Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures.

Silver, Daniel J.

Boswell records that Samuel Johnson had read Daniel Defoe and "allowed a considerable share of merit to a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well." The comment points to a truth about Defoe: a Protestant through and through, he had an amazingly catholic mind. It is, indeed, hard to think of another writer of imaginative literature who, in his journalism and pamphleteering, took on such an extraordinary range of subjects: finance, trade, religion, politics, travel, medicine, science, architecture, farming, horticulture, morals, and manners, among others.

The British journalist Richard West aims to pay tribute to this range of interests in his entertaining and refreshing biography, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures.(1) For West, Defoe's story became compelling not because of a lingering childhood attachment to Robinson Crusoe, which he confesses to having first read at an advanced age--as was Defoe when he wrote it. Rather, as an enthusiastic traveler and an adept of travel writing, West was inspired and delighted by Defoe's Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. Researching the present book, West also discovered that all of Defoe's weekly journalism from the broadsheet Review, which he founded, has been preserved in facsimile. What West found there was a breadth of absorbing prose that makes the case for acclaiming Defoe a great journalist, writing cleverly, informatively, and passionately about every subject of the day and anticipating every device--some, to be sure, not altogether welcome--of modern Fleet Street. It was through his topical writings and notorious satirical pamphlets that Defoe was known in his own time, and West justifiably wants to bring us to a fresh acquaintance with this aspect of Defoe, which has since faded into the background.

Defoe has found two kinds of fame through the ages. The first is literary: by the end of the eighteenth century, he would be principally known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, and so his status rests today. Modern critics, beginning with Ian Watt's canonization in The Rise of the Novel, have embellished the picture and dubbed Defoe the "father of the novel"--though, as West correctly observes, none of Defoe's fictions really qualifies as a novel proper. The second sort of fame is political and stems from the role accorded Defoe in Whig history. Beginning with Macaulay and ending with G. M. Trevelyan in the 1930s, the Whig historians found a hero in Defoe because of his efforts to help put William of Orange on the English throne, in the events that became known as the Glorious Revolution, which in Whig ideology guaranteed English liberties. As the Whig apologia has faded, so has Defoe's role. Yet, whatever the historicist excesses of the Whig view, West supports the claim that Defoe was a significant actor in the higher politics of his day and deserves an honored place in British history.

But West also shows that Defoe was simply a wonderfully spirited and quirky character, a bundle of paradoxes. Raised a Dissenter from the Anglican Church, and thus by definition an outsider to the mainstream in politics and religion, Defoe would become a trusted advisor and spy for a Tory grandee at the center of power. Known for his plainstyle prose and forthright, unblinking manner, Defoe was also a connoisseur of deceit and disguise--sometimes from sheer necessity, but one feels at times out of perverse enjoyment. Sober and practical in worldly affairs, Defoe would become a chronic debtor; he dispensed excellent advice on financial matters, but as an inveterate gambler in investment schemes, he could not take his own counsel and lost several small fortunes. An unquestioning Puritan in matters of sexual morality, in Moll Flanders he would write one of the bawdiest books of his time.

Little is known of Defoe's childhood. He was born, it appears, in 1660, the year of the Stuart Restoration, though his birth, unlike his siblings', is not recorded in the parish register. He was raised in London, and it was in London or its environs that he would spend most of his life, as the great city would always be for Defoe the center of his idea of Britain--modern, bustling, industrious, and indelibly Protestant. His father was a tallow chandler named John Foe. Though there has been speculation that the name was Anglicized from the Dutch, West notes that the best modern authority has not been able to trace the family line outside of England. Defoe lived through the two terrible cataclysms of the period, the plague of 1665 and the great London fire of i666--the Foe house being one of only three left standing in its district after the latter event, as if a sign of divine election. Barred from the Anglican schools, young Defoe attended Dissenting academies, and may have thought of becoming a Nonconformist minister. But by 1682, he had followed his father's path, entering the City of London as a hosiery merchant.

