Defoe as a Biographical Subject

Defoe as a Biographical Subject

Max Novak*University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

This essay on writing a biography of Daniel Defoe is focused on two problems.How is biography possible in a time when many thinkers have argued that all historyand biography are essentially forms of fiction and that the notion of a unifiedpersonality is an illusion? And how does one deal with the contention of JohnRichetti and others that a biography of Daniel Defoe has to be different from otherbiographies in that his character is essentially irretrievable from the past? Thearguments of various critics on authorship have shown us that works of history andbiography are never scientific presentations but rather works shaped by their authors.But it is only through such limited viewpoints that facts of a life or a history canhave meaning. Defoe was a spy who took many identities, but placed in adeterminable historical context, his opinions and motives are fairly consistent. Asthe many biographers of Defoe before me and I have shown, shaping the life andcharacter of such a protean figure is challenging but is not as difficult as might bethought.

The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly overthose performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness,to heed the thoughts and domestic Privacies and display the minutedetails of daily life.

Samuel Johnson, Rambler 60

The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.There is no life that can be recaptured.

Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives

As a number of reviewers remarked, in the beginning of my biography,Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (2001), I complained about the tedious workrequired of a biographer and about the entire enterprise. “I must confess,”I wrote, “that I came to writing this work reluctantly.”1 During the entireperiod of my undergraduate and graduate education as well as my early yearsas a university teacher, the dominant critical school was the NewCriticism. That school’s emphasis on the importance of the text of a literarywork made biography and the intentions of the author seemingly irrelevant.Such an approach was fairly successful, particularly in the classroom. It wasdifficult to argue against the primacy of what the text offered both from thestandpoint of its general structure and through a sentence-by-sentence© Blackwell Publishing 2006

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reading. But the New Criticism worked better for short lyric poems thanfor the novel, a form which incorporated so much of contemporaryexperience in its fabric. And when Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel appeared in1957, with its sociological approach and its fearless use of biographicalmaterials, it seemed as if what had previously been forbidden to critics wasnow available.

In Defoe’s case, however, the use of biographical approaches createdenormous confusion in the criticism. If, as some biographers and criticsthought, Defoe was best approached in terms of his “Puritan” background,then how could he have written either Moll Flanders or Roxana, works thatverge on the pornographic? Perhaps it was best to approach these fictionswithin a “Puritan” context. The splendid work of G. A. Starr and J. PaulHunter showed how rewarding such an approach might be.2 And in hisprefaces, Defoe appeared to claim that these fictions were entirely moralworks. Would it not be wise to take him at his word? What in Moll Flandersseemed like irony to many excellent critics such as Dorothy Van Ghent,had to be an illusion or simple confusion.3 Yet irony was endemic to themany picaresque fictions treating crime and criminals from which Defoedrew both his form and substance. And as one disparaging contemporaryacknowledged, irony was so much a part of his writing because it was partof his character. In other words, biographical approaches that viewed Defoeas a “Puritan” had tended to skew the critical readings.4 In my first book,Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962), I avoided the problem byadhering to Defoe’s texts and using the concept of the persona – the variousmasks that Defoe assumed in his writings.

But in 1964, when I wrote an essay in College English on the deliberateironies in Moll Flanders based on Defoe’s use of irony throughout his 40-yearcareer as a writer, I did so, at the time, with the sense that biographicalmaterial should be used mainly to address a crux – when the text had createdseemingly irresolvable critical conflicts and when a misapprehensions aboutthe character of the author was leading to what, to my mind, were falseconclusions.5 Decades later, and after several books and many articles onDefoe, I concluded that what was needed was a biography that would allowus to make sense of his texts, particularly his major fictions. I never thoughtit would be easy. Defoe was a journalist who, in attempting to fulfill hisbargain with his paymasters, sometimes wrote in favor of causes which hedetested. After 1715, he was hired by the government to spy upon theopposition press. He was to write for Jacobites such as Nathaniel Mist andattempt to moderate the more extreme sentiments expressed by Mist andvarious contributors to Mist’s Weekly Journal. Attempting to resolve suchwritings with Defoe’s beliefs is an interesting exercise but is not much useto a biographer seeking to display a core of personality. Recently a scholarasked me whether Defoe was the author of a severe attack upon Hollandand the abysmal character of the Dutch.6 He was indeed the author, buthow likely was it that Defoe, whose True-Born Englishman (1701) powerfully

© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/6 (2006): 1218–1234, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00377.x

Defoe as a Biographical Subject . 1219

attacked an absurd English nationalism and the anti-Dutch feeling directedat William III, really believed in Dutch perfidy – that standby of a HighTory view of Europe?7 I had not mentioned this work in my biographybecause I considered it to be among the many pamphlets that he wrotestrictly as a propagandist for the administration of Robert Harley and withoutmuch biographical significance.

Defoe had been the victim of numerous attacks during his lifetime. Theydepicted his politics as those of a radical Whig, then as a Tory and finally asa Jacobite. His personal life was described in lurid terms, revealing him asan unscrupulous businessman, an inconstant husband, and a person whomno one could trust. In 1715, Defoe had the opportunity to reply to hisenemies in an autobiographical pamphlet, An Appeal to Honour and JusticeThough It Be of His Worst Enemies, a work that would shape many of thesubsequent biographies. It was composed at a time when he was particularlyvulnerable. Defoe had made his reputation as a satirist by attacking thosewhom he considered to be his political enemies and those whom heconsidered to be hypocritical and immoral. He had created manyenemies. When, following the death of Queen Anne and the triumph ofthe Whigs under George I, Defoe was seemingly without anyone to protecthim, he wrote this defense of his life – a defense that attempted to paint hismotives as always righteous and his actions, mainly in the form of his writingsbut also his active support of a Tory administrations, as always just. Althoughhe provided many significant biographical details along with a valuable (ifnot wholly reliable) chronology,An Appeal to Honour and Justice is a documentthat the biographer must approach with considerable skepticism.

