DANIEL DEFOE
Secret agent, political provocateur, merchant,
rebel, and writer, Daniel Defoe led a life as fascinating and
enduring as those he recounted in his novels. He was born in London
in 1660 to James Foe, a candle merchant and butcher of Flemish
descent. In his childhood Daniel survived a deadly resurgence of
the bubonic plague in 1665 that killed thousands of Londoners, and
he witnessed the Great Fire of London in 1666. As a Dissenter—a
Protestant who did not belong to the Church of England—Defoe was
excluded from studying at Cambridge or Oxford; instead he received
an excellent education under the Reverend Charles Morton, who would
become one of the first administrators of Harvard College.
By his early twenties Defoe had established
himself as a merchant, selling all manner of goods, including hose,
tobacco, wine, and the secretions of civet cats used in perfumes.
He married Mary Tuffley, daughter of a wealthy merchant, in 1684;
the couple had eight children during their long marriage, which
ended with Defoe’s death forty-seven years later.
Defoe’s great interest in politics entrenched him
in the political turmoil of his times, and he soon earned a sizable
reputation as a pamphleteer. His wildly popular poem The
True-Born Englishman (1701) challenges English sentiment
against Dutch-born King William III of Orange; his most famous
pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), is a
response to the attacks launched against Dissenters when William
died and Queen Anne took the throne. The tract landed Defoe in
Newgate Prison, which he would faithfully depict in Moll
Flanders, and upon his release he went into service as a
pamphleteer and information-gatherer for a moderate and influential
member of government, Robert Harley. In 1704 Defoe launched The
Review, a highly regarded political journal that he wrote and
edited until 1713. He emerged as a novelist with the publication in
1719 of the well-received account of a castaway The Life and
Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and he
appeased the appetites of his reading public by publishing three
nov els in a single year, 1722:
Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and A Journal of the
Plague Year. He published one more novel, The Unfortunate
Mistress: Roxana, in 1724, then turned his hand to nonfiction
again, with works that include the three-volume A Tour
Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published between
1724 and 1727. Daniel Defoe died, in debt and mired in legal
battles but widely respected as a writer and political thinker, in
April 1731 in a London boardinghouse.