No man who wrote so much and so variously has written so well. His favourite topic, if we may judge by the frequency with which he handled it, was "psychical research". Like Glanvill, Henry More, and other writers in the sceptical age of the Restoration, he collected, and told in his own inimitable manner, many current anecdotes of wraiths, death-warnings, second sight, and phantasms of the dead. The most prominent merit of De Foe, in fiction, is his power of convincing the reader by the minute and sober realism of his details. Some of his novels, in autobiographic form, have caused disputes as to whether they be romances, or actual memoirs.
"A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, on September 8, 1705" (published in 1706) has been described as "the first instance of De Foe's wonderful lies like truth". "This relation is matter of fact," said De Foe in the Preface. Sir Walter Scott, a ghost-hunter himself, explained the "fact" by saying that De Foe invented and wrote the story as a puff of Drelincourt "On Death," which the appearance of Mrs. Veal, on the day after her death recommended to her friend (who believed her to be alive), Mrs. Bargrave.
But Mr. George Aitken has proved "that the piece was, as De Foe said, 'a true relation of matter of fact,'" that is, De Foe merely wrote the story as told by Mrs. Bargrave—"the percipient"—the person who saw and conversed with the dead Mrs. Veal about her gown—"a scoured silk, newly made up". Mr. Aitken found a manuscript note of 21 May, 1714, by some one who had interviewed Mrs. Bargrave, and for whom Mrs. Bargrave made three or four minute additions. As for Mrs. Veal herself, she died on 7 September, appeared on 8 September to Mrs. Bargrave, and we have the record of her burial on 10 September, in the register of St. Mary's, Dover.
In another case, "The Botethan Ghost," told in an appendix to De Foe's "Duncan Campbell," the tale was really written, as De Foe says, not by himself, but by one of the people who saw the spectre, the Rev. Mr. Ruddle of Launceston in Cornwall, in June, 1665; the narrative was written on 4 September of the same year.
Thus De Foe's extraordinary gift of making things fictitious seem true has caused him to be charged with inventing stories which he merely retold, or printed from the manuscript of another.
De Foe was 60 years of age, and had suffered from apoplexy, when he wrote the masterpiece which made him immortal, "Robinson Crusoe" (1719). New editions appeared in May, June, and August; a sequel followed which few read; still more scarce are readers of De Foe's "Serious Reflections and Vision of the Angelic World" (1720). The "metapsychical" world was always very near De Foe, practical and shrewd man as he was.
"Crusoe" is based on Captain Rogers's narrative of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, a mariner of Largo, in Fife, marooned (1704) on the Island of Juan Fernandez. An allegory of De Foe's own life has been suspected, the idea is unimportant.
It is superfluous to dilate on the sterling merits of "Robinson Crusoe". Before he published it a critic had recognized "the little art he is truly master of, of forging a story, and imposing it on the world for truth". The style is as simple as Swift's, and more "homely". The tale of love was not De Foe's trade, any more than "the moving accident" was Wordsworth's. "Moll Flanders," and "Roxana" are no doubt meant to have a moral influence; but their readers are looking for something else: like the readers of the edifying Monsieur Zola.
De Foe was one of the fathers of journalism, and almost "the only begetter" of the story of adventure, the desert island romance, and, in "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and "A Journal of the Plague Year," of the historical autobiographical novel. "It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland...." That keynote reverberates in scores of the historical romances of 1885-1900.
The modern novelist, of course, avoids De Foe's strict statistical method. De Foe's story reads precisely like a historical document, and the modern reader dislikes nothing more than that sort of reading. De Foe's hero saw a number of people looking at "a ghost walking on a grave stone". Less fortunate Mr. Pepys "went forth, to see (God forgive my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave, but, as God would have it, did not".