Journalist spy who popularized the English novel form
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) survived plague, fire, pillory, and debtors' prison to write Robinson Crusoe—four editions before 1719 ended—and some 545 attributed titles. Merchant, secret agent, and Dissenter, he helped shape the novel alongside Behn and Richardson.
Born Daniel Foe, most likely in 1660 though guesses run from 1659 to 1662, he probably grew up on Fore Street in St Giles Cripplegate, London. He later added the grand-sounding De to his surname and sometimes falsely claimed kinship with a family named De Beau Faux. His father James was a prosperous tallow chandler; his mother Alice was dead by the time he was about ten. As a small boy he lived through the plague of 1665, which killed seventy thousand Londoners, the Great Fire the following year and the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667. His Presbyterian parents sent him, at around fourteen, to Charles Morton's dissenting academy at Newington Green.
As a merchant he dealt in hosiery, woollens and wine, bought a country estate, a ship and civet cats for making perfume, and was almost never out of debt. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley, who brought a £3,700 dowry; they stayed together 47 years and had eight children. He joined the doomed Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 but was pardoned, and later became a close ally and secret agent of William III. Arrested in 1692 over £700 owed, with total debts perhaps near £17,000, he was declared bankrupt. By 1695 he was collecting the tax on glass bottles, and in 1696 he ran a brick and tile works at Tilbury.
His December 1702 pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, a sly mock proposal to wipe out Nonconformists, brought a seditious libel conviction, three days in the pillory from 31 July 1703 and a stretch in Newgate. Robert Harley secured his release in return for spying for the Tories and paid off part of his debts. Within a week Defoe witnessed the Great Storm of November 1703, which killed more than 8,000 people, and his 1704 book The Storm, assembled from eyewitness reports, is often counted among the earliest modern journalism. His Review, backing Harley's ministry, came out three times a week until 1713.
In September 1706 Harley sent him to Edinburgh as an undercover agent to win Scots over to the Union. Trusted as a Presbyterian who had suffered for his faith, he advised Church of Scotland and parliamentary committees while fearing angry crowds. Some 545 titles are credited to him. Robinson Crusoe ran through four editions within 1719 and lent its name to a genre, the Robinsonade; Moll Flanders followed in 1722 and Roxana in 1724. He died on 24 April 1731 with little money, still entangled in lawsuits.
Source: Daniel Defoe
