James Foe, the father of the author of Robinson Crusoe, was a butcher and a citizen of London. Of his mother nothing is known. Daniel was chiefly educated at a famous dissenting academy, Mr Morton’s of Stoke Newington, where many of the celebrated nonconformists of the time were brought up. It is noteworthy that one of his schoolfellows suggested the unusual name of Crusoe. In after life Defoe frequently asserted the sufficiency of his education and the excellence of the methods observed by his teacher. Judging from his writings his stock of general information must have been far larger than that of most regularly educated men of his day; but it is probable that his attainments were in no particular line very exquisite or profound. With very 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 IL, but there seems to be no publication of his which is certainly genuine before The Character of Dr Annesley, the family minister, published in 1697. He had, however, before this (if we may trust tradition) played an active part in public affairs. He had taken up arms in Monmouth’s expedition, and is supposed to have owed his lucky escape from the clutches of the king’s troopsand the law, into which not a few of his school-fellows fell, to the fact of his being a Londoner, and therefore a stranger in the west country. On January 26,1688, he was admitted a liveryman of the city of London, having claimed his freedom by birth. Since his western escapade he had taken to the business of wholesale hosiery. 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 at that place. His business operations at this period appear to have been extensive and various. He would seem both now and later to have been a sort of commission merchant, especially in Spanish and Portuguese goods, and at some time or other he visited Spain on business. Later we hear him spoken of as “a civet-cat merchant,” but as he can hardly have kept a menagerie of these animals it is odd that no one has supposed that the civet-cat was the sign of his place of business (it was a very usual one) rather than the staple of his trade. In 1692 his mercantile operations came to a disastrous close, and he failed for £17,000. By his own account the disaster would seem to have arisen from relying too much on credit. 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 managership and chief ownership of some tileworks at Tilbury, but here also he was unfortunate, and his imprisonment (of which more hereafter) in 1703 brought the works to a stand-still, and thereby lost him £3000 From this time forward we hear of no settled business in which he engaged. He evidently, however, continued to undertake commissions, and made his political visits to Scotland an occasion for opening connections of this kind with that country. In the last thirty years of his life business played but a subordinate part, though he seems to have derived more profit from it than from his earlier ventures. It was probably at the time of his troubles in 1692 that he had occasion to visit Bristol, where—according to a local tradition—he lay perdu for fear of bailiffs all the week, but emerged in gorgeous raiment on Sunday, whence he was known by the nickname of “the Sunday gentleman.”

It was not as a business man that Defoe was to make his mark, though his business experiences coloured to some extent the literary productions to which he owes his fame. The course of his life was determined about the middle of the reign of William III. by his introduction (we know not how) to William himself and to other influential persons. He frequently boasts of his personal intimacy with the “glorious and immortal” king (epithets, by the way, to the invention of which he has considerable claim), and in 1695 he was appointed accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, which office he held for four years. During this time he produced (January 1698) his Essay on Projects, one of the first and not the least noteworthy of his works. This essay contains suggestions on banks, road-management, friendly and insurance societies of various kinds, idiot asylums, bankruptcy, academies (in the French sense), 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. On the one hand he pointed out to the dissenters the scandalous inconsistency of their playing fast and loose with sacred things, and on the other he denounced the impropriety of requiring tests at all. In direct support of the Government he published, towards the close of the reign, a Defence of Standing Armies, against Trenchard, 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—the publication, indeed, as the author of which he became famous—was The True-Born Englishman, 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 famous Kentish petition, and was the author, and some say the presenter, of the equally famous 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 any great 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 most powerfully written tract entitled The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England examined and asserted. At the same time he was occupied in a controversy on the conformity question with the well-known John How (usually spelt Howe at present), and wrote several minor political tracts.

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 famous Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The traditional criticism of this remarkable pamphlet is a most curious example of the way in which thoroughly inappropriate descriptions of books pass from mouth to mouth. Every commentator (with the single exception of Mr Chadwick) has dilated upon its “exquisite irony.” Now, the fact of the matter is, that in The Shortest Way there is no irony at all, and, as Defoe’s adversaries acutely remarked, irony would never, have been pleaded had not the author got into trouble, when of course it suited him faire flèche de tout bois. The pamphlet is simply an exposition in the plainest and most forcible terms of the extreme “high-flying” position, and every line of it might have been endorsed, and was endorsed, by consistent high-churchmen. The author’s object clearly was by this naked presentation to awaken the dissenters to a sense of their danger, and to startle moderate churchmen by showing them to what end their favourite doctrines necessarily led. For neither of these purposes was irony necessary, and irony, we repeat, there is none. If any lingering doubt from the consensus of authority on the other side remain, let the student read The Shortest Way and then turn to Swift’s Modest Proposal or his Reasons against Abolishing the Church of England. He will soon see the difference. Ironical or not, however, it was unlikely that the high-churchmen and their leader Nottingham (the Don Disιrial of Swift) would let such a performance pass unnoticed. The author was soon discovered; and, as he absconded, an advertisement was issued offering a reward for his apprehension, and giving us 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. His sojourn in the pillory, however, was 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. He remained in prison until August 1704, and then owed his release to the intercession of 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 can be little doubt that, independently of gratitude, Harley’s moderation in a time of the extremes! party-insanity was no little recommendation to Defoe. During his imprisonment the latter 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 manÿ short pamphlets, chiefly controversial, published a curious work on the famous storm of November 26,1703, and started 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 threw his writing into the form of something very like finished essays on questions of policy, trade, and domestic concerns; while he also introduced a so-called “Scandal Club,” in which minor questions of manners and morals were treated in a way which undoubtedly suggested the Tatlers and Spectators which followed. It is probable that if the five points of bulk, rapidity of production, variety of matter, originality of design, and excellence of style are taken together, hardly any author can show a work of equal magnitude. It is unlucky that only one complete copy of the work is known to exist, and that is in a private library. After his release he went to Bury St Edmunds for change of air, 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, is for the time an extraordinarily far-sighted performance. It denounces on the one hand indiscriminate alms-giving, and on the other the folly of national work shops, the institution of which on a parochial system had been 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 Gulliver; and at the end of the year Defoe performed a secret mission (the first of several of the kind) for Harley.