Of course there are various other sources that are useful. In his manypamphlets and in his journal, the Review, Defoe spoke of his life and attitudesmore than most contemporary journalists, and the letters that he wrote toRobert Harley and others provide extensive clues to his feelings andemotions. Unfortunately they are clues rather than evidence because almostall of these letters were written with particular goals. With Harley he wasplaying the role of the ingenious and trusted adviser and sometimes thatof the petitioner whose hard work for the government was beingneglected. With William Penn, to whom he wrote for help in getting outof jail, he struck a note of openness and personal honesty. With variousmembers of the Whig nobility, he was usually the humble worker in a goodcause. He wrote a series of letters to his daughter Sophia and to hisson-in-law, Henry Baker, that express his feelings in what appear to begenuinely confessional terms. But these were written at the end of his lifeand tell us little about the energetic controversialist and writer of fictionwho continues to interest us today.

The clues to Defoe’s character provided by these letters, then, areprovisional. Nevertheless they are extremely useful, and they were notavailable to Defoe’s earliest biographers. Instead it was this oneautobiographical pamphlet – An Appeal to Honour – that tended to shape the

1220 . Defoe as a Biographical Subject


view of Defoe for biographers during the eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury, and for the most part, it was a complete whitewash of his life as atradesman, a writer, and an agent for the government. The times had changedbut not Daniel Defoe. He had always been steadfast in his principles, alwaysright when others were wrong. It is no wonder that his early biographersviewed him as a martyr for the great liberal ideals of freedom of the press,political liberty, and religious tolerance. After all, at the end of 1702, he hadbeen placed in the pillory by the government for an ironic depiction of aHigh Tory clergyman in his pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.In his Hymn to the Pillory, written for his appearances in the pillory, he posedas the innocent victim of powerful forces who were able to maneuver thelaw to tyrannize over the citizenry.8

The first attempt at a real biography was that written by Robert Shielsfor Theophilus Cibber’s Lives of the Poets (1755). Twenty-four years hadpassed since Defoe’s death and during that time any detailed knowledge ofDefoe’s controversial career had vanished. In piecing together what fewfacts he had, Shiels accepted Defoe’s version of his life. In addition to beingthe great author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was now a man of unimpeachableprinciple who had spent his life as a defender of liberty and toleration.At the end, Shiels attempted a brief bibliography of a few of Defoe’swritings. This bibliography had a number of errors, but it revealed thatDefoe had written other works aside from Robinson Crusoe. Some form ofShiel’s life was often used as a preface to editions of Robinson Crusoe andthrough that his views of Defoe achieved considerable popularity.

Between Shiel’s brief biography and the first independently publishedbiography by George Chalmers in 1785 (2nd ed. 1790), the reputation ofRobinson Crusoe had grown. Defoe was now firmly associated with thatwork, and as the worship of the artistic genius was gradually taking shapeas a significant esthetic principle, there was some demand for furtherknowledge of his life and career. Chalmers was a Whig, and he saw in Defoea kindred spirit. Defoe’s True-Born Englishman, which had been enormouslypopular during the eighteenth century as a statement of Whig principles,now seemed to reveal an important side of Defoe’s character. And, as wehave seen, his having been pilloried for attacking religious prejudice in TheShortest Way with the Dissenters seemed to create a narrative of Defoe as amartyr for liberty. Chalmers presented his character in this light, whilefinding out few facts about his life. The expanded biography in the 1790edition now linked him to a considerable body of writings. He was no longerthe obscure author of a single masterpiece and a few other pieces, but aprolific writer waiting to be discovered. Perhaps because it suited thecontemporary image of the neglected writer of genius, Chalmers felt impelledto tell the story of how Defoe could not get Robinson Crusoe published, untilTaylor agreed to accept it, a hardly likely scenario considering both Defoe’sobvious popularity with contemporary readers and (unknown to Chalmers)his previous publication with Taylor.



In 1809, the Ballantyne edition of Defoe’s works appeared, accompaniedwith a life by John Ballantyne, completed with some critical remarks by SirWalter Scott in the following year. Scott put in place the image of Defoeas the master realist, but Ballantyne added few details to Defoe’s life.It was Walter Wilson, a writer on English Nonconformity, who wrote thefirst extensive work on Defoe and his times in three substantial volumes(1830). There was considerable filler in this attempt to provide an extensivehistorical background to the period, but essentially Wilson saw Defoe as thegreat defender of the English Dissenters and presented his life in heroiccolors. He expanded the list of Defoe’s writings, including many with whichhe surely had no connection. Perhaps more important was his invitation toCharles Lamb to write a critique of Defoe’s realist fictions: Moll Flanders,Roxana, and Colonel Jack. Even for Scott these works were a “coarse speciesof amusement” and inappropriate in their subject matter for genteel taste.9

But Lamb found in them the kind of “truth” that belonged uniquely toDefoe. He admitted that these tales of thieves and harlots were not fit forgood company, but then noted,“what pirates, what thieves, and what harlotsis the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of Defoe.” Lamb’s criticism gave an artisticturn to Defoe as the writer who defied convention for the sake of a nobleartistic liberty: that of the writer of fictions whose fidelity to the real washeroic.10

When Chadwick’s biography of Defoe appeared in 1859, it was after thepublication of the 20-volume edition of Thomas Tegg (1840 –1841) andthe three-volume edition of Defoe by William Hazlitt (1840–1843), editionsthat included a number of nonfictional works. Defoe was now establishedas an important British author. Chadwick saw Defoe as the writer whoforesaw Britain’s rise to economic preeminence in the world, and he hailedhim as the prophet of free trade. He more or less accepted Chalmer’s andWilson’s view of Defoe’s politics but was mainly interested in him as a writeron economics. For Chadwick, Defoe’s greatest work was The CompleatEnglish Tradesman (1726–1727). More than in Robinson Crusoe, in that work,Chadwick thought, readers could see the true English spirit of enterprise.

