DEFOE, DANIEL (c. 1659-1731), English author, was born in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, London, in the latter part of 1659 or early in 1660, of a nonconformist family. His grandfather, Daniel Foe, lived at Etton, Northamptonshire, apparently in comfortable circumstances, for he is said to have kept a pack of hounds. As to the variation of name, Defoe or Foe, its owner signed either indifferently till late in life, and where his initials occur they are sometimes D. F. and sometimes D. D. F. Three autograph letters of his are extant, all addressed in 1705 to the same person, and signed respectively D. Foe, de Foe and Daniel Defoe. His father, James Foe, was a butcher and a citizen of London.
Daniel was well educated at a famous dissenting academy, Mr Charles Morton’s of Stoke Newington, where many of the best-known nonconformists of the time were his schoolfellows. With few exceptions all the known events of Defoe’s life are connected with authorship. In the older catalogues of his works two pamphlets, Speculum Crapegownorum, a satire on the clergy, and A Treatise against the Turks, are attributed to him before the accession of James II., but there seems to be no publication of his which is certainly genuine before The Character of Dr Annesley (1697). He had, however, before this, taken up arms in Monmouth’s expedition, and is supposed to have owed his lucky escape from the clutches of the king’s troops and the law, to his being a Londoner, and therefore a stranger in the west country. On the 26th of January 1688 he was admitted a liveryman of the city of London, having claimed his freedom by birth. Before his western escapade he had taken up the business of hosiery factor. At the entry of William and Mary into London he is said to have served as a volunteer trooper “gallantly mounted and richly accoutred.” In these days he lived at Tooting, and was instrumental in forming a dissenting congregation there. His business operations at this period appear to have been extensive and various. He seems to have been a sort of commission merchant, especially in Spanish and Portuguese goods, and at some time to have visited Spain on business. In 1692 he failed for £17,000. His misfortunes made him write both feelingly and forcibly on the bankruptcy laws; and although his creditors accepted a composition, he afterwards honourably paid them in full, a fact attested by independent and not very friendly witnesses. Subsequently, he undertook first the secretaryship and then the management and chief ownership of some tile-works at Tilbury, but here also he was unfortunate, and his imprisonment in 1703 brought the works to a standstill, and he lost £3000. From this time forward we hear of no settled business in which he engaged.
The course of Defoe’s life was determined about the middle of the reign of William III. by his introduction to that monarch and other influential persons. He frequently boasts of his personal intimacy with the “glorious and immortal” king, and in 1695 he was appointed accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, an office which he held for four years. During this time he produced his Essay on Projects (1698), containing suggestions on banks, road-management, friendly and insurance societies of various kinds, idiot asylums, bankruptcy, academies, military colleges, high schools for women, &c. It displays Defoe’s lively and lucid style in full vigour, and abounds with ingenious thoughts and apt illustrations, though it illustrates also the unsystematic character of his mind. In the same year Defoe wrote the first of a long series of pamphlets on the then burning question of occasional conformity. In this, for the first time, he showed the unlucky independence which, in so many other instances, united all parties against him. While he pointed out to the dissenters the scandalous inconsistency of their playing fast and loose with sacred things, yet he denounced the impropriety of requiring tests at all. In support of the government he published, in 1698, An Argument for a Standing Army, followed in 1700 by a defence of William’s war policy called The Two Great Questions considered, and a set of pamphlets on the Partition Treaty. Thus in political matters he had the same fate as in ecclesiastical; for the Whigs were no more prepared than the Tories to support William through thick and thin. He also dealt with the questions of stock-jobbing and of electioneering corruption. But his most remarkable publication at this time was The True-Born Englishman (1701), a satire in rough but extremely vigorous verse on the national objection to William as a foreigner, and on the claim of purity of blood for a nation which Defoe chooses to represent as crossed and dashed with all the strains and races in Europe. He also took a prominent part in the proceedings which followed the Kentish petition, and was the author, some say the presenter, of the Legion Memorial, which asserted in the strongest terms the supremacy of the electors over the elected, and of which even an irate House of Commons did not dare to take much notice. The theory of the indefeasible supremacy of the freeholders of England, whose delegates merely, according to this theory, the Commons were, was one of Defoe’s favourite political tenets, and he returned to it in a powerfully written tract entitled The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England examined and asserted (1701).
At the same time he was occupied in a controversy on the conformity question with John How (or Howe) on the practice of “occasional conformity.” Defoe maintained that the dissenters who attended the services of the English Church on particular occasions to qualify themselves for office were guilty of inconsistency. At the same time he did not argue for the complete abolition of the tests, but desired that they should be so framed as to make it possible for most Protestants conscientiously to subscribe to them. Here again his moderation pleased neither party.
