Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was born Daniel Foe in Cripplegate, London — he added the aristocratic “De” in middle age — the son of James Foe, a tallow chandler and Dissenter. He was educated at the Dissenting academy of Charles Morton in Newington Green, a far more practical and modern education than Oxford or Cambridge offered, and was intended for the ministry. He chose commerce instead, embarking on a series of business ventures — hosiery, wine, civet cats, marine insurance, a tile factory — that ended repeatedly in bankruptcy.

Life and Career

Defoe’s early career combined trade and politics. He joined the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion against James II in 1685 and narrowly escaped execution after its failure. He supported William III’s Glorious Revolution and became a pamphleteer of remarkable energy and versatility. The True-Born Englishman (1701), a verse satire defending William against xenophobic attacks, was the most widely sold poem of its era.

The pivotal catastrophe came in 1703. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a satirical pamphlet that parodied High Church intolerance so perfectly that both sides were deceived, led to his arrest, prosecution, and sentencing to three days in the pillory. The pillory was a potentially lethal punishment — crowds could throw rocks — but Defoe’s supporters turned it into a triumph, pelting him with flowers. He was imprisoned in Newgate, released through the intervention of Robert Harley, and thereafter served as a government intelligence agent, travelling the country and producing reports on public opinion.

Defoe’s literary career as a novelist began astonishingly late. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was published when he was nearly sixty. The novel — presented as the authentic memoir of a castaway who spends twenty-eight years on a desert island — was an immediate and enormous success. It is the first great English novel and the prototype of the realistic adventure narrative. Defoe followed it with a remarkable burst of fiction: Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724).

Defoe published over 500 works in his lifetime — an output that makes him one of the most prolific writers in English. He died on 24 April 1731, in hiding from creditors, in Ropemaker’s Alley, London.

Major Works and Themes

Defoe’s fiction is characterised by an extraordinary realism — a gift for circumstantial detail that makes his invented narratives read like authentic memoirs. His protagonists are survivors: practical, resourceful, morally flexible individuals who navigate a hostile world through ingenuity and endurance.

Robinson Crusoe (1719) is both a survival narrative and a parable of self-reliance, colonialism, and providence. Crusoe’s transformation of a desert island into a miniature civilisation — complete with agriculture, pottery, and a fortified dwelling — has been read as an allegory of European colonialism, of bourgeois capitalism, and of the Protestant work ethic. It remains one of the most widely read novels in the world.

Moll Flanders (1722) follows its heroine through a life of crime, prostitution, and multiple marriages with an unsentimental realism that anticipates the great nineteenth-century novels. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a fictional account of the Great Plague of 1665 based on meticulous research, reads so much like eyewitness testimony that it was long believed to be factual.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Defoe was regarded as a journalist and a hack in his own time — the novel had not yet acquired literary respectability, and Defoe’s works were published anonymously as supposed true accounts. The Victorians recognised Robinson Crusoe’s importance but looked down on the rest. The twentieth century restored Defoe’s reputation as one of the founders of English prose fiction. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) established Defoe alongside Richardson and Fielding as the progenitors of the English novel.

His influence is vast: the desert-island narrative, from The Swiss Family Robinson to Lord of the Flies to Cast Away, descends from Crusoe. The criminal autobiography, from Dickens to Patricia Highsmith, owes something to Moll Flanders.

Key Works

• The True-Born Englishman (1701)
• Robinson Crusoe (1719)
• Captain Singleton (1720)
• Moll Flanders (1722)
• A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
• Roxana (1724)
• A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1727)

Collecting Defoe

Defoe is a major collecting author of the early eighteenth century, with Robinson Crusoe as the supreme target.

Robinson Crusoe (1719, W. Taylor, London) was published as The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The first edition is a small octavo, published in a single volume (Defoe later added The Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections). First editions are rare and bring $50,000–$200,000 depending on condition. The work was enormously popular and reprinted constantly; later eighteenth-century editions are collected at more modest prices. The engraved frontispiece, showing Crusoe in his goatskin clothing, has become one of the most recognizable images in English literature.

Moll Flanders (1722) first editions bring $5,000–$20,000. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) first editions bring $3,000–$15,000.

Defoe’s other novels and pamphlets — he produced over 500 publications — are collected by specialists. The pamphlets, many published anonymously, present attribution challenges that have occupied scholars for centuries.

Defoe autograph material is extremely rare. Very few authenticated letters survive. His handwriting is known from a small number of documents in the National Archives and the British Library. Any manuscript material is of the highest value.