Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731), the son of a Presbyterian London tallow-chandler,  became one of the most important journalists and writers of the early eighteenth century (he authored more than 300 works) and is generally recognized as the father of the modern British novel. For many years he attended the ministry of the Presbyterian Samuel Annesley (1620?-1696) in Bishopsgate Street and later in Spitalfields. Annesley was ejected in 1662 from his ministry at St Giles, Cripplegate, for his refusal to conform to the established church. His daughter, Susanna (1669-1742), was the mother of John and Charles Wesley. Defoe attended two academies conducted by Independent ministers: first as a young boy at James Fisher’s school in Dorking, and later at Charles Morton’s academy in Newington Green, where Defoe studied for the ministry, though he did not enter the profession.  Morton’s dissenting academy was considered the finest of his day, and he taught in English, leaving a lasting mark on Defoe and his future career as a writer. Defoe’s early life as a dissenter was marked by an eclectic spirit: he was raised a Presbyterian, trained by Independents, befriended the Quakers (most notably William Penn), and revered the works of John Bunyan, who has long been claimed by both the Independents and the Baptists. Defoe’s conduct books and fiction owe an obvious debt to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which provided Defoe with a valid defence as a nonconformist for the creation of allegorical and moral fiction. His writings, whether political, religious, or fictional, were consistently shaped by his adherence to a Whig culture and ideology that stressed individualism, equality, wealth, happiness, and religious and political freedom yet acknowledged at the same time the role of government in creating a society that would nourish and preserve these rights for all its citizens, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, what Leon Guilhamet terms Defoe’s ‘secularization of Puritan attitudes’ (Defoe and the Whig Novel, 15). These ideals were first embodied in his popular poem, The True-Born Englishman (1698), and his philosophical verse essay, Jure Divino (1706).

Defoe’s controversial career as a pamphleteer and journalist, however, began with his inflammatory expose An Inquiry into Occasional Conformity (1698), a practice he felt weakened the testimony of nonconformists, though many Churchmen and dissenters disagreed with his position. This was merely the first of many pamplets that would find Defoe defending what he believed was a central feature of nonconformity only to be attacked by foes and friends alike. This was most true of his controversial pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), written in the persona of a rabid High Churchman (patterned somewhat after the anti-nonconformist Anglican preacher Henry Sacheverell) who advocated the subjection and even abolition of dissenters. After his authorship of the pamphlet became known, Defoe was charged with sedition and eventually spent three days in the pillory in 1703. The following year Defoe commenced publication of The Review, which ran from February 1704 to June 1713, one of the most important contributions by a nonconformist to the early history of British journalism.

Defoe was also widely known among dissenters for his conduct books, most notably his two volumes of The Family Instructor (1715, 1718, which went through twenty editions by the end of the century), followed by Religious Courtship (1722), The Complete English Tradesman (1726), and Conjugal Lewdness (1727), all employing various narrative devices (primarily dialogues with carefully constructed character types) that Defoe would perfect in his novels. Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, the first of a series of novels exploiting travel and picaresque narrative forms that would propel Defoe into the first rank of British novelists (the novel would eventually become one of the most widely translated works in English history and has never been out of print). Crusoe and his island offered Defoe a laboratory in which he could work out many of his political and religious ideals, emphasizing in Crusoe’s instruction of Friday the supremacy of scripture, revelation, and the sovereignty of God, with occasional asides to such contemporary controversies among nonconformists as that which occurred at Salters’ Hall in 1719 concerning Arianism. Defoe’s other novels include Moll Flanders (1722), Col. Jack (1722), Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Roxana (1724).

For more on Defoe, particularly his religious beliefs and nonconformity, see James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe (1937; reprinted 1971); John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (1958); Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963); Peter Earle, The World of Defoe (1977); Robert James Merrett, Daniel Defoe’s Moral and Rhetorical Ideas (1980); Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989); and, more recently, Geoffrey Sill, ‘Three Protestant Dissenters: Defoe, Franklin, Whitman’, Modern Language Studies 28 (1998), 1-11; Ashley Marshall, ‘The Generic Context of Defoe’s The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters and the Problem of Irony’, Reveiew of English Studies, N.S. 61 (2009), 234-58; and Leon Guilhamet, Defoe and the Whig Novel (2010).