The death of William was a great misfortune to Defoe, and he soon felt the power of his adversaries. After publishing The Mock Mourners, intended to satirize and rebuke the outbreak of Jacobite joy at the king’s death, he turned his attention once more to ecclesiastical subjects, and, in an evil hour for himself, wrote the anonymous Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a statement in the most forcible terms of the extreme “high-flying” position, which some high churchmen were unwary enough to endorse, without any suspicion of the writer’s ironical intention. The author was soon discovered; and, as he absconded, an advertisement was issued offering a reward for his apprehension, and giving the only personal description we possess of him, as “a middle-sized 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, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” In this conjuncture Defoe had really no friends, for the dissenters were as much alarmed at his book as the high-flyers were irritated. He surrendered, and his defence appears to have been injudiciously conducted; at any rate he was fined 200 marks, and condemned to be pilloried three times, to be imprisoned indefinitely, and to find sureties for his good behaviour during seven years. It was in reference to this incident that Pope, whose Catholic rearing made him detest the abettor of the Revolution and the champion of William of Orange, wrote in the Dunciad—
“Earless on high stands unabash’d Defoe”
—though he knew that the sentence to the pillory had long ceased to entail the loss of ears. Defoe’s exposure in the pillory (July 29, 30, 31) was, however, rather a triumph than a punishment, for the populace took his side; and his Hymn to the Pillory, which he soon after published, is one of the best of his poetical works. Unluckily for him his condemnation had the indirect effect of destroying his business at Tilbury.
He remained in prison until August 1704, and then owed his release to the intercession of Robert Harley, who represented his case to the queen, and obtained for him not only liberty but pecuniary relief and employment, which, of one kind or another, lasted until the termination of Anne’s reign. Defoe was uniformly grateful to the minister, and his language respecting him is in curious variance with that generally used. There is no doubt that Harley, who understood the influence wielded by Defoe, made some conditions. Defoe says he received no pension, but his subsequent fidelity was at all events indirectly rewarded; moreover, Harley’s moderation in a time of the extremest party-insanity was no little recommendation to Defoe. During his imprisonment he was by no means idle. A spurious edition of his works having been issued, he himself produced a collection of twenty-two treatises, to which some time afterwards he added a second group of eighteen more. He also wrote in prison many short pamphlets, chiefly controversial, published a curious work on the famous storm of the 26th of November 1703, and started in February 1704 perhaps the most remarkable of all his projects, The Review. This was a paper which was issued during the greater part of its life three times a week. It was entirely written by Defoe, and extends to eight complete volumes and some few score numbers of a second issue. He did not confine himself to news, but wrote something very like finished essays on questions of policy, trade and domestic concerns; he also introduced a “Scandal Club,” in which minor questions of manners and morals were treated in a way which undoubtedly suggested the Tatlers and Spectators which followed. Only one complete copy of the work is known to exist, and that is in the British Museum. It is probable that if bulk, rapidity of production, variety of matter, originality of design, and excellence of style be taken together, hardly any author can show a work of equal magnitude. After his release Defoe went to Bury St Edmunds, though he did not interrupt either his Review or his occasional pamphlets. One of these, Giving Alms no Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation (1704), is extraordinarily far-sighted. It denounces both indiscriminate alms-giving and the national work-shops proposed by Sir Humphrey Mackworth.
In 1705 appeared The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, a political satire which is supposed to have given some hints for Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; and at the end of the year Defoe performed a secret mission, the first of several of the kind, for Harley. In 1706 appeared the True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal, long supposed to have been written for a bookseller to help off an unsaleable translation of Drelincourt, On Death, but considerable doubt has been cast upon this by William Lee. Defoe’s next work was Jure divino, a long poetical argument in (bad) verse; and soon afterwards (1706) he began to be much employed in promoting the union with Scotland. Not only did he write pamphlets as usual on the project, and vigorously recommend it in The Review, but in October 1706 he was sent on a political mission to Scotland by Sidney Godolphin, to whom Harley had recommended him. He resided in Edinburgh for nearly sixteen months, and his services to the government were repaid by a regular salary. He seems to have devoted himself to commercial and literary as well as to political matters, and prepared at this time his elaborate History of the Union, which appeared in 1709. In this year Henry Sacheverell delivered his famous sermons, and Defoe wrote several tracts about them and attacked the preacher in his Review.