Thus when Lee brought out his biography in 1869, accompanied by twovolumes of Defoe’s journalism, he approached Defoe as an established figure.Lee was far more efficient in gathering facts about Defoe’s life than earlierbiographers, and he discovered the letters to the government official, Charlesde la Faye, in which Defoe confessed his role as a writer hired by the Whiggovernment to vitiate the journalism of the opposition press. For Lee, thisonly added to Defoe’s heroic stature. To Lee’s mind, Defoe was willing tosacrifice himself for the good of the nation. As for Defoe’s work for theTory government of the Earl of Oxford, Robert Harley, Lee believed thatonce more Defoe was actually working for the good of the nation in refusingto follow the main body of the Whigs into opposition. Lee remained a truebeliever, but he had discovered the new materials that could undermineDefoe’s reputation as a man of staunch principles.



William Minto’s study of Defoe in the Men of Letters (1879) series wasthe first effort at undoing the view of Defoe that had prevailed for over acentury. It was the age of debunking biographies, and Minto saw in Defoe’sdefense of his principles, evidence of a person who lied to his readers withoutshame. Perhaps influenced by Leslie Stephen’s criticism of Defoe’s fictionsas a bag of tricks to create a sense of reality, Minto seemed to believe thatcharlatanism was an essential part of Defoe’s character. Even before thebiography, in A Manual of English Prose Literature (1872), he had written thatDefoe was “a most consummate dissembler; his easy success in playing thehypocrite gave him the fullest confidence, and his daring effrontery wellentitled him to Pope’s epithet – ‘unabashed Defoe’. . . . He was one of themost audaciously shifty and supple of men.”11 Seven years later, in hisbiography, he made Defoe into a master liar and deceiver:“He was a great,a truly great liar, perhaps the greatest liar that ever lived.”12 Minto putssome of the blame on the low moral climate among contemporary politi-cians. He sees a glimmer of conscience in Defoe and admires the causes forwhich he fought, but sees in him “a wonderful mixture of knave andpatriot.”13

This was followed by Thomas Wright’s biography in 1894, a work whichexpanded Defoe’s life by bringing in the saga of Henry Baker’s courtship ofDefoe’s daughter, Sophia, and Defoe’s attempt to stint on Sophia’s dowry.14

In utilizing this very human drama at the end of Defoe’s life, alongwith the letters between Defoe and Sophia, he was able to give a veryhuman dimension to Defoe’s family. But he unfortunately took a hint fromChadwick’s work and argued that Defoe was a writer of allegories and that,like a character in Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe did not speakwith his family for 30 years. In this scheme of things, Friday had to have areal existence as one of Defoe’s helpers in the political wars during the reignof Queen Anne. This bizarre allegorical interpretation made Defoe intosomething of an amiable wacko and detracted somewhat from the interestingmaterial about Defoe in a family setting.

At almost the same time that Wright was publishing his interpretation ofDefoe’s life,William Peterfield Trent, of Columbia University, was workingon his own biography of Defoe. The full work never appeared in print,15

but in 1916, he did issue a biographical reading of Defoe through his works,Daniel Defoe: How to Know Him. Trent tended to view Defoe as a pragmatist,a figure who found himself engaged in a life dedicated to writing almost byaccident and decided he would make a living at it, whatever the prevailingpolitical winds might be. In keeping with the times, Trent was interestedin the complexities of Defoe’s character, finding him neither the saint ofthe early hagiographies nor the “liar” that Minto had seen. Trent had vastlyexpanded Defoe’s body of works in a series of articles in The Nation (1907),and found no difficulty seeing Defoe as someone who, under the guise ofvarious pseudonyms, might write on any side. He created a Defoe who wascertainly ingenious but essentially unprincipled.



It was decades before the next biography of Defoe by James Sutherlandin 1937. Sutherland was the first biographer to look at the many law caseswith which he was involved from the 1680s until his death in 1731.Sutherland clearly admired Defoe as a writer, and he also admired Defoe’sresourcefulness as a human being. This was a book written during aworldwide depression, when almost everyone was suffering. The image ofDefoe as someone refusing to give in to difficulties, always battling to stayafloat, was presented as something admirable. Sutherland was skeptical aboutDefoe’s innocence in the many apparently shady dealings that ended up incourt. He thought Defoe might have cheated his own mother-in-law in hisdealing with the civet cats that he was raising for producing perfume. ButSutherland was reluctant to pass judgment on this aspect of Defoe’s life. Heunderstood Defoe’s desperation, and he had a unique insight into theparticular religious sensibility of the young Defoe. On the other hand, hefound Defoe’s protestations of religious righteousness difficult to accept andgave short shrift to those works treating religious subjects. He devoted onlya single paragraph to The Political History of the Devil and other works of asimilar nature as an attempt to make money on the always-popular subjectof the occult. In so doing he neglected a major part of Defoe’s interests.Nevertheless, this was an extremely readable and thoroughly researchedbiography.