Whsle on one of these in the west of England he was molested, though with no serious result, by the zealous country justices. In 1705 also appeared the famous Mrs Veal. As is well known, this admirable fiction is said to have been composed for a bookseller, to help off an unsaleable translation of Drdincourt on Death. Mr Lee, however, has thrown some doubts on this story. Defoe’s next considerable work was Jure Divino, a poetical argument in some 10,000 terribly bad verses; and soon afterwards (1706) he began to be largely 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 Godolphin, to whom Harley had recommended him. He resided in Edinburgh for nearly sixteen months, and his services to the Government were rewarded 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 latter year occurred the famous Sacheverel sermon, and Defoe wrote several tracts on the occasion. In 1710 Harley returned to power, and Defoe was placed in a somewhat awkward position. To Harley himself he was bound by gratitude and by a substantial agreement in principle, but with the rest of the Tory ministry he had no sympathy. He seems, in fact, to have agreed with the foreign policy of the Tories and with the home policy of the Whigs, and naturally incurred the reproach of time-serving and the hearty abuse of both parties. At the end of 1710 he again visited Scotland. In the negotiations concerning the Peace of Utrecht, Defoe strongly supported the ministerial side, to the intense wrath of the Whigs, and this wrath was displayed in an attempted prosecution against some pamphlets of his on the all-important question of the succession, but the influence of Harley saved him. He continued, however, to take the side of the dissenters in the questions affecting religious liberty, which played such a prominent part towards the close of Anne’s reign. He naturally shared Harley’s downfall; and, though the loss of his salary might seem a poor reward for his constant support of the Hanoverian claim, it was little more than his ambiguous, not to say trimming, position must have led him to expect. He was violently attacked on all sides, and at last published in 1715 an apologia entitled An Appeal to Honour and Justice, in which he defends his political conduct, and which furnishes us with the main authority for the details of his life. With this publication his political work was formerly supposed to have ended; but in 1864 six letters were discovered in the Record Office from Defoe to a Government official, Mr Delafaye, which established the fact that in 1718 at least Defoe was doing not only political work, but political w ork of a somewhat equivocal kind— that he was, in fact, sub-editing the Jacobite Mist's Journal, under a secret agreement with the Government that he should tone down the sentiments and omit objectionable items. He seems to have performed the same not very honourable office in the case of two other journals— Dormer’s Letter and the Mercurius Politicus ; and, if we may trust Mr Lee, he wrote in these and other papers till nearly the end of his life.

However this may be, the interest of Defoe’s life from this time forward is very far from political. He was now a man of fifty-five years of age; he had, up to this period, written nothing but what may be called occasional literature, and, except the History of the Union and Jure Divino, nothing of any great length. In 1715 appeared the first volume of The Family Instructor, which was subsequently continued, and which was very popular during the last century. Three years afterwards came forth the first volume of Robinson Crusoe. The first edition of this was published on the 25th of April 1719. It ran through four editions in as many months, and then in August appeared the second part Twelve months afterwards the third part, or Serious Reflections, appeared. This last part is now hardly ever reprinted. Its connection, indeed, with the two former is little more than nominal, Crusoe being simply made the mouth-piece of Defoe’s sentiments on various points of morals and religion. Meanwhile the first two parts were reprinted as a feuilleton in Heathcote's Intelligencer, perhaps the earlieδt instance of the appearance of such a work in such a form. Crusoe was immediately popular, and various wild stories were set afloat of its having been written by Lord Oxford in the Tower, and of its being simply a piratical utilization of Alexander Selkirk’s papers. It is sufficient to say that all such stories are not only intrinsically of the wildest improbability, but also possess not a tittle of evidence in their favour. A curious idea, recently revived by the late Mr H. Kingsley, is that the adventures of Robinson are allegorical and relate to Defoe’s own life. This idea was certainly entertained to some extent at the time, and derives some colour of justification from words of Defoe’s, but there seems to be no serious foundation for it. The book was almost immediately imitated; of such imitations Philip Quarll is the only one now known even by name. Contemporaneously with the later parts of Crusoe appeared The Dumb Philosopher, or Dickory Cronke. It is a short and rather duÛ book, of something the same type as the Serious Reflections.

In 1720 came forth The Life and A dventures of Mr Duncan Campbell. This, unlike the two former, was not entirely a work of imagination, inasmuch as its hero, the fortune-teller, was a real person. There are amusing passages in the story, but it is too desultory to rank with Defoe’s best. In the same prolific year appeared two wholly or partially fictitious histories, each of which might have made a reputation for any man. The first was the famous Memoirs of a Cavalier, which, as has been often repeated, Lord Chatham believed to be true history, and which Mr Lee believes to be the embodiment at least of authentic private memoirs. It is more probable, however, that Defoe, with his extensive acquaintance with recent English history, and his astonishing power of working up details, was fully equal to the task of its unassisted composition. As a model of historical work of a certain kind it is hardly...