay upon Projects (1999), The Consolidator (2001), Robinson Crusoe (2021), and Farther Adventures (2021).
Benjamin F. Pauley is Professor and Department Chair of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is the author of essays in Reactions to Revolutions: The 1790s and their Aftermath (2007), Positioning Daniel Defoe’s Non-Fiction: Form, Function, Genre (2011), Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years (2021), and The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson (2022).
Manushag N. Powell is Professor of English at Purdue University. She is the author of Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (2012) and coauthor of British Pirates in Print and Performance (2015). She is coeditor of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820 (2018) and editor of Defoe’s Captain Singleton (2019).
Penny Pritchard is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of The Long Eighteenth Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790 (2010) and Before Crusoe: Defoe, Voice, and the Ministry (2018), as well as articles in Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Religious History, Literature, and Culture, and Literature Compass
John Richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (1969), Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (1975), Daniel Defoe (1987), The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (1999), The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Bibliography (2005), and A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2017). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996), The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe (2008), and The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe (2018).
Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of South Florida. His books include Edmund Curll, Bookseller (2007, with Paul Baines), A Political Biography of Alexander Pope (2010), Documenting Eighteenth-Century Satire: Pope, Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot in Historical Context (2011), The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street (2021), and Defoe’s Tour and Early Modern Britain: Panorama of the Nation (2022).
Nicholas Seager is Professor of English Literature at Keele University. He is author of The Rise of the Novel: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2012), editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022), and coeditor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2015), Samuel Johnson’s The Life of Richard Savage (2016), and The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels (2023).
Geoffrey Sill is Emeritus Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 1713–1719 (1983) and The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (2001). He is the editor of Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection (1994) and Defoe’s The Consolidator (2005), and the coeditor of The Complete Plays of Frances Burney (1995).
Adam Sills is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University. He is the author of Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth Century Britain (2021) and of articles in English Literary History, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Literature Compass.
Srividhya Swaminathan is Associate Dean and Professor of English at St John’s University. She is the author of Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (2009) and coeditor of Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (2013) and The Cinematic Eighteenth Century History, Culture, and Adaptation (2018).
Rivka Swenson is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603–1832 (2016) and coeditor of Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks (2009).
David Walker is Professor of English at Northumbria University. He is the author of The Discourse of Sovereignty, Hobbes to Fielding: The State of Nature and the Nature
of the State (2003, with Stuart Sim) and the coeditor of Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture
Cynthia Wall is William R. Kenan Jr Professor at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (1998), The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (2006), and Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque (2018). She is the editor of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1998), Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (2003), and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (2008). She also coedited Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms (2001) and The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment (2017).
Defoe’s Life and Times
Brian Cowan
Zealous Revolutioner
Daniel Defoe was born in the wake of one revolution, and he lived to help build the legacy of yet another one which he lived through. Defoe’s life and times were thus shaped by two great revolutions of the Stuart age: the regicidal revolution of 1649 and the ‘glorious’ revolution of 1688–9. Defoe’s birth coincided with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660—a moment that attempted, unsuccessfully, to efface the memory of two decades of civil wars and regime changes that preceded it. As a young man, Defoe joined the fight against the prospect of a popish successor to the throne by supporting the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion (Appeal, 28).1 Although Monmouth’s attempted coup d’état failed in 1685, William of Orange’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 succeeded beyond expectations. Henceforth, Defoe would defend the rectitude and greatness of ‘the Revolution’ as it would thereafter be known to him and his contemporaries. The revolutionary King William III became Defoe’s hero, and throughout his life Defoe would insist that he had been a close confidant and advisor to the revolutionary king. Much of Defoe’s political activities in the succeeding decades would be devoted to defending William’s Glorious Revolution and to securing its enduring legacy. By the time of Defoe’s death in 1731, the Jacobite menace that had threatened to undo the Glorious Revolution had receded, and the Protestant succession to a now united British throne appeared to be secure as a second Hanoverian king, George II, had succeeded to his throne without contest after the death of his father in 1727.
Defoe wrote ceaselessly about the Glorious Revolution and almost always with great praise and reverence for the nation’s deliverance from the double threat of popery and arbitrary government that it heralded, but the regicidal revolution was never far
1 Warrant to the Justices of Assize and Gaol Delivery for the Western Circuit (31 May 1687), TNA, SP 44/337, f. 281; Peter Earle, Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor 1685 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 180, 223 n. 39.
from his mind either. He drew upon the later Stuart debates about the English civil wars when he crafted his fictional Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), a work which Nicholas Seager has argued was an attempt to moderate between the more partisan views of the war promoted by the posthumous publication of works such as John Toland’s edition of Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698–9) or the Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702–4). Pat Rogers notes that Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) ‘never openly takes sides on the issues of the English Civil War, when (as often happens) the narrator comes on remnants of that great and divisive struggle’.2 The challenge for Defoe, as for many of his contemporaries, was to acknowledge the divisive legacy of the civil wars without obviously aligning himself with either the regicidal or absolutist extremes of either side.