The next major scholarly biography was Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the ModernWorld by John Robert Moore in 1958. Moore’s is not so much a biographyas a study of various aspects of Defoe’s life with separate sections onjournalism, political activities, and fiction. Despite its valuable details, Moorenever succeeds in uniting the various Defoes he presents into a singlebelievable character. Defoe is shown doing this and that, but aside fromDefoe’s enormous energy, an aspect of Defoe that Moore captures verywell, Moore did not give us a clear sense of the motivation for Defoe’sactions – why Defoe did what he did. In addition, Moore serves as anapologist and a cheerleader for Defoe. He explains Defoe’s writing for Mistin the service of the government as someone doing his duty like a good boyscout following a code of honor. Whatever he was, Defoe was no boy scout.

Three less scholarly but nevertheless interesting biographies came outbetween 1955 and 1972 that deserve mention: William Freeman’s TheIncredible Defoe (1950), Brian Fitzgerald’s Daniel Defoe: A Study in Conflict(1958) and Alick West’s The Mountain in the Sunlight (1958). None of theseworks pretended to bring new documentary information to the study ofDefoe’s life, but they did provide distinct angles of vision. Freeman wasinterested in Defoe’s journalism and tried to show why he was so good athis craft. In Freeman’s view, Defoe’s strength lay in his combination ofconcrete facts and a rich imagination that made every page come alive. BothFitzgerald and West attempt to read Defoe against the conflicts of the age.Fitzgerald views the novels coming out of these political and socialdivisions. West, more doctrinaire in his Marxist approach, manages to create



a Defoe who was a radical in his youth but who sold out to bourgeois idealsas he became older. There is certainly some truth in this reading, and it isuseful to have this viewpoint laid out with so much insight.

In 1981, Frank Bastian published Defoe’s Early Life. In so far as this workis based on a number of works that he claimed to be by Defoe but were ofdoubtful authenticity, it must be approached with care. Bastian allows himselfto speculate on Defoe’s activities based on a rich knowledge of Defoe’s Tour(1724–1727). This makes of Defoe a far more adventurous figure than anycharacterization in previous biographies, having him involved in the fisheriesin the northern tip of Scotland, traveling widely on the continent, andperhaps taking voyages to strange places. It would be easy enough to arguethat Bastian takes too many chances and that it is too speculative. He ascribes29 new works to Defoe and uses them as crucial parts of the biography, thekind of practice that would have been considered methodologically unsoundin any class devoted to the teaching of scholarly methods. Nevertheless, thechapters on Defoe’s connections with the Marsh and Lodowick families andon Defoe’s education in Dorking are rich in knowledge and suggestiveness.

Paula Backscheider brought out her biography of Defoe in 1989, awonderfully researched work with a great deal of new material, the resultof hard and ingenious work in the Public Records Office. If some of thenew materials were small tags on the many already known law cases in whichDefoe was embroiled, it was nevertheless valuable to have them cataloged.And the material on Scotland brought a new dimension to Defoe’s work asan English spy to forward the Union between England and Scotland.Occasionally, as with the reliance on a doubtful source for Defoe’s stay inBristol, she is led astray, but this is a rich biography of Defoe’s career. Mymajor objection to it lay in the lack of character analysis. She ended up witha Defoe who loved to spend his time in coffee houses and taverns,exchanging ideas, and swapping stories with his large body of acquaintances.If this more open Defoe was a welcome addition, it seemed to create a lesscomplex figure than appeared in say, Alick West’s concept of Defoe as aperson shaped by political and economic forces at work in the age.

John Richetti’s recent “critical biography” is a brilliant critical reading ofDefoe’s writings, but as he remarks at the beginning, he avoids any effort“to construct a coherent interior life or confident psychological profile ofDaniel Defoe, nor will biographical speculation accompany my treatmentof Defoe’s writings in any exact way that might claim simple relationshipsbetween life events and writing . . .”16 Richetti reads Defoe through histexts and through the various personas he created throughout his life. Thushe finds a kind of brashness in the Defoe of The True-Born Englishman andthe Review, a feeling that, as an author, Defoe was always putting himselfforward in the way that Norman Mailer attempted in his Advertisements forMyself (1969). But was not Defoe trying to write as the new man createdby the Glorious Revolution, dependent on his own talents and sassy (Richettiuses the word,“sour”) toward the nobility and the clergy of the Church of



England? If a persona may be seen as part of the personality, as Richettiargues, should we not read the speaker of The Shortest Way with the Dissentersas an example of Defoe venting deeply held resentments against his fellowDissenters and view the work as a form of Defoe’s aggressive assertiveness?Richetti does not propose this, but it suggests the danger of approachingDefoe through his varied personas. Richetti is a wonderful reader of Defoe’sprose and poetry, perhaps the first critic to suggest that even Defoe’s lengthyepic satire, Jure Divino, contains excellent passages of poetry. In his insightfuland ample criticism of Defoe’s fiction, there is almost no biographical materialat all. Some of his biographical comments are extremely suggestive, but thisbook is essentially a critical study with a loose biographical framework.

In writing my own biography, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, I wantedmost of all to create a coherent personality. My discovery of the manuscriptof his youthful collection of short fictions, “Historical Collections,” at theWilliam Andrews Clark Memorial Library provided me with an opportunityto understand his early attitudes and reading. What, for example, was oneto make of his interest in heroes such as Alexander the Great? What of thosewho, coming from the lower ranks claimed gentility or nobility by somesingle, virtuous act? What of his fascination for stories about overcomingadversity? In shaping the vision of his character, I took as my model JamesBoswell’s attempt to keep Samuel Johnson in character throughout his Life,as if he were a figure in a successful novel.17 If I felt that I had failed to makeDefoe into a complex but believable character, I might have given up thetask. At the same time, I wished to show how Defoe changed and bent withthe political winds. And above all, I wanted to sustain the notion that, forthe modern reader, his importance lay in his writings and particularly in hisfictions.