The City was a stronghold of Dissent as Nonconformist sentiments held sway through much of the merchant class. None of which escaped the notice of the crypto-Catholic Charles II, who introduced various depredations against both Dissenters as a group and against the freemen of the City in particular. Dissenters had much to fear from the prospect that Charles's brother, the openly Catholic James, Duke of York, would assume the throne. For this reason, they pushed to get the House of Commons to deprive James of his royal rights, on the grounds that a Catholic could not head the Church of England. Some, Defoe among them, went even further, supporting the claim to the throne of Charles's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. When Charles died in 1685 and James took the crown, Monmouth staged a rebellion. The circumstantial evidence suggests that Defoe fought with him at the decisive Battle of Sedgemoor, where Monmouth was defeated and captured during flight. The upshot was to strengthen James's hand and led to bloody reprisals. Luckily, Defoe--perhaps merely because he had his own horse or was good at disguise--managed to escape.

Defoe, like many others who wanted a strong Protestant king, turned to the Dutch leader, the staunchly Calvinist William of Orange. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was generally welcomed by beleaguered Britons, but the dour William, foreign in every way, could not long hold the people's loyalty; he was subject to sniping at court and vulgar disdain among the rabble. In this atmosphere, Defoe would forever endear himself to William's followers and amuse many others through his bitingly witty pamphlet The True-Born Englishman, which ridiculed the chauvinism of William's detractors, pointing out that Britain was a multiethnic country where few could lay claim to ancient Saxon lineage. The pamphlet went through many printings and undermined High Tory legitimists who looked longingly for another Stuart to save England from the gloomy, uncouth Dutchman.

An indifferent tradesman and, happily, but a sometime soldier, Defoe had come to his true metier. By the beginning of Queen Anne's reign, Defoe had fully taken up the pen, having founded a thrice-weekly newspaper called the Review--beating to the punch the now better known Tatler and Spectator of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In the Review, Defoe wrote about current events, editorialized about politics, dispensed advice, and published letters from readers--some of which he composed himself, the better to set up straw men to destroy with acid replies.

Defoe's bitter gibes and independence of mind were not always appreciated and, indeed, landed him in the stocks. After writing one pamphlet attacking Dissenters of weak conscience who indulged in "occasional conformity"--taking Anglican communion so as to avoid the disabilities imposed by the hated Test Act passed under Charles II--Defoe was mortified to see the High Churchmen use his points to illustrate their contempt for the Nonconformist "vipers." Having insulted Whig Dissenters, he would make up for it in spades with another pamphlet aimed at "high-flying" Tories who tried to push through an Occasional Conformity Bill to smoke out dissembling Nonconformists. As West observes, Defoe's Shortest Way with Dissenters can be best compared with Swift's Modest Proposal for its savage irony--except that unfortunately for Defoe the irony was all too effective. This pamphlet so accurately lampooned High Church invective that it was taken to be the real thing: Tories actually recommending Dissenters be hanged! Outraged Tories called for blood; the anonymous pamphleteer was hunted down, captured, tried, and convicted of "sedition." He was forced to stand in the pillory, but was said to be pelted mainly by flowers from appreciative Londoners. He still faced an indefinite sentence in the ghastly Newgate prison, a living hell, but was rescued by intercession of the Queen's ministers, who thought the clever Defoe could be of some use.

Defoe's backstairs champion proved to be one of the most formidable politicians of the day, Robert Harley (later Lord Oxford). Though parliament would have to wait for the advent of Robert Walpole to see its first prime minister proper, Harley paved the way as a true party leader, as well as the very type of the Machiavellian manipulator--"Robin the Trickster" they called him--possessed of as few principles as scruples. Harley was himself born of merchant stock and raised a Dissenter; of generally Whiggish disposition, he found it convenient nonetheless to gravitate to the Tories when they were on the rise. But Harley was a moderate Tory opposed to the High Church types who taunted Dissenters, favored the Stuart Pretender, and tried to thwart William's and then Anne's continental wars against Louis XIV.

Harley found in Defoe not only an able and willing polemicist in the cause of Protestant battle against the Bourbons and Hapsburgs--hostilities rather ingloriously backed by City merchants who longed to smash Spanish dominion over the lucrative Atlantic slave trade--but also an adventurer who was willing to go underground as a sort of informant or spy. Defoe would serve Harley for a number of years in this capacity, providing in particular some valuable intelligence about the political situation in Scotland, which was a wild card in English politics.