For most of his contemporaries, however, Defoe’s views on the civil war era were far from moderate. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Defoe saw the revolution that ended Charles I’s reign as an event akin to the more respectable glorious revolution that ended James VII and II’s rule. In a pamphlet published early in Anne’s reign, Defoe shocked many of his readers by declaring that the only difference between the two revolutions ‘lyes here, the Whigs in 41. to 48. took up Arms against their King; and having conquer’d him, and taken him Prisoner, cut off his Head, because they had him: The Church of England took Arms against their King in 88. and did not cut off his Head, because they had him not. 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’ (PEW, iii. 65). A few years later, in the Review (1704–13), Defoe would return to the topic where he would declare that there was little difference between ‘the dry Martyrdom of King James, by his Passive Obedience, Church Subjects; and the wet Martyrdom of King Charles I, by People that never made any such Pretence’.3
Resistance was the common denominator between the two revolutions for Defoe; unlike most of his contemporaries, Defoe did not shy away from comparing the regicidal revolution with the Glorious Revolution. He made the analogy explicit in the preface to his longest poem, Jure Divino (1706), where he declared, despite acknowledging that ‘some People will not bear the Comparison . . That the Parallel between the Civil War, or Parliament War, or Rebellion, call it which you will; and the Inviting over, Joyning with, and Taking up Arms under the Prince of Orange, against King James, seems to me to be very exact, the drawing such a Parallel very just, and the Foundation proceeding, and Issue just the same’ (SFS, ii. 42, 43–4). Defoe could not understand ‘How any People can then Defend the inviting over the Prince of Orange, to check the Invasions of King James II. and at the same time condemn the taking Arms against the Invasions of King Charles I’ (SFS, ii. 44). Defoe even went so far as to claim that King James suffered more than his
2 Nicholas Seager, ‘“A Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read”: History, Fiction, and Politics in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier’, ECF, 20:4 (2008), 479–505; Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London: Penguin, 2001); Pat Rogers, The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 28–9.
3 Review, ii. 804 (18 December 1705).
father Charles, whose execution was ‘Une coup de Grace’, whereas for James his rebellious subjects ‘were 11 years a Murthering of him, and he languish’d all that while under their Treachery’ (SFS, ii. 49). Defoe’s point was not to denigrate the Glorious Revolution, it was quite the opposite: he insisted that it had been achieved through resistance to the king’s sovereign power and that resistance had been legitimate.
This was a highly controversial claim to make at the time. Queen Anne’s reign saw the resurgence of a Tory ideology that abhorred all forms of resistance theory, even when applied to the Glorious Revolution. This Tory revanche put establishment Whigs on the defensive, and all but the most radical of them sought to temper their avowal of resistance theory, or even better to avoid the question altogether. Defoe’s refusal to do either horrified many, and his equation of the revolution of 1649 with that of 1688 was explicitly condemned during the trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell.4 After this official repudiation of his vigorous defence of resistance theory, very few other writers would dare to take it up again later in the eighteenth century.
Defoe was mainly known in his lifetime as a seditious writer with dangerously unorthodox views about resistance and revolution, but this is not how Defoe saw himself. Defoe consistently presented himself as a political moderate, a pragmatist, and a skilful politician who had access to and the esteem of the good and the great, above all his two heroes, King William III and the wily Robert Harley, whom Defoe did not hesitate to call ‘Prime Minister’ (Letters, 31). As important as they are for understanding Defoe’s own self-regard and his public self-fashioning, these characteristics were guises adopted by a mercurial figure who delighted in presenting himself as a key player in the frenzied politics of post-revolutionary Britain. Defoe was not entirely wrong about this: through his varied and prolific writings, he managed to find himself embroiled in some of the major debates of his day. He wrote on politics, religion, economics, education, social policy, travel, and geography; he documented current events as well as writing histories.
Defoe’s reputation in his own day was indelibly associated with his politics, and particularly his enthusiasm for the Revolution. When John Oldmixon identified Defoe as ‘a Zealous Revolutioner and Dissenter’ for the readers of his History of England (1735), he was merely repeating a standard opinion of the writer’s significance.5 Defoe’s emergence in literary public opinion as a writer of genius emerged only posthumously, and even then the process was a slow one [see chapter 33]. Robert Shiells was an early defender when he wrote the first substantive (albeit brief) biography of Defoe in The Lives of the Poets (1753), in which he argued against the derisive views of Pope and other arbiters of literary taste: ‘De Foe can never with any propriety, be ranked amongst the dunces, for whoever reads his works with candour and impartiality, must be convinced that he was a man of the strongest natural powers, a lively imagination, and solid judgment,
4 Brian Cowan (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Malden, MA and Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 228; T. B. Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols (London: Hansard, 1809–28), xv. 213, 324, 341.