As in the quote from Dubin’s Lives at the head of this paper, I do notbelieve that it is possible to recreate the past with absolute accuracy. As theanthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued, all historical accounts have tobe shaped in one direction or another, have to be “history-for” one particularpurpose or another, or else plunge into “chaos.”18 Within those limitations,I tried to be as accurate as possible and thought it my job to read all thecontemporary newspapers, pamphlets, and sermons that might give me asfull an idea of Defoe’s time as possible. What follows the quotation fromMalamud’s novel (and a passage used by John Richetti in a previous article)is the thought that “All biography is fiction.” I do not believe that. ThoughI shaped, selected, and emphasized particular facts and events to create myvision of Defoe’s character, though I often speculated on what Defoe mighthave thought about various matters, I invented nothing.

In remarking on my biography, Professor Richetti evokes MichelFoucault’s “What Is an Author,” to argue that, with Defoe, it might bebetter to speak of the “author function” rather than search for his character,but as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, biography can sometimessolve difficulties where there are conflicting critical views about the



text. Although I am fully sympathetic to arguments about the author andhis text being deeply intertwined with social milieu and can see someadvantage in regarding literary works as anonymous discourses, I firmlybelieve, with the writers on hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadammer, E. D.Hirsch), that biography can add to our understanding of both the authorand his texts.19 As my teacher, Ralph Cohen, once remarked in a seminar,to pretend to exclude such knowledge has a degree of critical naiveté.Foucault instanced the writings of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka as examplesof works that have “the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer,” yet allthree writers have been part of a major biographical industry.20 And fromthe standpoint of biographical information, we know more about Defoethan almost any seventeenth-century literary figure with the exception ofSamuel Pepys. We know almost nothing of John Dryden’s or WilliamCongreve’s family life or inner life. Biographies of Defoe are hardly differentin kind from other biographies.21

I thought that as a biographer I had to create a comprehensible andcoherent vision of the past, and I believe I benefited, to some extent, byhaving lived through the Great Depression (and the radical interpretationplaced by many on the social programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s NewDeal) into a period in which there appeared to be a return to some of theideas that had governed the United States at the end of the nineteenthcentury, especially Social Darwinism, a contempt for the poor and powerless,and all controls taken off capital exploitation. Defoe had experienced similarideological change. He had grown up with some of the radical ideas thrownabout among the sects and the army during the Interregnum. The GloriousRevolution of 1688 appeared to be a fulfillment of some of these ideas, andhe committed himself to them so fully that he did not apprehend the gradualmove toward more conservative attitudes in politics and social attitudes. Hisegalitarian statements about the monarchy shocked those who attended thetrial of the High Churchman Henry Sacheverell in 1710, and his ironicattack on the Jacobites in three pamphlets of 1713, showed how incapablehe was of understanding the limits of free speech in a system that stillremained authoritarian.

The events of 1714 and 1715 – Britain threatened with the possibility ofa Jacobite government, the arrival of George I, the rebellion in Scotland,and Defoe himself faced with jail once more – finally taught him to settlefor less than the ideal and to see the wisdom of a slight degree ofdiscretion. To some extent, then, his special pleading in his autobiographyof 1715, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, that it was the age that had changedand not he, had a grain of historical truth. But he had changed as well, froma puritanical prig to a political idealist and activist, and then to someonewilling to keep a low profile and literally tend his garden in StokeNewington. No longer manning the political barricades, he began to lookwithin and to write the great fictions – Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, AJournal of the Plague Year and Roxana – and the lengthy works of observation



on contemporary life – A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, ThePolitical History of the Devil, and Conjugal Lewdness – among the many thatare still worth reading.

In searching for the core of Defoe’s character for my biography, I foundhim capable of being extremely devious but also an ingeniousconversationalist and a person capable of winning a wide range of friends.Political judgments, filtered through the attitudes of contemporaries haveoften colored our view of him. Scriblerians, such as Swift and Pope, hatedhim. Whigs, such as Oldmixon, despised him. Charles Gildon, envious ofthe success of Robinson Crusoe, tried to denigrate him. But even whilesuggesting that he was inspired by Satan, most contemporaries admiredhis ingenuity, wit, and originality. The fame he gained over the centuriesthrough Robinson Crusoe, was a fortunate turn, but oddly enough, it retrievedhis contemporary fame and pointed us to his many achievements. I tried inmy biography to show him for the brilliant writer that he was.

What then of Johnson’s advice about capturing the private life and thesmall gestures that inform us about the inner man? Johnson was right to adegree. I have to admit that I was thrilled when I discovered a pamphletdepicting Defoe holding forth at Sue’s Coffee House in a blue cloak andgesturing with a finger that had a diamond ring.22

It suggested a kind of pride in his ideas and an annoying self-assurance ofwhich some of his critics complained. It also showed his ability to commandan audience. But as I mentioned previously, in looking for keys to hischaracter, I found “Historical Collections” (1682), a manuscript I discoveredat the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, more useful. This was avery young Defoe trying to impress the woman he was going to marry. Heput down the brief fictions that were intended to reveal what he was liketo his future wife by showing the kind of reading that had impressed him.It showed a person who was ambitious and who admired heroism and aspiredto it. It also showed that at this age, he was bigoted about Jews and overlyconfident in his ability to live a moral, religious life. Along with the personalpoems he wrote at the same time, his Meditations, it demonstrated his senseof himself as a sinner and his deep Christian beliefs. There was much thatmight be inferred from this document. Mainly it revealed a great deal abouthis self-image and suggested something about the directions of his futureself-fashioning.

