"The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"
stands the subject of our sketch, the "Tinker of Elstow." Of his high merit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinburgh Review expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those which produced "Paradise Lost" and the "Pilgrim's Progress."[Back to Contents]
DANIEL DEFOE[2]
By Clark Russell
(1661-1731)
Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson Crusoe" remains, at the end of two centuries, the most popular work of fiction in a literature abounding in imaginative works of superlative excellence, was born in London in 1661. His father was plain Mr. Foe, a butcher, of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Though Defoe speaks gratefully and respectfully of his father, he implies here and there in his writings a pride of birth which probably did not induce him to talk freely of the parental calling. He must needs be of Norman extraction, and go back with the best of those whose family claims he sneers at; and that posterity might be in no doubt of the antiquity of his descent, he, at the age of about forty, changed the plain sturdy name of Foe into De Foe; but the accepted name is as it is spelt in this contribution.
His father wished to make a Dissenting teacher of him, and sent him to Morton's Academy, in Newington Green. Morton thoroughly grounded him in knowledge of a practical and useful sort; and Defoe claimed for his preceptor's system of education that the pupils became masters of the English tongue. But language is a genius. No teacher could make a writer of a boy who was without the talent of words. In after years Defoe appears to have picked up several tongues, as may be judged by his challenge to John Tutchin, to translate with him any Latin, French, or Italian author for twenty pounds each book; one sees his proficiency also in the character he gives of himself in a paper in Applebee's Journal. But at the very heart of the genius of Defoe lay the spirit of the tradesman. It burns like a farthing rushlight in the midst of a richly furnished room. Whoever wants to understand Defoe must study his mind by this light. He declined to fill a pulpit because, in the language of the shop, "it did not pay." Already, that is when he was about two-and-twenty years old, he was writing pamphlets on Protestantism, on Popular Liberties, and the like, and he also appears to have taken part in the Duke of Monmouth's rising.
In 1685 he opened a shop as a hosier in Freeman's Court, Cornhill. There is nothing memorable to record of him while he was in this line of trade, saving that in 1688, at the Revolution, he made haste to accentuate his adhesion to William III. by joining a company of volunteer horse, a royal regiment made up of the principal citizens of London: these men, gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, with Defoe in their midst and the Earl of Monmouth at their head, guarded the king and queen to a banquet at Whitehall. His prosperity as a hosier ended in 1692, in which year he fled to Bristol, a bankrupt, with debts, according to his own showing, amounting to seventeen thousand pounds. He did not, however, long lie in hiding. In recognition of his services as a pamphleteer, the post of accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty was given to him. We then find him prospering again. He started a brick-making manufactory at Tilbury, and set up a coach and a pleasure-boat. His pen, moreover, was ceaselessly employed; the titles of the productions of a single month would more than fill the slender space allotted me. He fought for Non-conformity till 1698, then broke with the Dissenters because of their practice of occasional conformity, which, he pretends, disgusted him. His argument was, let a man be wholly a Dissenter, or wholly a Churchman. But don't let him go to chapel one Sunday and church the next. He can never be taken seriously, however, in these short flights any more than in his long novels. There is no consistency in his writings, because there is no conscience in his opinions. In his "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," he faces about, and the man who was at war with Howe, the most eloquent of Non-conformist divines, second only to Jeremy Taylor in richness of thought and splendor of diction, is, on the merits of that piece of irony, accepted by posterity as the foremost champion of Dissent.
Defoe's loyalty to King William, however, must pass unquestioned. "The True Born Englishman" procured him the notice of the king, whose confidence he claims to have been honored with. His real character as a journalist and publicist grows quickly visible after the death of William III. His genius as a "trimmer" makes sheer irony of his most appealing and eloquent pieces. Swift says of himself that he wrote that reputation might stand him in the room of a title and coach and six; Defoe flourished his pen as a tradesman, for money. Swift claims to have been the greatest master of irony of his day, nay, to have invented that form of writing. But Defoe surely is his equal, and in "The Shortest Way" out and away his superior. The writer's gravity completely deceived the world. When it was known who was the author, the Dissenters were hardly less indignant than the High Churchmen. The satiric recommendations were indeed in the highest degree alarming. The Tory party had approved with complacency while they thought the piece a serious proposal. When they found out Defoe wrote it, they hunted him down and forced him to surrender himself. A hue-and-cry advertisement in the papers while he was a fugitive, survives as one of the best pen-and-ink sketches in the language: "He is a middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown coloured hair, but wears a wig: a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." "The Shortest Way" was ordered to be burnt, and Defoe sentenced to pay a fine of 200 marks to Queen Anne, to stand three times in the pillory, to be imprisoned during the queen's pleasure, and to find sureties for his good behavior for seven years.
The genius of Eyre Crowe has given a wonderful life and color to this memorable incident. This dead thing seems charged with a very passion of vitality in the charming illustration that accompanies this sketch. It is impossible to recur to the degradation of one of Great Britain's finest geniuses, at the instance of men of no more importance to posterity than the worms which have eaten them up, without wrath and disgust. But he was popular, and the crowd used him handsomely. They pelted him with flowers and drank his health. Pope, in a famous line, speaks of the London Monument that, like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies, because of the inscription upon it that charged the Papists with causing the great fire. The malignant little hunchback, as malevolent as an ape for all his genius, could tell lies as great as any the chisel could grave, and unfortunately, infinitely more lasting. When he wrote: "Earless on high stands unabash'd Defoe," he knew he lied. Defoe did not lose his ears. He was pilloried simply, and for three days successively, stood in Cornhill, in Cheapside, and at Temple Bar, where our illustration exhibits him. He went to Newgate; the government dared not hinder him from writing, and it was while a prisoner that he heroically started "The Review," at first a weekly, and afterward a bi-weekly, issue. It was also in Newgate that he learnt much of those secrets of the prison-house which, translated into "Moll Flanders" and "Colonel Jack," are transcripts so exquisitely faithful that one knows not how to parallel them in art save by the paintings of Hogarth. He had a wife and six children at this time, and it is difficult to guess how he provided for them. His works at Tilbury were a failure: it may be supposed that his pen was his sole resource.