1. Daniel Defoe’s biography:
Daniel Defoe was born in 1660, in London, and was originally christened
Daniel Foe, changing his name around the age of thirty-five to sound more
aristocratic. Like his character Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a third child. His mother
and father, James and Mary Foe, were Presbyterian dissenters. James Foe was a
middle-class wax and candle merchant. As a boy, Daniel witnessed two of the greatest
disasters of the seventeenth century: a recurrence of the plague and the Great Fire of
London in 1666. These events may have shaped his fascination with catastrophes and
survival in his writing. Defoe attended a respected school in Dorking, where he was
an excellent student, but as a Presbyterian, he was forbidden to attend Oxford or
Cambridge. He entered a dissenting institution called Morton’s Academy and
considered becoming a Presbyterian minister. Though he abandoned this plan, his
Protestant values endured throughout his life despite discrimination and persecution,
and these values are expressed in Robinson Crusoe
.
In 1683, Defoe became a
traveling hosiery salesman. Visiting Holland, France, and Spain on business, Defoe
developed a taste for travel that lasted throughout his life. His fiction reflects this
interest; his characters Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe both change their lives by
voyaging far from their native England.
Defoe became successful as a merchant, establishing his headquarters in a
high-class neighborhood of London. A year after starting up his business, he married
an heiress named Mary Tuffley, who brought him the sizeable fortune of 3,700
pounds as dowry. A fervent critic of King James II, Defoe became affiliated with the
supporters of the duke of Monmouth, who led a rebellion against the king in 1685
When the rebellion failed, Defoe was essentially forced out of England, and he spent
three years in Europe writing tracts against James II. When the king was deposed in
the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and replaced by William of Orange, Defoe was able
to return to England and to his business. Unfortunately, Defoe did not have the same
financial success as previously, and by 1692 he was bankrupt, having accumulated the
huge sum of 17,000 pounds in debts.. Though he eventually paid off most of the total,
he was never again entirely free from debt, and the theme of financial vicissitudes—
the wild ups and downs in one’s pocketbook—became a prominent theme in his later
novels Robinson Crusoe
contains many reflections about the value of money.
Around this time, Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking venture.One of
his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled “The True-Born Englishman,”
which became popular and earned Defoe some celebrity. He also wrote political
pamphlets. One of these, The Shortest Way with Dissenters
,
was a satire on
persecutors of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until they
realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result, Defoe was publicly
pilloried—his hands and wrists locked in a wooden device—in 1703, and jailed in
Newgate Prison. During this time his business failed. Released through the
intervention of Robert Harley, a Tory minister and Speaker of Parliament, Defoe
worked as a publicist, political journalist, and pamphleteer for Harley and other
politicians. He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and disguises, reflecting his
own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist, and prisoner. This theme of
changeable identity would later be expressed in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who
becomes merchant, slave, plantation owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing,
Defoe often used a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was
incredibly wide-ranging and productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books and
pamphlets during his life.Defoe has been called the father of modern journalism;
during his lifetime he was associated with 26 periodicals.