As I mentioned above, the closest we get to an inner life are his last letters.But these letters are filled with self-pity. He was on the run from his creditor,living away from his home, and fearing capture. He was also in pain fromhis arthritis. There is nothing in these letters of the defiant author whobraved the pillory after mocking the attempts of the High Church to forcesome kind of conversion on the Dissenters. He was still refusing to yield tohis enemies or at least to the particular enemy who was attempting to collectsome doubtful debts, but he was weak and tired. It would be possible toconstruct a biography of Defoe from these letters. In this model, he would



be a loving father to his daughter, Sophia, and disappointed by the behaviorof his sons.

It might be possible to extrapolate from this material to the character ofa kindly family man, but we know that he had almost driven his daughtermad by attempting to withhold a marriage settlement from his futureson-in-law, Henry Baker. These letters show Defoe in a time of physicaland psychological exhaustion. He was in pain and no longer able towrite. Their importance is undeniable, but just as the priggish young manof “Historical Collections” would have to abandon some of his ideals beforebecoming the writer we admire, so this image of Defoe’s self-pity in oldage is a far cry from the street fighter who braved punishment numeroustimes to assert his ideas or the “imaginist” who dreamed of desert islandsand piracy. They come closest to revealing what Johnson considered mostimportant for any biography, but it would be a mistake to locate the characterof Moll Flander’s author here. We are better off reading his character bytrying to see behind the many masks he created in his writings.

As mentioned earlier, in his essay on writing a biography of Defoe, JohnRichetti quoted the continuation of the statement from Bernard Malamud’sDubin’s Lives with which I began this essay. Having lamented the inabilityof the biographer to recreate the past from “time’s mud,” he concludes that“all biography is ultimately fiction.” Yet the larger meaning within the novelis that the idea of a settled personality is also a fiction. It was a lesson thatthe Existentialists brought us in the middle of the twentieth century,exemplified by Jean Paul Sartre’s Roquentin in La Nausée. Like almost allof Malamud’s characters, Dubin is searching for a “new life,” and writingbiography – encountering a life that might be viewed from beginning toend – helps him to understand his inner self.

As a character, Defoe was very much in flux. The quixotic underpinningsthat caused him to abandon his family and his business ventures to fight withMonmouth in 1685 might have been read through the heroic spirit thatemerges in his “Historical Collections” of 1682. He was accompanying KingWilliam in a city regiment a few years later, but his first bankruptcy alongwith some of the questionable actions he took to save his investments musthave demolished the core of certainty about his beliefs that he had shownin 1682. The personality that emerges in his Essay upon Projects (1697) is thatof the new man of the 1690s, believing in the progress of institutions andsociety, but also someone making allowance for financial missteps and humanfrailty.

The enormous success of his True-Born Englishman (1701) seemed toestablish him as the most powerful propagandist for the reign of William IIIin England. Defoe claimed that William was so pleased by it that he wastaken into the confidence of the King and probably given the task ofestablishing a system of intelligence throughout England.23 At a time whenwit was prized above all other qualities, he was thought to be among thewittiest men in England. He weighed in on almost every issue, giving



opinions on the need for a standing army, the coming war with France, thesuccession to the crown, the true basis of government, and what he calledthe “Villainy of Stock-Jobbers.”With his poems on Reformation of Manners,he wrote with the sense that he could sway opinion and improve thebehavior of society.And to make matters even better, he was being rewardedfinancially for his efforts. Apart from the success of his writings, his factoryat Tillbury where he manufactured bricks and pantiles seemed to beflourishing.

He thought of himself as a gentleman, but his treatment by thegovernment after the publication of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters atthe end of 1702, should have showed him how little the power structure,both Queen and Parliament, considered his status as a writer and successfulmanufacturer important. He may have turned the experience ofimprisonment and the pillory into a triumph with his Hymn to the Pillory(1703) and the efforts of his friends, but it was still a humiliation. His defiantclaim that those punishing him for imaginary crimes were the real criminalsmay resonate through time but so did Pope’s image of an earless Defoestanding in the pillory in The Dunciad. For Pope, the humiliation appearedto say everything that needed to be said about Defoe as a man and as a writer.

His second bankruptcy that resulted from those events left him financiallyruined, but while he was in prison, he imagined the publication of whatwould become the Review, a journal that ran for nearly a decade.And withthat journal came a renewed career as a writer and an activist. Who canimagine that anyone would have been interested in a biography of DanielDefoe had he simply remained a successful brick manufacturer? WilliamTrent believed that Defoe fell into his career as a writer more or lessaccidentally, but that he seemed to court trouble with his writings.Manufacturing bricks taught him something of use for Crusoe’s attempts atbaking Clay pots, but that was clearly not where his real interests lay. Hiswork for Harley and Godolphin as a spy and an author in England had tohave taken up a vast amount of his time and labor. Significantly enough,his visit to Scotland and the vast amount of energy he put into trying tobring about the Union was accompanied with a new status. In Edinburgh,with its strong Presbyterian base, he was no longer a Dissenter. He waswined and dined by the Scottish nobility, and they asked his advice aboutthe running of their farmland. If the pillory had diminished his sense ofself-importance, his activities in Scotland had to have buoyed his self-esteem.And it did not hurt that the government was paying him 400 pounds a yearfor his activities.

When he decided to support Harley and the Tories in 1710, many of hisreaders were shocked, and being drawn into writing Tory propaganda hadto have stretched his own sense of his integrity. These last four years of thereign of Queen Anne had to have taken a terrible toll on him. He wasarrested again in 1713 after writing three ironic pamphlets on the possibilityof a return of the family of James to the throne. The instigators of the action



were the Whigs, but he had to have had a difficult time explaining his actionsto his employers who interceded in the judicial process to rescuehim. Toward the end, he had to be facing the terrible possibility that Annemight agree to bring an exiled Stuart to the throne. The Dissenters werealready being punished by the Schism Act, and the treatment of the Scotsand Scotland appeared to violate part of the Union agreement that he helddear. Anne’s death and the coming of George I to the throne rescued himfrom a dilemma. Would he have been willing to sell his services to theJacobites? Probably not, but the times were stretching his political allegiancesto the limit.

In 1715, on the outs with the new Whig government, and in jail, Defoefaced the possibility of a severe punishment. His employment by thatgovernment to work for and spy upon the opposition had to place enormouspressure on Defoe. People wondered why he was writing as a defender ofthe Church of England in his Mercurius Politicus. He seemed at times to becontrolling the entire journalistic establishment. In 1718, he was revealedas the chief journalist for the Jacobite, Nathaniel Mist, the publisher of whatwas known as Mist’s Weekly Journal. No one could understand what he wasdoing. Many thought he had become a Jacobite, although at approximatelythe same time he was also secretly working for Whig newspapers.

The picture of Defoe at home, which we get from Henry Baker, is thatof an old man, suffering from various ills. He lived in a largish house inStoke Newington with his wife and daughters. There was a garden, andwhen he had not withdrawn to his study to write, Defoe apparently gavesome time to gardening as a leisurely occupation. He was still engaged inwriting pamphlets and essays for the newspapers, still very much involvedwith political and social problems, but it is likely that he was enjoyingsomething equivalent to family life.

On occasions, we can imagine him in his house with his wife and childrensinging songs and playing the theorbo lute.24 We know that the deaths ofhis father and his daughter saddened him. Any life of Defoe would beincomplete without imagining such moments. But he was deeply involved,both personally and as a writer, with the political and social events of histime. Such encounters were the materials from which he was to constructthe books that continue to interest us. Johnson was right to some extent. Ifwe could find the letters that he wrote home to his wife when he was onhis trips, we would know much more about him, about his private feelingsand emotions. Yet I do not accept the idea that we do not have an excellentgrasp of his character.25 He lived his life in the world fighting for the causesin which he believed. To trace his career in terms of his writings and thepolitics of his time tells us the most important things about him. We do nothave much information about his daily relations with his wife beyondknowing that he sometimes trusted her to pick up his payments from thegovernment, but we do know that in The Farther Adventures of RobinsonCrusoe, he seems to idealize the relationships between Crusoe and his wife



and between the husbands and their native wives who are settlers on hisisland. Some biographers might find this far less important. But I want toknow what goes into an author’s writing. I tried to show the biographicaland intellectual matters that led Defoe to emerge as a writer of fiction. Totry to rescue that from what Malamud called “time’s mud,” was enough for me.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles,149 Humanities Building, Box 951530, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1530, USA. Email:[email protected] Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 8.2 See especially Starr and Hunter.3 See Van Ghent 33–43. Some of the confusion arose from the high value place on irony amongthe New Critics. Before being willing to identify a work as ironic, they wanted the irony to besystematic and continuous.4 For the fullest treatment of Defoe as a “Puritan,” see Rudolph Stamm.5 Novak,“Conscious Irony in Moll Flanders,” 198–204.6 Defoe, The Justice and Necessity of a War with Holland. Professor Bernard Goldgar asked me thequestion.7 For one of many works expressing contempt for everything about the Dutch, see Dryden’s play,Amboyna (1673).8 One of the inspirations for this stance had to be George Wither (1588–1667), who was frequentlyimprisoned for offending the authorities. Defoe quoted and praised Wither in his Serious Reflectionsof Robinson Crusoe.9 Scott 166–7.10 Wilson, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe, 3 vols. 3:638.11 Minto, A Manual of Prose Literature 350.12 Minto, Daniel Defoe 169.13 Minto, Daniel Defoe 171.14 Minto had previously treated Defoe’s relationship with Baker in a few pages as had Lee, whowas reluctant to picture Defoe as an old man fleeing from his creditors.15 The manuscript is part of the Trent Collection at the Beinecke Library of Yale University.16 Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe viii.17 Donald Greene (who raged against Boswell’s Life of Johnson as a terrible biography) and I had afriendly disagreement on this matter. I published my argument in The Biographer’s Art 31–54,a volume to which Donald Greene also contributed. Professor Greene suggested that we havea written debate on this subject. Although I regret it now, I declined the invitation.18 Lévi-Strauss 257.19 It has often been remarked that Defoe had the ability to create strong characters, who, speakingin their own voice, seem to obliterate the presence of the author. Charles Lamb praised Defoefor this, but he also acknowledged that all of Defoe’s fictions revealed the stamp of Defoe’spersonality. In my biography, I deliberately avoided general critical discussions of Defoe’s majorfictional creations and limited myself to treating only those elements in them connected to Defoe’slife and other writings. See Wilson, 3:428, 637.20 Foucault 102.21 John Richetti quotes approvingly P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens as saying about Defoe, thathe “courts exposure and yet hides his personality, so that we get no such feeling of him as a personas we do with Swift and Pope.” Certainly we have many more letters from Swift and Pope thanwe have from Defoe and many more biographical facts, yet I am not certain that we know themany better. Attempting to read Swift’s intentions into either A Tale of a Tub or Gulliver’s Travelshas always proved to be difficult. Although there is no denying the brilliance of Irvin Ehrenpreis’sbiography of Swift, it is equally true that his attempts to read Swift’s intentions into the complicatedpassages of his writings constitute the weakest part of that work.And the relatively recent discoveryof Pope’s Jacobite sympathies suggests how little we knew and continue to know about his beliefs.



22 Novak,“A Whiff of Scandal in the Life of Daniel Defoe,” 35–42.23 Some of Defoe’s claims to having a close relationship with William III have met with skepticismrecently, but it seems clear that those examining him after his arrest for publishing The ShortestWay with the Dissenters thought that Defoe had connections with political figures during the reignof William III. And Harley seemed to respect Defoe’s understanding of politics. Defoe’s list ofcorrespondents (April 1706) throughout the nation, who would handle his two publications, readslike a system of intelligence that needed some time before it could be established. See Defoe,Letters 115–18. For the argument that Defoe was lying about his connections, see Furbank andOwens 227–32.24 See my note,“Crusoe and ‘The Country Life,’ Defoe and Music,” 40–2.25 See, for example, the review of my biography by Alkon 198 –213. Alkon argues that Defoe’sfictions are “autonomous artefacts” (211).

Works CitedAlkon, Paul. “The Invisible Man Returns.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14 (2002), 198–213.Backscheider, Paula. Defoe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989.Bastian, Frank. Defoe’s Early Life. London: Macmillan, 1981.Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. 2 vols. London, 1791.Chalmers, George. The Life of Daniel De Foe. 1785. 2nd ed. London: John Stockdale, 1790.Defoe, Daniel. An Appeal to Honour and Justice.The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Writings of Daniel

Defoe, 14 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1927. 14: 189–238.——. The Compleat English Tradesman. 2 vols. London, 1726–27.——. Conjugal Lewdness. London, 1727.——. An Essay upon Projects. London, 1697.——. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1719.——. Historical Collections. Manuscript collection. Los Angeles: The William Andrews Clark

Memorial Library.——. The History and Remarkable Life of Col. Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col. Jack. London, 1722.——. A Hymn to the Pillory. London, 1703.——. A Journal of the Plague Year. London, 1722.——. Jure Divino. London, 1706.——. The Justice and Necessity of a War with Holland. London, 1712.——. Letters. Ed. George Healey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.——. The Meditations. Ed. George Healey. Cummington, MA: Cummington Press, 1946.——. Mercurius Politicus. May 1716–October 1720.——. Mist’sWeekly Journal. February? 1716–October 1724.——. The Political History of the Devil. London, 1726.——. Reformation of Manners. London, 1702.——. Review, 9 vols. in 22 vols. Ed.Arthur Secord, New York: Columbia UP, 1938.——. Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1720.——. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. London, 1702.——. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. 3 vols. London, 1724–27.——. The True-Born Englishman. London, 1700 [for 1701].Dryden, John. “Amboyna.” Works. Vol. 12. Ed. Vinton Dearing et al. 20 vols. Berkeley: U of

California P, 1952–2000. 1–77.Fitzgerald, Brian. Daniel Defoe: A Study in Conflict. London: Secker and Warburg, 1954.Freeman,William. The Incredible Defoe. London: Jenkins, 1950.Furbank, P. N., and W. R. Owens. “Defoe and King William: A Sceptical Enquiry.” Review of

English Studies 52 (2001): 227–32.Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York:

Pantheon Books, 1984. 101–20.Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht Strauss. The Yale Edition of

the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale UP, 1958. Vols. 3–5. 318–23.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962.Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam, 1959.



Malamud, Bernard. Dubin’s Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979.Minto, William. Daniel Defoe, in English Men of Letters [Series]. Ed. John Morley. London:

Macmillan, 1879.——. A Manual of Prose Literature. Boston: Ginn, 1901.Novak, Maximillian. “Boswell’s Life of Johnson.” The Biographer’s Art. Ed. Jeffrey Myers. London:

Macmillan, 1989. 31–52.——. “Conscious Irony in Moll Flanders.” College English 26 (1964): 198–204.——. “Crusoe and ‘The Country Life,’ Defoe and Music.” Notes and Queries 237 (1992): 40–2.——. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.——. “A Whiff of Scandal in the Life of Daniel Defoe.” Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1970):

35–42.Pope,Alexander. The Dunciad. Ed. James Sutherland, vol. 5 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems

of Alexander Pope. 11 vols. London: Methuen, 1940–1969.Richetti, John. The Life of Daniel Defoe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.——. “Writing about Defoe: What is a Critical Biography?” Literature Compass 3.2 (2006):

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.Scott, Sir Walter. On Novels and Fiction. Ed. Ioan Williams. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968.Shiels, Robert. “Daniel De Foe.” The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland. Ed.Theophilus

Cibber. 4 vols. London 4 (1753): 313–25.Stamm, Rudolph. Der Aufgeklärte Puritanismus Daniel Defoes. Swiss Studies in English 1. Zurich:

M. Niehau, 1936.Starr, G.A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.Sutherland, James. Daniel Defoe. London: Methuen, 1937.Trent,William Peterfield. [“Daniel Defoe”] Trent Collection. New Haven: Beinecke Library.Trent,William Peterfield. Daniel Defoe: How to Know Him. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1916.Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Holt, Reinhart and

Winston, 1953.Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California

P, 1957.Wilson,Walter. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Chance,

1830.West,Alick. The Mountain in the Sunlight. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1958.Wright,Thomas. The Life of Daniel Defoe. London: Cassell, 1894.



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Defoe as a Biographical Subject