Our knowledge of these secret activities is limited, yet it seems fair to say that Defoe served his patron best through his open writings, which pushed the programs of the Queen's "Junto" consisting of, in addition to Harley, Lord Godolphin; the financial wizard, and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the greatest soldier of the age. Defoe scribbled tirelessly in defense of the noble aims of the continental wars and the virtues of debt financing that propped up these martial efforts. It was an unlikely troika that shaped Anne's policies, and Defoe--a man of no party--gave them a medium of public expression and served to lend the policies some semblance of coherence.

As the political fortunes of his patrons waned--Oxford for a time imprisoned in the Tower and Marlborough impeached and dismissed from the Queen's council--Defoe's income also waned, as would his sense of purpose. As Britain settled into political stability with the Hanoverian Succession (and the Union with Scotland, which Defoe championed, having come to pass), he had less of a role; moreover, because he had burned his bridges with the now-ascendant Whigs--with whom he should have had natural affinities--he had no hopes for preferment. He wound up his Review in 1714. He continued to invest in new schemes to obtain riches but only incurred ever-growing debt, attracting some very tenacious creditors who hounded him until his death (and surely hastened it). Yet the resourceful Defoe found new subjects to write about, including such practical manuals as Conjugal Lewdness which survive today only as antiquary material, and imaginary adventures and picaresque tales, a couple of which seem still fit to stand for the ages.

West concedes from the outset that his book should not be regarded as a critical biography, and, indeed, his discussion of Defoe's fiction is its least impressive feature, containing some charmingly appreciative commentary, but nonetheless relatively perfunctory. West is rightly skeptical about the heavy weather modern critics have made over Robinson Crusoe, and it is at least refreshing to be spared more allegorical readings. And unlike academic critics, at least those not disposed to retrospective politically inspired sneering, West is disarmingly irreverent to Defoe; though he doesn't mention it, he would have little patience with the pious reading of Crusoe and Moll Flanders as modeled on Puritan spiritual autobiographies. For West, despite his great admiration, Defoe can be as hypocritical as his Moll. Characteristically, he scolds Defoe for what is usually forgotten about Crusoe: the whole premise for the adventure is the hero's participation in the slave trade, which Defoe himself hardly condemned but rather connived at and approved. As a pious Christian, Defoe should have known better.

As one would expect, West really comes alive in discussing Defoe's Tour of Britain. It is a singular merit of the biography to remind us how much pleasure can be found in this neglected work. West quotes generously from the book, sharing his own delight at the justness of many of Defoe's observations and the fine, clean sound of its plain English prose. He is also full of appreciation for Defoe's leg-pulling and indulgence in tall tales; in fact, the whole book is something of a fabrication, as Defoe made no such grand tour--though he had taken many trips over the years--and, as to many places described, he had probably never been to them, compiling descriptions from books he had consulted. Less charming are Defoe's prejudices--particularly his anti-Catholic bigotry--at which West allows himself no little irritation.

Defoe's curiosity, waggish sense of humor, and sure journalist's instinct for the compelling story to be conjured out of a mass of facts all make themselves abundantly felt in A Tour. Here is the coda to a passage in which Defoe offers a tale illustrating the sanguinary habits of justice in the North Country: it is said that once a woman riding into Halifax on market day, when executions took place, passed the chopping block and caught all unawares a head in her basket.

 All the use I shall make of this unlikely stow, is this, that it seems
 executions were so frequent, that it was not thought a sight worth the
 peoples running out to see; that the woman should ride along so close to
 the scaffold, and that she should go on, and not so much as stop to see the
 ax fall, or take any notice of it. But these difficulties seem to be much
 better solved, by saying, that tis reasonable to think that the whole tale
 is a little Yorkshire, which, I suppose, you will understand well enough.

Defoe did not live to see fame from his later writings. He died in 1731, alone, nearly penniless, hiding from creditors. It is good to be reminded of his vitality, his independence of mind and conscience, his intelligence and good sense, and that he "had written so variously and so well."

(1) Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures, by Richard West; Carroll & Graf, 427 pages, $26.

Daniel J. Silver reviews books for The New Criterion, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal.