Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

by Mrs. Oliphant

There is a good stock of goods in it, but there is nobody to serve but a prentice boy or two and an idle journeyman. One finds them all at play together rather than looking out for customers; and when you come to buy, they look as if they did not care whether they showed you anything or no. Then it is a shop always exposed; it is perfectly haunted with thieves and shoplifters. They are nobody but raw boys in it that mind nothing, so that there are more outcries of stop thief! at their door, and more constables fetched to that shop than to all the shops in the street.

The households of the soberer and more sensible members of the craft are also open to grave animadversion. The ladies are too fine; they treat their friends with wine or punch or fine ale, and have their parlors set off with the tea-table and the chocolate-pot, and the silver coffee-pot, and oftentimes an ostentation of plate into the bargain, and they keep “three or four maid servants, nay, sometimes five,” and some a footman besides, “for ’tis an ordinary thing to see the tradesmen and shopkeepers of London keep footmen, as well as the gentlemen. Witness the infinite number of blue liveries which are so common now that they are called the tradesmens’ liveries, and few gentlemen care to give blue to their servants for that very reason.” Of the maids themselves, who ask “six, seven, nay eight pounds per annum” for their services, a terrible account is given in a pamphlet published about 1725, where there is a humorous description in the first person of a young woman who comes to apply for the place of housemaid, evidently maid of all work to the speaker, who lives with his sister, with a man and maid for their household. She is so fine that Defoe himself shows her into the parlor and keeps her company till his sister is ready, thinking her a gentlewoman come to pay a visit. Perhaps it is not Defoe, but, with his usual skill, he makes us think so. All these details bring before us the London of his time. The mercers had their shops in Paternoster Row, “where the spacious shops, back warehouses, skylights, and other conveniences, made on purpose for their trade, are still to be seen,” where “they all grew rich and very seldom any failed or miscarried,” and also in Cornhill, where Defoe’s own establishment was, though there, apparently, business was carried on wholesale. It appears to him that trade is going downhill fast when this order is changed, when Paul’s Churchyard is filled with cane-chair makers, and Cornhill with the meanest of trades, even Cheapside itself, “how is it now filled up with shoemakers, toy shops, and pastry cooks?” Everything is going to destruction, the old trader thinks, shaking his head as he goes through the well-known streets, where once the fine ladies came in their fine coaches standing in two rows; he cannot think but that trade itself is coming to an end when such changes can come to pass. Trade, he says, like vice, has come to a height, and as things decline when they are at their extremes, so trade not only must decline, but does already sensibly decline. It ought to be a comfort to the many timid persons who have lived and prophesied evil since then to hear that Defoe a hundred and fifty years ago had come to this sad conclusion.

He was born into a world he thus describes, into the atmosphere of shops and counting-houses, where the good tradesman lived in the parlor above or behind his shop, and was called with a bell when need was, and was constant at business “from seven in the morning till twelve, and from two to nine at night,” the interval being occupied with dinner; where the appearance of the long, flowing periwig and the sword and the man in blue livery were the danger-signals, and showed that he must break, he could not hold; where the cry of “Stop, thief!” might suddenly get up in the midst of the traffic, and the constable be called to some fainting fine lady who had got a piece of taffeta or a lace in her muff or under her hoop; and where, perhaps the greatest risk of all, a young man of genius, who was but a hosier, might betray himself in a coffee-house and be visited afterward by great personages veiling their lace and embroidery under their cloaks, who wanted a seasonable pamphlet or a newspaper put into the right way. A strange old London, more difficult to put on record in its manners and features than it is to record in pasteboard its outward aspect; where town could be convulsed by a chance broadsheet, and the Government propped or wounded to death by an anonymous essayist; when men of letters were secretaries of state, and other men of letters starved in Grub street, and the masses thanked God they could not read; when a revolution was made for liberty of conscience, yet every office and privilege was barred by a test, and intolerance was the habit of the time. The author of “Robinson Crusoe” must have got all his ideas in the narrow, bustling streets, full of rumors, of wars and commotions, and talk about the scandals of the court, and sight of the finery and license which revolted, yet exercised some strange fascinations upon the sober dissenting tradesmen who had found the sway of Oliver a hard one. He was born the year after the Restoration, and was no doubt carried out of London post-haste with the rest of his family in the early summer when the roads were crowded with wagons and carts full of women, children, and servants, all flying from the plague. The butcher’s little son was but four, but very likely retained a recollection of the crowded ways and strange spectacles of the time; and no doubt he saw, with eyes starting out of their little sockets with excitement and terror, the glare of the great fire which burned down all the haunts of the pestilence and cured London by destroying it. Then, both at school, at Newington, and in the parlor behind the shop, there would be many a grave talk over what was to come of all the wickedness in high places; and when the papist king came to the throne, many discussions as to how much his new-born liberality was good for, and whether there was any safety in trusting to his indulgences and declarations of liberty of conscience. Defoe by this time was old enough to speak his own mind. He had left school at nineteen, and till he was twenty-four there is no appearance that he was doing anything, save, perhaps, picking up notions on trade in general, and as much as a young dissenter could, among his own class, or in the coffee-houses where it was safe, delivering his sentiments upon questions so vital to the welfare of the country. According to his own statement, he had written a pamphlet in 1683 to prove that a Christian power, though popish, was better than the Turk. He was now so bold as to tell the dissenters “he had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures than the papists should fall both upon the church and the dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot.” No doubt he was then about in London noticing everything, discoursing largely with a wonderful, long-winded, sober enthusiasm, making every statement that occurred to him look like the most certain truth; talking everywhere, in the coffee-house, at the street corners, down in Cripplegate in the paternal parlor, never silent; a swarthy youth, with quick gray eyes and keen, eager features,

and large, loquacious mouth. Better be fined and silenced than let in popery to burn you into the bargain. Better stand fast in all those deprivations and hold your faith in corners, than accept suspicious favor from such a source, and help to bring in again the Jesuit and the Pope. While Penn, with his plausible speech and amiable temper, drew his Quaker brethren into a strange harmony with the courtier’s arts, and presented addresses to James, and accepted his grace, the young tradesman would be pressing his very different argument upon the suspicious somber groups far from St. James’s, where there was no finery, but a great deal of determination. And when in the disturbed and confused wretchedness of the time, no man knowing what was about to happen, but sure that some change must come, young Monmouth set up his hapless standard, could it be Defoe’s own impulse, or the catch of some eddy of feeling into which he had been swept, which carried him off into the ranks of the adventurer? It is said that three of his fellow-students at Newington figure among the victims of the Bloody Assize. Defoe would always be more disposed to talk than fight. He must, we cannot help thinking, have thought it a feeble proceeding to put yourself in the way of getting your head cut off, when you could use it so much more effectually in convincing your fellow-creatures. His mind, ever so ready to slip through every loophole, carried his body off safely out of the clutches of Jeffreys. Probably when he turned up at home against all hope after this unlucky escapade, his friends were too thankful to thrust him into the hosier’s warehouse, where no doubt he would give himself the air of having sold and bought hose all his life.

There is, however, nothing to build any account of his life upon in these earlier years. The revolution filled him with enthusiasm, and King William gained his full and honest support—a support both bold and serviceable, and with nothing in it which was not to his credit. But apparently a man cannot be so good a talker, so active a politician, and follow the rules which he himself laid down for a successful tradesman at the same time. Most likely his mind was never in his hose, and the world was full of so many more exciting matters. Seven years after he had been set up in business he “broke,” and had to fly, though no further than Bristol, apparently, where he made an arrangement with his creditors. He would seem to have failed for the large sum at that time of seventeen thousand pounds, which he honestly exerted himself to pay, and so far succeeded in doing so that he reduced in a few years his debts to five thousand pounds in all; and, what was still more, finding certain of the creditors with whom he had compounded to be poor, after he had paid his composition fully, he made up to them the entire amount of his debt—an unlooked-for and exceptional example of honorable sentiment. Some years later, when Defoe had got into notoriety, and was the object of a great deal of violent criticism, a contemporary gives this fact, on the authority indeed of an anonymous gentleman in a coffee-house only, but it seems to have been generally received as true. The writer was in a company “where I and everybody else were railing at him,” when “the gentleman took us up with this short speech:

“‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘I know this Defoe as well as any of you, for I was one of his creditors, compounded with him and discharged him fully. Several years afterward he sent for me, and, though he was clearly discharged, he paid me all the remainder of his debt, voluntarily and of his own accord, and he told me that, as far as God should enable him, he intended to do so with everybody. When he had done he desired me to set my hand to a paper to acknowledge it, which I readily did, and found a great many names to the paper before me, and I think myself bound to own it.’”