2. His Prose. This is of amazing bulk and variety, and for convenience can be divided into two groups.
(a) Political Writings. Like most of the other writers of his time, Defoe turned out a mass of political tracts and pamphlets. Many of them appeared in his own journal, The Review, which, issued in 1704, is in several ways the forerunner of The Tatler and The Spectator. His Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) brought upon him official wrath, and caused him to be fined and pilloried. He wrote one or two of his political tracts in rough verses which are more remarkable for their vigor than for their elegance. The best known of this class is The True-born Englishman (1701). In all his propaganda Defoe is vigorous and acute, and he has a fair command of irony and invective.
(b) His Fiction. His works in fiction were all produced in the latter part of his life, at almost incredible speed. First came Robinson Crusoe (1719); then Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Captain Singleton, all three books in 1720; in 1722 appeared Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack; then Roxana (1724) and A New Voyage round the World (1725).
This great body of fiction has grave defects, largely due to the immense speed with which it was produced. The general plan of the novel in each case is slatternly and unequal; as, for example, in Robinson Crusoe, where the incomparable effect of the story of the island is marred by long and sometimes tedious narratives of other lands. Then the style is unpolished to the verge of rudeness. In homely and direct narrative this may not be a grave drawback, but it shuts Defoe out from a large province of fiction in which he might have done valuable work.
But at its best, as in the finest parts of Robinson Crusoe, his writing has a realism that is rarely approached by the most ardent of modern realists. This is achieved by Defoe’s grasp of details and his unerring sense of their supreme literary value, a swift and resolute narrative method, and a plain and matter-of-fact style that inevitably lays incredulity asleep. To the development of the novel Defoe’s contribution is priceless.
In the passage now given note Defoe’s completely unadorned style, the loosely constructed sentences, and the almost laughable attention to the minutest detail:
I went to work upon this boat the most like a fool that ever man did who had any of his senses awake. I pleased myself with the design, without determining whether I was able to undertake it; not but that the difficulty of launching my boat came often into my head; but I put a stop to my own inquiries into it, by this foolish answer: Let us first make it: I warrant I will find some way or other to get it along when it is done.
This was a most preposterous method; but the eagerness of my fancy prevailed, and to work I went. I felled a cedar-tree, and I question much, whether Solomon ever had such a one for the building of the Temple at Jerusalem; it was five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part next the stump, and four feet eleven inches diameter at the end of twenty-two feet, where it lessened, and then parted into branches. It was not without infinite labour that I felled this tree; I was twenty days hacking and hewing at the bottom, and fourteen more getting the branches and limbs and the vast spreading head of it cut off; after this it cost me a month to shape it and dub it to a proportion, and to something like the bottom of a boat, that it might swim upright as it ought to do. It cost me near three months more to clear the inside, and work it out so as to make an exact boat of it: this I did indeed without fire, by mere mallet and chisel, and by the dint of hard labour, till I had brought it to be a very handsome periagua, and big enough to have carried six-and-twenty men, and consequently big enough to have carried me and all my cargo.
Robinson Crusoe