5 John Oldmixon, The History of England, During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I (1735), 235.
which . . ought not only to screen him from the petulant attacks of satire, but transmit his name with some degree of applause to posterity’. Even so, Shiells noted that Defoe’s ‘considerable name’ was earned by ‘his early attachment to the revolution interest, and the extraordinary zeal and ability with which he defended it’. Defoe was ‘best known for the True-Born Englishman’, Sheills added.6
It was only in the later eighteenth century, and particularly after the enterprising bookseller Francis Noble began to attribute fictional narratives such as Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) to Defoe, that Defoe’s reputation as an author of literary distinction, rather than a political writer who defended the Revolution interest, began to take shape.7 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Defoe’s reputation as a ‘master of fictions’, grounded largely on the growing esteem for the novels he wrote between 1719 and 1724, dominated critical interest in him as a canonical author. Defoe is now probably best known as a fiction writer, and thanks largely to the prominence of his fictional writings in Ian Watt’s influential The Rise of the Novel (1957), he is a key figure in debates about the ‘rise of the novel’ in the eighteenth century. Taken as a whole, Defoe’s oeuvre (insofar as it can be known) illustrates the changing fortunes of literary production from the age of revolutions into which he was born to the subsequent century of politeness and sensibility in which his writings proved to become increasingly admired, reprinted, and in due course canonized.
He did not set out to be a writer, let alone a great one. Daniel Defoe was born as Daniel Foe, the son of James Foe (d. 1706), a successful London tallow chandler whose Puritanism would become known in his son’s lifetime as ‘Dissent’ due to the ecclesiastical schism created by the ‘Clarendon Code’ of penal laws enacted in the early years of the Restoration.8 Young Daniel grew up in the religious culture of late Puritanism and the political culture of what Mark Goldie has identified as ‘Puritan Whiggery’ [see chapter 17]. His family’s minister was the renowned Presbyterian Samuel Annesley, and he was educated at the Reverend Charles Morton’s dissenting academy in Newington Green. It was in this nascent culture of Dissent that the young Defoe was raised. He was encouraged to begin training as a minister; had he done so, he would have been one of the first generation of Dissenting ministers wholly educated and ordained entirely outside the Church of England, but this was not to be.9 It is possible that Defoe practised as a Dissenting preacher for a while when he was a young man in
6 Robert Shiells, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols (1753), iv. 325, 313; Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Routledge, 1972), 311–27.
7 P. N. Furbank, and W. R. Owens, ‘Defoe and Francis Noble’, ECF, 4:4 (1992), 301–15; P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
8 George Southcombe, ‘Dissent and the Restoration Church of England’, in The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714, ed. Grant Tapsell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 195–216.
9 Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (London: Boydell, 2016), 194–5; Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 7–21; Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 315–16.
his twenties, and he would later pen a few lay sermons that were published, but he publicly acknowledged that ‘the Pulpit is none of my Office—It was my disaster first to be set a-part for, and then to be set a-part from the Honour of that Sacred Employ’.10
Daniel chose instead to follow a secular life of trade and, ultimately, of professional writing. His life and his writings reflect the final phase of Puritanism in the age of revolutions. Certain Puritan themes remained central to Defoe’s worldview: the importance of divine providence; the primacy of Biblical scripture as a guide to the divine plan; the centrality of faith to one’s spiritual life; his orthodox trinitarianism; his plain style of prose expression; his respect for and even practice of lay preaching; and a rigorous sense of personal and social morality that found expression in his support for (and even participation in) the ‘reformation of manners’ movement.11 Defoe’s hostility to the theatre, which he described in distinctly Puritan terms as ‘Nurseries of Crime, Colleges, or rather Universities of the Devil—Satan’s Workhouse, where all the Manufactures of Hell are propagated’, is exemplary of a worldview in which sin was omnipresent and a source of fear and social concern [see chapter 4].12 Indeed, Defoe’s self-proclaimed conception of his position as a writer depended upon his notion that a satirist aims to provoke and chasten the consciences of his readers [see chapter 11]. As he put it in the preface to The True-Born Englishman (1700/1), ‘The End of Satyr is Reformation’ (SFS, i. 83).13 Defoe’s vocation as a public satirist reflected the evolution of trends within Dissenting culture, particularly as Dissent came to reconcile itself with the emergence of a postrevolutionary public sphere.14
Over the course of Defoe’s lifetime, the social and cultural worlds of Dissent became more securely urban and mercantile, just like Defoe himself. Without ever abandoning his piety, Defoe turned his talents towards the world around him. He sought to understand and describe that world for his contemporaries, and as it happens his works have become an invaluable guide to his world for later historians of his age.15
10 Review, vi. 427 (22 October 1709); for speculation on Defoe’s preaching, see Rogers, Grub Street, 316; Furbank and Owens, Critical Bibliography, 49, 246, 247 (nos 53(P), 250c, 250i).
11 Katherine Clark, Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); Charles Eaton Burch, ‘Defoe and the Edinburgh Society for the Reformation of Manners’, RES, 16:63 (1940), 306–12.
12 Review, vi. 328 (1 September 1709).
13 Ashley Marshall, ‘Daniel Defoe as Satirist’, HLQ, 70:4 (2007), 553–76; Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England 1658–1770 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 52–3, 153–68.
14 Brian Cowan, ‘The Public Sphere’, in The Cambridge History of Britain, vol. 3, Early Modern Britain, 1500–1750, ed. Susan Amussen and Paul Monod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, c.2025); Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
15 Peter Earle, The World of Defoe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976).
